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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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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