Sickle Cell Mice on the Rebound

Well, it appears that mice are doing well these days. Some seem to have been "cured" of type 1-like diabetes recently and now some others are overcoming sickle cell anemia. An article in Science today describes how Tim Townes at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and Rudolf Jaenisch of MIT (Cambridge, MA) and colleagues were able to coax stem cells derived from mouse skin cells into blood-producing stem cells, and to administer them in such a way that the mice produced only normally-shaped red blood cells. Check out ScienceNOW for a good description of the study. Thanks, mice.