“Latest Stem Cells News”

Ten years ago, Leah Potts was a patient at Craig Hospital, after a skiing accident that broke her neck and damaged her spinal cord. The first doctors she saw warned her she might never walk again.

Today, Potts teaches Spinning, the popular and intense indoor group bicycling class. The Aspen resident can walk (with a cane). She skis again (with outriggers). And she blogs about her progress at leahpotts.com.

“I remember lying there in bed at the beginning,” she said. “I remember lying there thinking, ‘OK, this doesn’t sound too good. I have two choices: Lie here and cry about it, or get up and do something about it.’ I was 23 years old. I’d just graduated from college. I felt like my life was just beginning.”

When she left Craig Hospital after three months, Potts relied on a walker or a wheelchair to get around. Using the walker was exhausting. It took all her energy to move from the front door to her living-room sofa. She had to rest before getting up again to go to the next room.

Reclaiming her body became Potts’ full-time job. She spent at least three hours a day in rehabilitation treatment, sticking to a grueling schedule that later cost her her short marriage to Dan Roland.

Incoming search terms:

Stem cells injected into the eyes of mice with defective corneas returned the corneas to a more normal appearance, a new study has found.

Researchers hope the procedure might one day be in humans. About 40,000 such transplants are done each year in the United States.

“The stem cells took the scar-like matrix, remodeled it and made it more like normal,” said senior investigator James Funderburgh, an associate professor of ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh. “We were surprised and delighted.”

A report on the study is in the April 9 online edition of the journal Stem Cells.

The cornea is the transparent, front layer of the eye that serves as a protective barrier and, along with the lens, helps focus light. Corneas can develop scar tissue from chronic inflammation caused by infections or other conditions and by injuries, such as chemical or thermal burns or other trauma.

Incoming search terms:

The British mega-brand Virgin has launched a stem-cell bank in Qatar. The country has lofty goals of becoming the world leader in stem cell technologies, and unlike in the West, Qatar does not face some of the ethical issues surrounding stem-cell research.

It was a lavish launch for the opening of Qatar’s new research center that brought out billionaire Richard Branson and Qatar’s royal family to the country’s new Science and Technology Park.

Branson came to Qatar to open the Virgin Health Bank, the first in the region that collects stem cells from the umbilical cord blood of newborns.

“Qatar is a trusting exciting country, it has leaders with great vision,” Branson said.

The sprawling new science center is part of the leaders’ ambitious plans to make this small Gulf state the center for medical research and innovation. Virgin’s plan is to store umbilical-cord stem cells after a mother has given birth.

A portion of those stem cells will be banked for that infant’s future use in the event of medical needs. The remainder will be stored at a national public center for research and use by any patient with a matching tissue type. Cord-blood stem cells are used to treat leukemia as well as other blood-related illnesses.

Incoming search terms:

A 21-year-old leukemia patient underwent pioneering surgery in a Shanghai hospital Wednesday, when doctors transfused 30 milliliters of umbilical-cord blood donated by a Shanghai cord bank. Today they will transplant a batch of his father’s stem cells, which are an imperfect match.

This combination of umbilical-cord blood and half-matched stem cells can offer lifesaving transplant opportunities to many more patients than traditional methods, which require a perfect match between patient and donor, said doctors from Shanghai No. 1 People’s Hospital.

It will be a month before results of the transplant are determined.

About 40,000 to 50,000 people on China’s mainland are diagnosed with leukemia every year – alf of them children. Only about 1,000 are able to receive a stem-cell transplant because of the difficulty of finding a matching donor.

The chances of finding a perfectly matched donor are as little as one in 100,000, when direct blood-relatives are not available. The possibility of an exact match is one in four between immediate relatives.

Incoming search terms:

Dalhousie Medical School cancer researcher Dr. Patrick Lee has proven that a common virus can infect and kill breast cancer stem cells. This breakthrough finding is published in the current issue of Molecular Therapy, the journal of the American Society of Gene Therapy.

It is only within the past few years that the scientific community has understood the full significance of cancer stem cells and the urgent need to find a means of eliminating them.

“Cancer stem cells are essentially mother cells,” explains Dr. Lee, Cameron Chair in Basic Cancer Research at Dalhousie Medical School. “They continuously produce new cancer cells, aggressively forming tumours even when there are only a few of them.”

Cancer stem cells are difficult to kill as they respond poorly to chemotherapy and radiation. As Dr. Lee notes, “You can kill all the regular cancer cells in a tumour, but as long as there are cancer stem cells present, disease will recur.”

Incoming search terms:

Stem Cell Research Clinical Study- Spinal Cord Injury

A few weeks ago, I covered a story about  a stem cell research published study for spinal cord injury patients in Ecuador.  In that study, Dr. Luis Geffner used 3 different delivery methods of Adult Stem Cells to help 52 spinal cord injury patients and counting.

Michael Flounders- Walking in the Right Direction

One of those 52 patients was Michael Flounders who says “Since the stem cell implant I am making a recovery. How long and how far it will go no-one can say because it is so new.

This is taken from the stem cell abstract published in Cell Transplantation, Volume 17, Number 12, 2008 , pp. 1277-1293(17):

Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate improvements in ASIA, Barthel (quality of life), Frankel, and Ashworth scoring. Moreover, in order to assess bladder function, we designed a simple numerical clinical scoring system that demonstrates significant changes in bladder function following BMSCs administration.

Adult Stem Cell Video- Spinal Cord Injury

Also in that clinical study, there were 8 case studies done.  And this amazing video has recently surfaced showing 3 of those spinal cord injury patients treated with their own Adult Stem Cells.   Below, the video you will find the transcription (the stem cell video is in Spanish, although there are subtitles). Watch the whole thing- it really is uplifting!

Incoming search terms: