“Latest Stem Cells News”

For children born with immunodeficiencies, researchers may have found a better way for them to get the help they need from stem-cell transplants (…)

Children with primary immunodeficiencies have genetic defects in their immune system that leave them open to infection and other complications. Stem-cell transplants can replace the defective immune system with one derived from healthy donor bone marrow, but without a stem-cell transplant, many of these children might die, the researchers noted in a journal news release.

In order to create space for the donor stem cells and prevent rejection, the patient usually undergoes chemotherapy, radiotherapy or both. This chemoradiotherapy can cause severe liver or lung damage, as well as hair loss and sickness. It may also cause problems with growth, puberty and infertility in later life, according to the news release (…)

With this approach, the 16 children with primary immunodeficiencies in this study, who were too sick for a traditional stem-cell transplant, were able to avoid much of the toxicity caused by chemotherapy (…)

read full article on http://www.ajc.com/health/content/shared-auto/healthnews/bird/630592.html

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SURGEONS from Southampton have developed a pioneering bone repair technique that could end the need for artificial hip replacements.
Six people have undergone the procedure which uses a their own stem cells to repair damaged hip joints. Only one operation has failed (…)

Under the procedure surgeons extract bone marrow from the back of a patients’ pelvis, then extract a layer of stem cells by spinning the marrow in a centrifuge.
The stem cells are then mixed with ground up bone donated from another patients discarded hip replacement (…)

Professor Richard Oreffo of Southampton University, one of those behind the research, said the technique could be improved by replacing donated bone with an artificial material containing chemicals that promote stem cell growth.

read full story on http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/4573027.Hampshire_scientists_repair_hip_joints_using_stem_cells/

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Using skin cells from people with type 1 diabetes, researchers were able to produce cells that made insulin in response to changing blood sugar levels, though not as efficiently as normal insulin-producing cells do. (…) “This is a big deal,” said Susan Solomon, CEO of the New York Stem Cell Foundation, which provided some of the funding for the study. “Tackling the basic biology of type 1 diabetes, which is a very complex disease, is a critical step. With these cells, we can see in a dish what’s happening to the immune system, and if you don’t understand the immune response, you get nowhere with type 1 diabetes.”

“This is very preliminary data, but now we could potentially look at the interaction between immune system cells and insulin-producing cells to find the root cause or trigger, which we think might vary from patient to patient,” explained Meri Firpo, an assistant professor at the Stem Cell Institute at the University of Minnesota (…)

In the current study, researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center at Columbia University, obtained skin samples from two white males who had type 1 diabetes. One was diagnosed at 3 years of age, while the other was first diagnosed when he was 21.

Normal skin cells are already specialized cells. Their job is to protect the body with a covering of skin, explained Firpo. To transform these cells into embryonic-like stem cells, essentially getting them back to the beginning when they weren’t already specialized, researcher Doug Melton and his colleagues used three inserted genes to reprogram the cells, creating what’s known as an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPS). In this case, the cells were then turned into insulin-producing cells (…)

She said that this study helps further at least two areas of research that JDRF is focusing on: developing a self-source for islet-cell transplants and blocking the immune response. Another area of research that JDRF is actively pursuing is the possible encapsulation of islet cells before transplantation so that they could hide from the immune system (…)

from http://www.ajc.com/health/content/shared-auto/healthnews/diab/630511.html

A study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes a way to create induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from ordinary adult cells taken from patients with type 1 diabetes. These stem cells then can be reprogrammed to produce all of the cell types relevant to the disease.

“What you get is the ability to watch, for the first time, type 1 diabetes develop,” says senior author Douglas Melton, a professor of natural sciences at Harvard University and co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. “Until you watch a disease develop, you will not understand the mechanism, and you therefore cannot devise any kind of sensible treatment or cure.”

Melton and his colleagues show that the reprogrammed iPS cells–so called for their ability to give rise to many cell types–can be spurred to differentiate into tissue resembling the insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells that are destroyed by the immune system in type 1 diabetes.

Embryonic stem (ES) cells have long been the gold standard for deriving pluripotent cell lines. But ES cells can only be used to create disease models for disorders such as cystic fibrosis, where the genetic underpinnings are straightforward. Because the genetics underlying type 1diabetes are complex and poorly understood, researchers have no way to identify diabetes-specific ES cells (…)

Ultimately, Melton plans to construct a “living test tube” for probing the interplay between the beta cells and the immune system in diabetes. He hopes to use the diabetic iPS cells to generate all three relevant cell types and then to put those cells into a so-called humanized mouse that can accept human cells to see how they interact.

from http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23335/

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Kidney stem cells, according to some experts, could be able to repair kidney damage if used properly. The first researchers to identify the cells were scientists at the University of Florence, who published an article recently in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. Giuseppe Remuzzi, the head of the Nephrology and Dialysis division of the United Hospitals of Bergamo recently spoke about their potential in Milan at the World Nephrology Congress.

“The truth about stem cells,” explained the expert, “ is what US President Barack Obama pointed out when he announced the repeal of laws banning the federal financing of embryonic stem cell studies. They are promising, but there is still a lot of work to do. Currently, these cells treat very few diseases. We must study them and compare the various types.”

Many scientists, continued Remuzzi, believe in them, although the results are few and mostly have been obtained in vitro. “Everyone’s dream is to repair organs with stem cells.” There are good possibilities for kidneys, he added. “Since stem cells could be responsible for a regeneration process observed in animals treated with Ace-inhibitor drugs, which delay the progression of kidney diseases. The idea is that these cells have an innate ability to repair damages, which, through the use of drugs, can be directed and sustained, with good results.”

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