Several previous attempts to purify bone marrow for sickle-cell transplants have failed.

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After receiving a bone marrow transplant and stem cell treatment from an umbilical cord donated by a woman in the USA, his condition seemed to improve.

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Aastrom Biosciences came to stem-cell work through bone marrow transplants.

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The researchers showed that it could be used to grow mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), a kind of primitive cell derived from bone marrow that can be easily grown in culture.

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Dr Michael Seckl, a medical oncologist, and his team at the hospital found that treating cancerous cells with Taxol and stem cell infusion - an advanced form of bone marrow transplantation - was successful.

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He was part of a team investigating the use of stem cells, which are able to become any other type of cell in the body from nerve to bone, taken from the amniotic fluid which surrounds a developing foetus in the womb.

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But he said the Kyoto paper was "quite a large step forward" in developing a process by which sperm could be made for infertile men, perhaps by taking as a starting point a cell from their skin or from something like bone marrow.

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Of the millions of people with sickle-cell disease in the world, only some 300 have received a bone marrow transplant because of age (doctors won't perform the procedure on patients 16 years and older) and donor-matching problems.

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The first solid evidence implicating stem cells in cancer came in the early 1990s when John Dick, a stem cell researcher at the University of Toronto, developed a method for transplanting cancerous human bone marrow cells into mice.

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