New findings may increase longevity of stem cells

Identifying the mechanisms that control cell life span is one of the more important questions facing stem cell researchers, indeed, all researchers attempting to understand normal and abnormal cell and organ development. So the recent discovery by a Harvard Stem Cell Institute team that a family of well-known transcription factors plays a major role in regulating the life span and longevity of hematopoietic, or blood, stem cells is of particular note. Transcription factors are proteins that participate in the synthesis of RNA using a DNA template.

Gary Gilliland, director of Harvard Stem Cell Institute's (HSCI) Cancer Stem Cell Program, and colleagues at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute believe that their findings may have broad implications for stem cells in other tissue types as well, and may eventually lead to strategies to increase cell longevity.

It is possible, the researchers say, that their findings could eventually lead to ways to enhance the blood stem cells that are at the heart of the bone marrow transplants used to treat leukemia.

Gilliland, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, said that the recent findings from his lab and Ronald A. DePinho's lab at Dana-Farber "have important implications for normal stem cell biology, and for cancer stem cells.