“Latest Stem Cells News”

“You can make liver. You can make pancreas. You can make bone. Therefore you can make neuro cells. You can make heart cells,” said Dr. Robert Carpenter
Yes, he said make a liver make a heart. From what? Stem cells from your teeth.

“We recently discovered that adult stem cells that don’t have the controversy related to it like embryonic cells have the ability to regenerate and treat a number of illnesses and injuries,” Carpenter said.
Stem cells are being studied to affect other disease like diabetes, kidney problems; liver problems even Parkinson’s disease. It’s in human clinical trials, and it is expected to be available within the next decade. Stem cells from teeth are proving much better than those from even bone marrow.

“With dental stem cells, since they are closely linked to bone and cartilage. It is easy to manipulate these immature cells into cartilage. They’ve actually in the laboratory, have made an exact human ACL,” said Carpenter.Baby teeth have the most viable cells.

“Stem cells in teeth particularly deciduous teeth or wisdom teeth and the follicles the surround wisdom teeth are very immature very plastic stem cells, plastic being the key word that are manipulable into a number of different tissue types,” the doctor said.
Wisdom teeth are also a great source of stem cells and that is why Abby DelGiacco is sending wisdom teeth to a lab to have them preserved with a program called Stemsave. Once her teeth are extracted, they are placed in a container, sealed in a temperature-controlled thermos and overnighted to a cryolab where her cells are preserved if she needs them.

“You never really know what is going to happen and never want to think about it but something you could awful disease and that is what this is for it is not only for degenerative neurological diseases. It is for tissue, bone muscle, tendons if I tear my ACL,” said DelGiacco.
Insurance doesn’t pay to store your stem cells there is a $590 set up laboratory fee and each year thereafter Abby will pay $100.

The cells are there if and when she needs them and studies are showing they maintain viability at least fifty years, probably more. And if you don’t have wisdom teeth left, don’t worry. All you need is one healthy tooth.

Concha Herrera Arroyo, from El Pais

The Cardiology department and the Area of Cell Therapy of Cordoba hospital Reina Sofia are carrying out clinical tests with patients who have suffered from a severe heart attack. With the implantation of the patient’s stem cells, the heart regenerates thus improving its wall motion, that is, its cardiac performance.

Indeed for the last four years, the Area of Cell Therapy of Cordoba hospital, led by haematologist Dr. Concha Herrera, has been implementing a therapy program with adult stem cells in patients with heart-related problems. However, this therapy is not a service the hospital offers yet. More specifically, at the end of 2007 the hospital ended a clinical test with patients who had suffered a severe myocardial infarction, that is, an obstruction of one of the main coronary arteries that stops the blood pump to the heart.

The test consisted of treating 30 people split into three groups of ten each at random. The first group was the control group, where patients received standard treatment for acute myocardial infarction; the second group was treated with stem cells directly implanted into the coronary artery affected using a catheterization; the third group was treated with a medicine called G-CSF, which makes cells move from the marrow to the blood, so that they get to the heart in a natural way, without having to do so through a catheter.

At the end of the test, the results revealed that the two groups treated without cells improved slightly, whereas patients transplanted with stem cells through the coronary arteries (vessels which bring the blood to the Herat muscle) did improve their ventricular function much more. This was interpreted as a significant decrease of the cardiac failure symptoms such as pain, fatigue and breathlessness when making small efforts.

Moreover, with this process it is possible to prevent some acute arrhythmias (change or irregularity in the rhythm of the heartbeat), which in many cases could result in the patient’s death. ‘However, it does not prevent a future heart attack’, Dr. Herrera assures.

In short, the stem cells transplanted from the marrow into the heart muscle have a double function: on the one hand they regenerate the heart cells, the cardiomiocites. In addition to this, they segregate a series of proangiogenic factors that produce blood vessels (angiogenesis) and can also produce the recruitment of stem cells that are in the myocardium itself.

Everyone knows about the potential of stem cells in the medical field, but until today, no one had found a way to recognize them in an organ or tissue. Thanks to a new study published in the ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ by 2007 Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, Mario Capecchi and researcher at Cattolica University in Rome, Eugenio Sangiorgi, this obstacle has been overcome. Experts have found a new technique to find stem cells hidden in the pancreas.

“Although the journals talk a lot about this topic,” said Sangiorgi, who has collaborated with Capecchi for years, “in reality, we experts don’t understand them very well. For example, we don’t have a method to distinguish between a stem cell and another cell a priori in the same tissue. By observing the cell’s behavior we can then figure it out.”
In other words, when a researcher observes a particular tissue, it is not immediately possible to identify the cell with certainty and isolate it.
In some cases, like in the pancreas, until a few years ago, it was doubted if these cells were even present in the organ.

“Together with Professor Capecchi,” continued Sangiorgi, “some time ago we created a method to mark stem cells in tissues. A sort of little flag that could help us label the cells that we were looking for.” To arrive at this conclusion, they used a portion of DNA, which in an animal model, is activated with the use of a drug. Once the marker is ‘turned on’, a special fluorescent protein is produced (which won its discoverers, Osamui Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Tsien, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2008) and is able to illuminate the stem cells. “To understand if they were actually stem cells,” continued Sangiorgi, “we just had to wait: a normal cell will die sooner or later, while a stem cell maintains its capacity to divide and replicate.”
In the new article, Sangiorgi and Capecchi demonstrated with their new technique that certain cells located in the pancreas, called acinar cells, are stem cells in reality. These cells are responsible for the production of an important digestive enzyme.

