How did the bone marrow transplant work in the mice?
Dr. Tolar: We took different types of cells from the bone marrow and we tested them one by one. There were about 16 of them and 15 didnt work. The one that we identified actually worked in about one quarter of the animals tested. Mice that are typically not able to live beyond two weeks survived. This was extremely exciting because it was totally new and never happened before. We didnt know at that time if this was because we had taken cells from the healthy mouse and put it into the mouse with the disease, like the situation in our bone marrow transplant practice where we take the cells from a healthy donor and put it in a child with the disease. What we needed to show and what we did show, was that cells from healthy mice traveled into the skin of diseased mice and expressed the collagen 7 protein. We have special stain to show us that the protein is actually there. We were also able to show that the diseased mice formed Velcro-like fibers, called anchoring fibers, that anchor the to
