“Latest Stem Cells News”

Texas researchers who thought President Barack Obama’s executive order lifting the restrictions on embryonic stem cell research would finally free them to ramp up work with the cutting-edge science are facing a new obstacle: the state Legislature.
Eighteen of the state’s leading scientists signed a letter sent to the Legislature Monday objecting to a provision inserted in the Senate budget bill last week that would ban state funding from supporting research involving the destruction of human embryos.

“Such an amendment would be detrimental to Texas,” said the statement. “A ban would halt ongoing research projects and negatively impact the ability of Texas academic health institutions, both public and private, to competitively recruit and retain world-class scientists, professors and students in the biological sciences.”
The bill, which passed the Senate Finance Committee 6-5 with little discussion, is scheduled to come before the full Senate floor Wednesday. The House is working on its own budget bill.

Treating a heart attack with the patients’ own bone marrow stem cells boosts blood flow within the heart and may help reduce long-term complications, a new U.S. study finds.
The study included 31 patients who underwent angioplasty and stent placement after a heart attack. Within one week of the attacks, 16 of the patients received infusions of their own bone marrow cells into the coronary artery in which a blockage had caused the event.

The 16 patients received different amounts of bone marrow stem cells — 5 million, 10 million and 15 million cells. The 15 patients in the control group received standard medication only. All the patients were followed for up to five years.
After three to six months, patients who received higher doses of bone marrow stem cells showed greater improvement in blood flow within the heart than patients who received lower doses and those in the control group, the researchers said.

Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston announced this morning it has done the nation’s first stem cell transplant to successfully treat a stroke patient.

The patient came to the hospital last Wednesday, too late to receive clot-busting drugs to treat the stroke, according to a news release about the procedure. So doctors decided to try a therapy they are investigating as part of a clinical trial with the University of Texas Medical School at Houston: using stem cells from the patient’s own bone marrow. The adult stem cells — not controversial embryonic stem cells — came from marrow in the patient’s leg. The theory of how they work is that the stem cells migrate to the area of injury in the brain to do repairs, according to the release.
“The patient is recovering remarkably well and has not shown any signs of paralysis,” the release says. “He remains in the hospital under observation, but will be discharged later this week.”

In a genetic engineering breakthrough that could help everyone from bed-ridden patients to elite athletes, a team of American researchers—including 2007 Nobel Prize winner Mario R. Capecchi—have created a “switch” that allows mutations or light signals to be turned on in muscle stem cells to monitor muscle regeneration in a living mammal. For humans, this work could lead to a genetic switch, or drug, that allows people to grow new muscle cells to replace those that are damaged, worn out, or not working for other reasons (e.g., muscular dystrophy). In addition, this same discovery also gives researchers a new tool for the study of difficult-to-treat muscle cancers. The full report containing details of this advance is available online in The FASEB Journal.

It’s a doctor’s dream — an unlimited supply of disease-free blood.
And it may not be the stuff of fiction for long, reports CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer.
Someone in the United States needs blood every two seconds. In surgery, on cancer words, on the nation’s battlefields — blood transfusions save lives.
But in the U.S., demand often exceeds supply. And elsewhere, especially in the developing world, there’s a real chance the blood cud be contaminated with diseases such as AIDS or Hepatitis C.

Enter Dr. Marc Turner, a cell biologist from Scotland who received a multi-million dollar research grant to try to make blood in his lab from human stem cells.
“These cells are being generated from human embryonic stem cells, which themselves are generated from three-to-five-day-old human embryos,” Turner says.
Palmer explains that stem cells can be coaxed, theoretically, to grow into any human body part.

Stem cell researcher Dr. Ann Kiessling announced today the discovery of cell characteristics that may explain important differences between embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. Scientists have for years been frustrated in their efforts to grow the trillions of adult stem cells needed for therapies, which is why embryonic stem cells seem promising — they can multiply endlessly and also develop into any cell in the body.

Kiessling discovered that early human embryo cells express CLOCK, and other circadian genes, that other human cells growing in laboratories did not. This was a surprise. Although scientists have recently become aware that human tissues have a circadian oscillator that cycles every 24 hours, in phase with the master circadian pacemaker in the brain that responds to light and dark, early embryos seemed too small to function like a tissue.