“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/

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

TaiGen Biotechnology Co., Ltd. announced today that in a phase 1 study in healthy volunteers TG-0054, a chemokine receptor CXCR4 antagonist, was well tolerated and rapidly mobilized stem cells and endothelial progenitor cells from bone marrow into peripheral blood. The number of CD34+ stem cells in circulation after one dose of TG-0054 was equal or higher than reported cell numbers needed for stem cell transplantation in cancer patients. The observed AEs were all mild and transient. A phase 2 study in stem cell transplantation for multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and Hodgkin disease patients is currently being initiated (…)

“We are greatly encouraged by the phase 1 study results which indicates that TG-0054 has the potential to be used alone, not in combination with G- CSF, for allogenic or autologous stem cell transplantation in cancer patients. This should greatly reduce the hospital and other associated cost for such a procedure. Importantly, the activity and safety profile in the phase 1 study will support our future development of TG-0054 in chemosensitization and tissue ischemia, including myocardial infarction, stroke and severe intermittent claudication. Our preclinical animal disease models and the phase 1 study results lend strong support to clinical development for these clinical indications,” said Dr. Ming-Chu Hsu, Chairman & CEO of TaiGen (…)

from http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/excellent-stem-cell-mobilization-and-safety-profile-for-tg-0054-62316942.html

Never mind facial masks and exfoliating scrubs, skin takes care of itself. Stem cells located within the skin actively generate differentiating cells that can ultimately form either the body surface or the hairs that emanate from it. In addition, these stem cells are able to replenish themselves, continually rejuvenating skin and hair. Now, researchers at Rockefeller University have identified two proteins that enable these skin stem cells to undertake this continuous process of self-renewal.

The work, published in Nature Genetics, brings new details to the understanding of how stem cells maintain — and lose — their status as stem cells and are able to specialize into various types of cells. It also further dissects a ubiquitous Rube Goldberg-like pathway whose molecular gears and levers play an important role in activating stem cells to divide and transform into tissue-making cells.

Lead researcher Elaine Fuchs, head of the Laboratory of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development, and first author Hoang Nguyen, a former postdoc in the lab, worked with mice engineered to lack the proteins TCF3 and TCF4, which reside in the nucleus of skin stem cells, where they bind to DNA to turn genes off that would otherwise cause the stem cells to differentiate. They found that without TCF3 and TCF4, all of the layers of the mice’s skin still develop properly, but they cannot be maintained.

“The epidermal stem cells — one of the types of stem cells in the skin — lose their capacity to self-renew and replace skin cells that have died,” says Nguyen, who is now an assistant (…)

from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090927152828.htm

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

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