“We get surprises every week,” Prockop said.

Prockop, director of the Center for Gene Therapy at the Tulane University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans, will be relocating to Temple in August.

He will serve as inaugural holder of the Stearman Chair in Genomic Medicine, professor of molecular and cellular medicine in the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine and director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Scott & White.

Everyone has stem cells, which are “generic” cells that can make exact copies of themselves indefinitely. In addition, a stem cell has the ability to produce specialized cells for various tissues in the body - such as heart muscle, brain tissue.

“There are still some mysteries about stem cells, but many people are now using the cells to treat almost any disease you can name - arthritis, heart disease, diabetes, stokes, kidney diseases,” Prockop said.

Why stems cells do what they do is a puzzle, he said.

“Our ideas have changed,” Prockop said. “It seems as though we are tapping into cells that are there to repair any tissue in the body.”

The problem, he said, is that the body doesn’t produce enough stem cells to keep up with diseases and injuries.

Prockop’s research team takes a teaspoon of a patient’s bone marrow into the laboratory and makes about 300 million of the cells in about three weeks.

“By getting back millions you can speed up the process of repair,” he said.

In the past couple of months there have been reports of breakthroughs in embryonic stem cells research - with one group of scientists indicating they had derived embryonic stem cells from adult skin cells and another group reporting they could cultivate stem cells from embryos without destroying the embryo.

Prockop said he’s not planning to pursue research in these areas because the technology is very complicated and difficult.

There have been no reports of any patient trials using embryonic stem cells, he said.

“There have been some major technological problems,” Prockop said. “One thing is they form tumors in animals that look like the beginnings of cancer and nobody quite knows how to get around this problem.”

Dr. Prockop’s group is recognized as a world leader in the production and characterization of adult stem cells. He was awarded a $4.3 million grant by the National Institutes of Health in 2003 to establish the first laboratory for the preparation and distribution of these cells from bone marrow stroma to academic scientists at other centers in the United States and abroad.

So far, shipments have been made to about 250 research centers worldwide.

Those receiving the cells have been studying the basic biology of the cells and also using them for animal models of human diseases, Prockop said.

“The number of models being tested for human diseases is almost limitless and include Alzheimer’s, Parkinsonism, Multiple Sclerosis, heart diseases, lung diseases, kidney diseases and even some cancers,” he said.

Prockop did say a laboratory is being set up at Tulane and another will be established in Temple to make cells for treatment of patients.

He said it’s difficult to determine the cost of stem cell therapies once treatments become part of mainstream medical care.

“The techniques we use to prepare cells are changing all the time - becoming easier and therefore less expensive,” he said. “It’s hard to put a price tag on it.”

Prockop is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences.

His labs will be located at the Scott & White west campus.

Prockop is considered to be one of the top researchers in his field, said Dr. Donald Wesson, vice dean of the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine, Temple campus.

“If you were to ask anybody across the nation who had the top three or four programs in regenerative medicine, Prockop’s would be on that list,” he said.

The addition of Prockop to A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine is a huge boost to the school’s research programs, Wesson said.

“We anticipate the presence of his group will enhance the research done by groups already here,” he said.

jgibbs@temple-telegram.com