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Human stem cells trigger immune attackJessica Ebert Doubt cast on therapeutic use of embryonic cell lines. Exposure to molecules from animals might have made human stem cells unacceptable.© ANDREW LEONARD / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Most human embryonic stem-cell lines, including those available to federally funded researchers in the United States, may be useless for therapeutic applications. The body's immune defences would probably attack the cells, say US researchers. When embryonic stem cells are added to serum from human blood, antibodies stick to the cells. This suggests the cells are seen as foreign, and that transplanting them into the body would...

Oregon Health & Science University will be the first, and maybe only, hospital to give a risky experimental stem-cell transplant to children dying of a rare nerve-destroying disease. In the coming months, as many as six children with Batten disease will travel to OHSU for injections of neural stem cells, primitive cells that can form new brain and nerve cells. The stem cells are taken from human fetuses, with their mothers' agreement, and processed and purified by a California company, StemCells Inc. At OHSU, a surgeon will inject the stem cells into eight areas of each child's brain. The theory...

April 3, 2006 — The news is being hailed as a medical milestone: Several years after receiving new bladders engineered entirely in a laboratory, seven young patients are all still healthy. It marks the first long-term success of total-organ tissue regeneration, an area of medicine that until now was more the stuff of science fiction than clinical reality. Dr. Anthony Atala, the director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, reports in tomorrow's issue of the medical journal The Lancet on the success of the new procedure, which was performed on children born with...

AP MEDICAL WRITER TUCSON, Ariz. - French doctors treating the world's first face transplant patient say she suffered a tissue-rejection episode that threatened to cost her her new features, but she is doing well now - so well that the surgeons hope to do five more such operations soon. "She can swallow and eat. That was impossible before the surgery. Psychologically, she's very happy," said Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard, a surgeon from Lyon, France. "For us, this experience is the best proof that we are right" to have done the transplant instead of trying routine reconstructive surgery, Dubernard said, referring to...