Does anyone know who is doing research for Sickle Cell Anemia using stem cell technology? Any people or references are greatly appreciated. Thanks, Lucy

what do you mean by stem cell techology? Do you mean bone marrow transplants, gene therapy (correction of stem cell defect), embryonc stem cell studies? If you give more info I'll try to give you an answer.

moreso gene therapy or ESC. Thank you!

Well, there is still quite a universe between gene therapy and ES cells, so I'm still not sure what you are exactly looking for. But I'll toss some names at you.

Gene therapy:

There is a very good group of researchers at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Check out - Semin Hematol. 2004 Oct;41(4):279-86. Gene therapy for the hemoglobin disorder by Persons DA, Tisdale JF.

Also the Terry Fox Laboratory in BC, Canada has folks working on gene therapy and stem cells e.g., .J Clin Invest. 2004 Oct;114(7):953-62. High-level beta-globin expression and preferred intragenic integration after lentiviral transduction of human cord blood stem cells by Imren S, Fabry ME, Westerman KA, Pawliuk R, Tang P, Rosten PM, Nagel RL, Leboulch P, Eaves CJ, Humphries RK.

There are others that can be found on doing a PubMed search.

As for ES cells, I'm not aware of sickle cell research. Gordon keller has published on development of erythroid cells from murine ES cells, but I'm not sure if they are going after developing therapeutics using ES cells. Murine ES cells have been used by many to make mice with human hemoglobinopathies. Is that what your after? Or are you interested in therapeutic cloning using human ES cells and using genetherapy to repair the defect?