“Latest Stem Cells News”

Joseph Wagner sees most cell-therapy companies offering little more than a bag of cells.
His company will give the bag a little direction.

Cell Targeting is developing technology that can point stem cell therapies to specific areas of the body. Among the many challenges in cell therapy is direction: not enough of the stem cells are getting to the tissues that needs treatment (…)

Currently a stem cell therapy can help different parts of the body. That attracts more customers, but doesn’t do much when the company wants to differentiate its product and charge a different price.

A stem cell therapy tweaked by Cell Targeting can become unique because it can be directed to different areas of the body to treat different afflictions, Wagner said.

“We make them distinct by our delivery,” Wagner said. “We have the ability to make those bags of cells into unique cell-therapy products.”

Cell Targeting’s product is a peptide, a tiny piece of protein, that coats stem cells and guides them to damaged tissue. The coating peels away like paint after it gets to its target and allows the therapy to do its work (…)

But Cell Targeting’s biggest competitor may be science itself and the research underway to better understand how stem cells work. It’s likely that stem cells on their own can find their way “home” to specific tissues, Gerson said.

“We just don’t know what those Velcro connections are,” Gerson said.

Wagner said the idea that stem cells head home is a bit of “voodoo.” Only a single-digit percentage of cells return to their point of origin — and there’s no evidence they return in a larger percentage to damaged tissues, he said. Also, Wagner pointed out that in many cases, cell therapy companies don’t want stem cells to go “home” but instead to another tissue that the stem cell can also heal (…)

from http://www.medcitynews.com/index.php/2009/09/cell-targeting-ready-to-bring-purpose-to-stem-cell-therapy/

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Stem cells exposed to microgravity express different proteins than those grown in normal gravity, say Australian researchers (…)

Dr Burns, along with graduate researchers Elizabeth Blaber and Helder Marcal, used a NASA rotating-wall vessel to simulate microgravity, which is experienced by astronauts in low Earth orbit, to analyse its effect on human embryonic stem cells.
Stem cells are cells that have yet to differentiate into cells with specialised functions (…)

Associate Professor Ernst Wolvetang of the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at the University of Queensland says while it’s difficult to judge the research prior to publication, it is a “novel idea” (…)
“How relevant this will be to space flight itself is a whole different matter, because we don’t have embryonic stem cells in our adult bodies anymore,” he said.

from http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/28/2698695.htm

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Deep in the brain, buried in the hippocampus and subventricular zone, reside adult neural stem cells, cells that retain the ability to become other types of neural cells and could serve as possible treatments for ailments ranging from vision impairment to Parkinson’s to spinal cord injuries. Doctors, scientists and patients, however, are understandably hesitant to go digging around for them, their location being “a great deterrent,” Sally Temple, founder of the New York Neural Stem Cell Institute, said at the 2009 World Stem Cell Summit here on Wednesday.

Researchers, therefore, are anxious to uncover other, more accessible neural stem cell candidates. Temple and her team have turned their sights to the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), a layer of tissue at the base of the retina that comes into being within 30 to 50 days of conception, before many other parts of the neural system differentiate. Cells from this area of the eye can be easily harvested from retinal fluid that is usually discarded during retinal surgery, she explained (…)

from http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=stem-cells-bring-new-insights-to-fu-2009-09-24

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Stem-cell firm BioTime said this week that it will open a subsidiary in China called BioTime Asia to expand its stem cell therapeutics and research tools to the Asian market.

BioTime Asia will be based at the Nanshan Memorial Medical Institute, or NSMMI, and will clinically develop and market therapeutic stem cell products in China and market stem cell research products in China and other Asian countries (…)

BioTime and its US research tools subsidiary, Embryome Sciences, will license the rights to certain stem cell technology to BioTime Asia, and will sell the Chinese subsidiary stem cell products for therapeutic use and for resale as research products, BioTime said. Under the arrangement, BioTime Asia will license back to BioTime any new technology it might develop or acquire for use outside of China (…)

from http://www.genomeweb.com/print/924594

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In the decades-long war on cancer, as of late, researchers had been making little progress in comparison to colleagues treating other conditions, such as cardiac or infectious diseases. “Cancer research has really plateaued out,” William Matsui, an associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University‘s School of Medicine, said at the 2009 World Stem Cell Summit here on Tuesday. But pushing cancer stem cell research “gives us a novel way to study cancer,” said Matsui, who also runs a lab at the university’s Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Cancer and stem cells have had a fraught relationship—not in the least because of early concern that stem cell treatments could in fact spur on cancer through their encouragement of undifferentiated cell growth. But cancer stem cells themselves have gained a more solid toe-hold in the past several years as a potential new target for cancer research.

Cancer stem cells—or CSCs—are presumed to have similar capabilities as healthy stem cells: they can regenerate and differentiate into any cell that makes up the cancer. Such cells are often blamed for relapses in patients who by all other measures appear to have been cured. One of the large problems, however, has been in finding these cells. In some cancers, such as some leukemias, they are suspected to be only one cell in a million.

Cancer stem cells’ persistence has given rise to the so-called dandelion theory of cancer treatment. Researchers and doctors have traditionally worked to obliterate the visible cancerous menace—the tumor, or dandelion weed, as it were. But as anyone with a lawn may be well aware, hacking off the flower does little to stop the root—that is, the stem cell—from regenerating another attack later. So, posits Richard Jones, also at the Sidney Kimmel Comparative Cancer Center, it’s possible that effective drugs may have been abandoned because they were not creating quick, visible responses. Eliminating the root stem cells will cause the tumors to stop growing, but not right away, he explained at the summit.

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William H. Frey

Scientists have pioneered a unique delivery system to administer therapeutic stem cells to the brain, by way of a simple nasal spray. Once the droplets containing the stem cells are snorted through the nose, the solution breaks through the blood-brain barrier, seeding the brain with the stem cells (…)

Scientists from the University of Minnesota and the University Hospital of Tuebingen, Germany conducted the research. The researchers administered the nasal spray containing rat stem cells to mice and within an hour, the rat stem cells were visible in the mice brains. The researchers then repeated the experiment using human stem cells and they also penetrated the blood-brain barrier within an hour.

It’s believed the stem cells enter the brain through the olfactory nerves through small holes in the cribriform plate, which is a thin horizontal part of the skull at the base of the brain.

The researchers further found that administering an enzyme called hyaluronidase, to the mice before having them snort the stem cells, enabled greater amounts of stem cells to travel to the brain.
The nasal delivery system has obvious benefits over drilling into a patient’s skull to administer the stem cells, which can cause inflammation and infection.

Lead researcher William Frey, an adjunct professor of pharmaceutics at Minnesota noted, “When you cut into the brain, that leads to an inflammatory response,” says Frey. “We’re hoping this will help. We didn’t see evidence that intranasal stem cell treatment caused inflammation.” (…)

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