The work is an in-depth analysis of global gene expression in human neural stem cells and demonstrates a method for prolonging the shelf life of cultured fetal stem cells, making it possible to generate enough cells to use to treat disease, says Lynda Wright, the lead author of the paper.

“We have now characterized long-term neural stem cells lines,” she says. “That genetic characterization – and our ability to grow these lines for a year or more – is one of the major steps toward clinical application.”

[For more details, see the press release from which this article is excerpted.]