Scientists have come up with what could someday be one of the first workable treatments using embryonic stem cells to thwart a disease.

Stem cell treatment extends the life of mice in Sandhoff’s disease, a fatal degenerative disorder, said Evan Y. Snyder, head of the Burnham’s stem cell program. Snyder, Burnham colleague Jean-Pyo Lee and an international team of researchers published their results Sunday(12th March) on the Web site of the medical journal Nature Medicine.

“Everybody is always saying to us, ‘Well, you guys studying the human embryonic stem cells, you haven’t benefited anyone yet,’” said Evan Snyder, a neuroscientist who has published breakthrough papers on both embryonic and adult stem cells. “Well, this is it.”

The international team, headed by Snyder, a physician-scientist at the Burnham Institute in California, also compared the effectiveness of embryonic stem cells versus the “adult” variety and found them to be equally effective.

The data is so strong, Snyder said, he plans to call upon the federal Food and Drug Administration to allow him to launch clinical trials immediately to test the effectiveness of the treatment against Tay-Sachs disease, a genetic disorder affecting Ashkenazi Jews.

The research was posted online (12th March) on the Web site of the journal Nature Medicine.

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