This sounds like it will be available rather faster than suggested
here. This is a direct way to observe the immune system at work.
Surely just in terms of tracking circulatory inflammation with no
therapeutic input at all it is a major advance. One would not need
to supply an actual therapeutic load in such a case as the body is
already doing just fine.
Such a protocol would naturally isolate locales of serious damage and
support intervention.
In the meantime most medical problems sooner or later express
themselves generally in terms of inflammation. This will allow
actual mapping of the inflammation and confirmation.
This could turn out to be a major advance.
Magnetically-labeled
blood cells could provide a boost to medical research
By Ben Coxworth
15:57 July 12, 2012
Scientists have had
success in tracking the passage of blood cells within the body, by
labeling them with magnetic particles (Photo via Shutterstock)
Thanks to advances in
stem cell therapy, it is now possible to use engineered white blood
cells to fight diseases such as HIV within the human body.
When such treatments are being developed, however, it can be
difficult to track where the introduced cells travel within a
patient’s system, and how many of them make it to their target.
Now, thanks to research being carried out at the University of
Edinburgh's Centre for Cardiovascular Science, those cells can be
magnetically labeled.
Vascular surgeon
Jennifer Richards led a team that introduced tiny magnetic iron oxide
particles into white blood cells (also known as immune cells). Six
test subjects were then given separate thigh muscle injections of the
magnetically labeled cells, unlabeled white blood cells, and just the
magnetic material. Up to seven days later, the labeled cells still
showed up on MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans of the subjects.
By contrast, other methods of cell-labeling only allow the cells to
be tracked for a maximum of a few hours, or expose the patient to
radiation – which MRI does not.
The
magnetically-labeled cells so far appear to be harmless to the
recipients, as two test subjects were given increasingly large doses
of the cells through a vein, and showed no adverse effects.
Additionally, the
cells are still able to serve their immune function. When the labeled
cells were injected into a subject with an inflamed area on their
thigh, they moved to that area as they normally would. Nonetheless,
Richards has stated that more human tests will be required before the
magnetic labeling of blood cells is able to be widely practiced.
A paper on the
research was recently published in the journal Circulation:
Cardiovascular Imaging.
Source: American
Heart Association
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