It may have been Tyler's mom!..sorta appropo to your lamenting about the cycling woes crossing with biotech news..actually not..this talks about 'maternal microchimerism' where a few of mom's cells make it thru the placenta and could potentially be involved in bad autoimmune diseases like Lupus..
Chip Off the Old Block
When mom gives you some cells, she's probably just trying to help -- but Anne Stevens says it may not always work out that way.
LAB JOURNAL By PETER LANDERS August 22, 2007 [WSJ]
Some of the cells in your body may not really be yours at all. They may belong to mom.
A decade ago, that was just a far-out notion. But evidence is mounting that a handful of maternal cells slip through the placenta and make themselves at home in a developing fetus. They appear to stick around for decades, maybe for life.
Anne Stevens, pediatrician at Children's Hospital in Seattle. Anne Stevens first heard about the idea in 1999, when she attended a talk by J. Lee Nelson, a pioneer in the field. After a stint in Dr. Nelson's lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Dr. Stevens opened her own lab at Children's Hospital in Seattle. Today, the 44-year-old pediatrician is a specialist in maternal microchimerism, the study of how we resemble, in a small way, the mythical monster called a chimera that featured body parts of many creatures.
Dr. Stevens is trying to figure out whether mothers' cells can trigger disease in their offspring. Most of the time, these maternal hand-me-downs seem to be harmless or maybe even helpful. But sometimes, she believes, the body's immune system may react violently against them. "Maternal cells are probably in all of us, in all tissues," Dr. Stevens says. "We don't know why the immune system loses tolerance."
Her research is part of the bigger quest to understand diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis or type 1 diabetes, in which the immune system attacks the body's own tissue. Dr. Stevens sees the toll in her practice at Seattle Children's. Though rheumatoid arthritis is far more common in adults, a form of the disease strikes children too. "A lot of doctors don't recognize it," she notes.
The study of microchimerism is still in its infancy,[lol, at least it's beyond the fetal stage] and scientists debate whether the phenomenon is as widespread as Dr. Stevens believes. The field has yet to fully explain any autoimmune disease, much less lead to a cure.
One rare disease she has studied is neonatal lupus syndrome. In adults, lupus is usually found in women in their 20s. But antibodies passed by mothers to their unborn children to protect them against disease may play a role in triggering the neonatal syndrome, which can lead to a fatal heart condition.
In 2003, Dr. Stevens and colleagues published an analysis in the medical journal Lancet of tissue taken from eight infants who had died. Four had lupus and four died from other causes. The examination showed that the damaged heart tissue of infants with lupus had many maternal cells. In one sample, more than one in 50 of the infant's heart cells were actually from its mother. In other children the figure was at most one in 1,000. The results suggested that the maternal cells could be triggering a lethal immune reaction.
Scientists, including Dr. Stevens, aren't sure why we have the maternal cells in the first place. If the cells were broadly harmful, it seems likely people would have evolved ways to get rid of them. One intriguing possibility is that mom is actually giving a helping hand by transferring some of her cells to her kids. They may be stem cells that pitch in to repair damaged tissue.
That hypothesis leads to another interpretation of the Lancet results. Perhaps a separate cause led the infants' immune system to attack their hearts, and the maternal cells rushed to repair the damage.
A team led by Dr. Nelson took a favorable view of the maternal cells' contribution in a study of type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disorder affecting pancreatic cells. The team showed this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that young people with the disease have an unusually large number of maternal cells in their blood. The team also analyzed maternal cells in the pancreatic tissue of deceased diabetes patients. The researchers suggested that the maternal microchimerism "most likely contributes to efforts to restore function and regenerate diseased tissue."
But Dr. Stevens is leaning a bit more toward the notion that the maternal cells can be troublemakers. Her lab has done work, still unpublished, suggesting that children with lupus produce more of certain immune-system proteins in response to maternal cells. That work is funded by the Arthritis Foundation, while some of her other work draws support from the National Institutes of Health.
She is testing her theories in mice. In these experiments, a mother's cells are manipulated to carry a gene that makes them glow green. Half her offspring do not inherit the gene, so any cells of the youngsters that glow green must have been passed directly on from mom. Dr. Stevens's team temporarily wounded the kidneys of the offspring and found that the maternal cells didn't rush to the kidney to regenerate tissue. That suggests maternal cells aren't part of the normal repair process.
Even as Dr. Stevens's and other researchers struggle to understand the role of the transferred maternal cells, the field is producing some interesting philosophical questions. What does it mean to be you, if 1% of your cells are your mother's? "It could be comforting or disturbing," says Dr. Stevens. She quotes the title of an article by Judith Hall of the University of British Columbia: "So you think your mother is always looking over your shoulder? --She may be in your shoulder!"
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