Those cells were then implanted in mice specially bred to develop diabetes.
The scientists next looked at microglia in mice that had been bred to develop a condition that resembles Alzheimer's disease.
But, she continues, experiments in mice bred to develop memory loss "have shown that elderly animals that began a running program benefited".
In lab tests reported in the journal Nature Medicine, denosumab blocked the growth of the cancer precursor cells and slowed the growth of tumours in mice bred to develop breast cancer.
In a 2011 study by the same researchers at the University of South Florida, for instance, mice genetically bred to develop Alzheimer's and then given caffeine alone did not fare as well on memory tests as those provided with actual coffee.
Previous work has shown that rats bred to develop symptoms that model Alzheimer's disease perform worse at the maze.
They extracted cancer cells from mice previously bred to develop prostate cancer spontaneously and added the mouse B7 gene so that the cells expressed the B7 protein.
A treatment to lower levels of a protein called "STEP" in mice bred to develop a condition similar to Alzheimer's disease appeared to reverse some of their memory and learning problems.
The researchers took two sets of mice, one of which was bred to develop neurological disorders and another that was healthy.
In the mice bred to develop neurological disorders, however, they found that brain cell regeneration deteriorated as the disease advanced, as did levels of RBM3.
