Female Supremacy Articles - Page 26

Screen 10 of 31

Dr. Huard’s team, and the study’s first author, Bridget Deasy, PhD, director of the Live Cell Imaging Lab at Children’s Stem Cell Research Center, made the discovery while working with a population of stem cells they isolated in the lab while searching for a cure for Duchene muscular dystrophy (DMD). DMD is a genetic disease estimated to affect one in every 3,500 boys. Patients with DMD lack dystrophin, a protein that gives muscle cells structure. Using an animal model of the disease, his laboratory is using stem cells to deliver dystrophin to muscles.

In this study, Dr. Huard’s team injected female and male muscle-derived stem cells into dystrophic mice and then measured the cells’ ability to regenerate dystrophin-expressing muscle fibers.

They then calculated the regeneration index (RI) – the ratio of dystrophin-positive fibers per 100,000 donor cells.

Only one of the 10 male populations of implanted stem cells had an RI over 200. In contrast, 40 percent of the female stem cell populations had an RI higher than 200, and 60 percent of the female populations of stem cells had an RI higher than the mean RI of the male cells (95).

This difference may arise from innate sex-related differences in the cells’ stress responses, according to Dr. Deasy, an assistant professor in the Departments of Orthopaedic Surgery and Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and School of Engineering, respectively.