UB Team Finds a Way to Make Stem Cells into Myelinating Cells

Stem therapy to treat multiple sclerosis may benefit greatly from a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by the laboratory of Fraser Sim, Ph.D., assistant professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology at University of Buffalo’s School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. Dr. Fraser’s team discovered that transcription factor (proteins that induce gene expression) SOX10 is a master switch for inducing myelination in oligodendrocytes of the brain.

“Now that we have identified SOX10 as an initiator of myelination, we can work on developing a viral or pharmaceutical approach to inducing it in MS patients,” said Dr. Sim in a news release. “If we could create a small molecule drug that would switch on SOX10, that would be therapeutically important.”

Dr. Sim’s team, including lead author Jing Wang, a doctoral candidate at University of Buffalo, studied fetal brain stem cells for transcription factor expression. They identified transcription factors turned on in oligodendrocyte progenitors, but not neural progenitors. “We narrowed it down to a short list of ten transcription factors that were made exclusively by oligodendrocyte progenitor cells,” said Dr. Sim. “Among all ten transcription factors that we studied, only SOX10 was able to make the switch from neural progenitor to oligodendrocyte progenitor cell.”

Remarkably, SOX10 was capable of differentiating oligodendrocytes both on the lab bench and in a model of human leukodystrophy. These results indicate increasing SOX10 expression in stem cells will enhance the efficacy of human transplant therapy.

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