Cells

ROCKVILLE -- CellPro Inc. yesterday won the backing of a panel of government advisers to expand the use of its cell filtering device to help cancer patients safely rebuild immune systems destroyed by chemotherapy.The panel's recommendation, if accepted by the Food and Drug Administration, means the Ceprate device, used to filter and concentrate bone marrow cells taken from cancer patients, also would be approved for a less painful and cheaper technique that takes cells from the bloodstream instead.

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the University of Wisconsin said yesterday that they had separately reached a potential milestone toward growing human tissue for transplantation.The researchers, reporting in two journals, said they had used different methods to grow colonies of embryonic stem cells -- parent cells for every tissue in the human body. Both teams acknowledged that the work, although exciting, is likely to ignite a debate over the source of the cells: aborted fetuses in Baltimore and unused embryos in Wisconsin.

The dithering over increasing the number of cells at the Carroll County Detention Center should come to an end. Even though the lowest bid to build the 80-bed expansion is about $1 million over the architect's estimated cost, the commissioners ought to go ahead with the project instead of wasting their time looking at modular cells.Much as it might wish otherwise, Carroll County will have a permanent need for more jail cells. The county's population has grown and, thus, so has the number of residents who must be incarcerated.

As a Harvard Medical School student studying immunology in the 1970s, Dr. Curt Civin began wondering how the body's immune system might be used to fight cancer.Today, thanks to the physician's 15-year quest to answer that question, doctors will soon have a commercially available device that helps cancer patients' immune systems recover quickly after the heavy hit that bone-marrow transplants and high doses of chemotherapy deliver to the body.Civin, a child oncologist and the King Fahd Professor of Pediatric Oncology at Johns Hopkins Hospital, will take center stage in Washington tomorrow when he is honored for the invention by the Intellectual Property Owners Association, a nonprofit organization that promotes patent and copyright protections.

Scientists have succeeded in reprogramming ordinary cells from the tips of mouse tails and rewinding their developmental clocks so they are virtually indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells, according to studies published today. If the discovery applies to human cells - and researchers are optimistic that it will - it would offer a straightforward method for creating a limitless supply of cell lines tailor-made for patients without ethical strings attached. Three research groups said they accomplished their feat by activating four genes that are turned on in days-old embryos.

In the nearly 40 years since the nation declared war on cancer, great advances have been made in breast cancer screening, early detection and treatment. The death rate for breast cancers has fallen. More is discovered all the time about the genetics and biology of the disease. But a cure remains elusive. Cancer, which is actually a variety of diseases, changes constantly and can spread throughout the body in ways that can be difficult to detect. Even when stopped in its tracks, it can often adjust and evade treatments that once worked against it. In most cases, the body's immune system learns to go after a foreign invader like a virus or a bacteria.

The Maryland Penitentiary was quiet yesterday as 30 inmates agreed to leave the tent city in the prison's recreation yard and move into empty cells in the west wing, a prison spokesman said.Sgt. Gregory M. Shipley, spokesman for the state Division of Correction, said about 200 inmates remained in the yard yesterday, as corrections officers, about 20 boot-camp inmates and four police dogs scoured cells in C Dormitory searching for a second gun used in Wednesday's standoff. One gun has been found.

LINCOLN, Neb. -- The offices of L. Dennis Smith, president of the University of Nebraska, and Mike Johanns, the state's Republican governor, are less than three miles apart. Their offices are closer than their positions concerning a controversy that, thanks to rapidly evolving biological science, may soon be transcended. But when it is, we may be nostalgic for the comparative simplicity of today's moral dilemma about the use, in research and medical therapy, of cells derived from fetuses made available by elective abortions.

A Montana paleontologist and his colleagues believe they have found red blood cells in the fossilized leg bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex and say they have high hopes of extracting DNA from the dinosaur's cells.The discovery of the putative dinosaur blood cells has not yet been submitted to a scientific journal or independently confirmed but was reported two weeks ago by the National Science Foundation, which has financed the exploratory project.Jack Horner, a paleontologist at Montana State University who directed the investigation, said in an interview yesterday that his group hoped to find matches between gene fragments left in the preserved blood cells with comparable DNA segments from modern crocodiles or birds.

MOSCOW -- The men who challenged Boris N. Yeltsin for the rule of Russia spent yesterday in solitary confinement, dining on a first course of cabbage soup and a second of herring and potatoes.Parliament Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, Vice President Alexander Rutskoi and their four-member "Cabinet" are being held in Lefortovo Prison, built in 1880 and once a symbol of Soviet secret police -- KGB -- terror.One of the Cabinet members -- Viktor Barranikov -- was until a few months ago Mr. Yeltsin's KGB chief -- or minister of security, as the new title goes.