This is an interesting discovery from another point of view: “In general,” said Sangiorgi, “it was thought that stem cells were cells without a precise function, and that they were undifferentiated and had no set objectives other than tissue regeneration. Instead we have learned that acinar cells, although they are stem cells, have a precise role in the pancreas. They are like soldiers who perform their job normally for the army, but if they are needed they are also available to work for the government too.”

This work has paved the way for new studies on stem cells including their potential risks: “Thanks to their extraordinary reproductive power, they can even become carcinogenic. But if we manage to discover a way to isolate and study them in other organs, we will be able to analyze their properties in-depth and provide many responses on how they function.”

A 300-euro bill has arrived for some couples that had stem cells taken from their child at birth three years ago. Sant’Anna has sent a bill to parents who decided to transport umbilical cord blood to Switzerland, which in Italy cannot be stored for personal use.

For the past year, the procedure is no longer free at Sant’Anna, but now the hospital is sending bills out to couples who had the procedure done in 2008 when the hospital was not yet making people pay and the operation was entirely free. Numerous couples in the past weeks have surprisingly received a bill from Sant’Anna and the complaints are rolling in, along with phone calls and e-mails, opinion columns in the newspapers and interviews on TV.

“Our first son was born in 2006,” said a couple of young parents who asked to remain anonymous. “We asked the hospital to keep the umbilical cord stem cells and send them to Switzerland where it is possible to pay for them to be stored for personal, future use. No one at Sant’Anna hospital told us that we would have had to pay for this service.”

A few weeks ago due to the upcoming birth of their second son, the couple returned to the hospital.

“We asked for the same service,” they explained, “and this time they asked us for a 300 euro payment in order to obtain the necessary certification to transport the blood to Switzerland. We accepted, despite the fact that 300 euros seemed excessive, because they only need a simple health document. We paid the bill, but recently we also received a second bill for the same amount and we discovered that the bill was for the birth of our first child 3 years ago.”

The same thing happened to about ten couples, which three years after receiving the same services from the hospital, were sent a bill by Sant’Anna Hospital. A 300-euro bill that was completely unexpected, since until the end of March 2008 the hospital had not set any price for the service.

Current laws in Italy do not allow people to store stem cells for personal use. Only free, voluntary, and anonymous donations of umbilical cord blood can be made, which are then made available to anyone who needs them, just like blood or organ donations.

“Voluntary donation is covered by the national health system,” said executives at the hospital through their press office. Donation for personal use is not covered because it is not part of the program. Orders from the healthcare ministry specify that public hospitals do not have to guarantee this service. The hospitals, like Sant’Anna, which make this service available, naturally have the right to charge patients for this service, since it is not covered by the national health system.”

At least until March 2008 there were no precise regulations on the matter.

“Regulations were set one year ago,” said heath-care officials, “and since then all of the couples are being informed that the cost of the service is 300 euros. This sum is needed in order to perform a detailed certification of the blood. This document is necessary to transport the stem cells across the border. The hospital must guarantee that the withdrawal was done in compliance with all of the regulations and that the sample is healthy, and that it has been collected and stored according to all regulations.”

However, Sant’Anna is sending out bills for children that were born before March 2008. “The couples knew that sooner or later they would receive a bill,” said hospital officials. “The sum was not established, but they were informed that this was not a free service.”

Stem cells are providing more than just hope against diabetes. The first patients treated with adult stem cells are no longer taking anti-diabetic drugs, while ‘extraordinary results have been obtained in mice with embryonic stem cells,’ said Senator Ignazio Marino yesterday in Rome at the Changing Diabetes Barometer forum.

‘Embryonic stem cells are something that we must keep in mind,’ said Marino referring to the first encouraging results obtained in the United States, where last year, the first data on the possibility of controlling diabetes in mice was published as well as the possibility of using embryonic stem cells to replace insulin producing cells. While this objective is still a long way away in humans, a therapy based on adult stem cells is much closer.

Results published two years ago in a magazine of American medical association, Jama, relative to the first 15 patients treated with adult stem cells, showed that some of the patients were able to stop insulin-based therapy. ‘Results like these,’ concluded Marino, ‘must stimulate further investments in this field.’

Stem Cell Research using the patient’s own Adult Stem Cells has brought us another great discovery- Stem Cell Contact Lens. In Australia, a group of doctors in a research study treated 3 patients who had some form of cornea problems and they all were able to see after the stem cell treatment in which their own stem cells healed damage to their cornea

The Process of Stem Cells for the Cornea

1. The doctors removed Adult Stem Cells from the patient’s good eye
2. The stem cells were grown on a contact lens for 10 days
3. The contact lens was placed on the damaged eye for 3 weeks
4. The stem cells “blend” into the eye and repair the damage in the cornea

From the stem cell article:

The researchers, led by Dr Nick di Girolamo, said each person’s sight improved significantly within weeks of the procedure, and that it was a simple inexpensive technique which required a minimal hospital stay

Stem Cell Research Abstract

Also, here is the  stem cell research abstract for the cornea study.  Here are some of the actual results:

Results. A stable transparent corneal epithelium was restored in each patient. There was no recurrence of conjunctivalization or corneal vascularization, and a significant improvement in symptom score occurred in all patients. Best-corrected visual acuity was increased in all eyes after the procedure.

This technique is simple, non invasive, and uses the patient’s own stem cells– so the patient has nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying something like this.  What can be easier than popping in a contact lens?

Covering Old Stem Cell Ground?

However, it seems like they have doing something similar in India for a number of years. Notice in the story, that the doctors removed stem cells from the good eye of the patient. What happens if the patient has two bad eyes? Well there are  doctors in India are getting the stem cells from under the lip of the patient. This stem cell story didn’t get any run when it came out in October of 2008- but it probably should have. Read more about what this group of stem cell doctors in India have for stem cells for the cornea here