Access

News and Views

Nature Medicine 15, 612 - 613 (2009)
doi:10.1038/nm0609-612

IFN-alpha wakes up sleeping hematopoietic stem cells

Emmanuelle Passegué1 & Patricia Ernst2

  1. Emmanuelle Passegué is at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research, Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology/Oncology, University of California–San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA
  2. Patricia Ernst is at the Dartmouth Medical School, Department of Genetics and Norris Cotton Cancer Center, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA.
    e-mail: Passeguee@stemcell.ucsf.edu or e-mail: patricia.ernst@dartmouth.edu

The cytokine interferon-alpha stimulates the turnover and proliferation of hematopoietic cells in vivo (pages 696–700). The findings hint at a new strategy to treat hematopoietic cancers.

At homeostasis, complex regulatory networks maintain the ongoing production of all blood cell types1. During this process, very few hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) actively divide, and most of them remain quiescent in the bone marrow.

$rb.Type.Code