“Latest Stem Cells News”

A have-a-go hero who was blinded in one eye in a chemical attack 15 years ago has miraculously got his sight back after undergoing pioneering stem cell treatment.
Russell Turnbull is one of eight patients with impaired vision who have been treated successfully with their own stem cells, in a technique developed by scientists and eye surgeons at the North East England Stem Cell Institute.
Mr Turnbull was hit in his right eye, causing massive damage to the cornea stem cells, leaving him with severely impaired vision, a condition known as Limbal Stem Cell Deficiency (LSCD) (…)

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(…) Three months ago the world’s first cosmetic stem-cell facelift was carried out on Pauline Wills, 55, an office manager from South London, by Dr Aamer Khan from the Harley Street Medical Skin Clinic. It cost £7,500, took nearly six hours under local anaesthetic and Pauline had the added bonus of losing an inch from her tummy.

And because the procedure uses the body’s own stem cells – which makes it a living tissue graft – you grow into your own facelift during the six months afterwards (…)

Stem cells are present throughout the body and one of their functions is to repair damaged tissue and regenerate muscles, nerves, blood vessels and skin cells. The body has a reserve of these cells in the bone marrow, although there are a thousand times more stem cells in our fat stores (…)

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Don’t worry about your child’s loss of teeth or if they have immature ones as doctors at AIIMS can regrow them using stem cell technique by just making a minute slit in their root.
“We at AIIMS are treating children with infected, immature teeth as a result of traumatic injuries, by using locally available indigenous stem cells,” Dr Naseem Shah, Chief of the Centre for Dental Education and Research, AIIMS said.

She explained that the root forms the most important part of the tooth. It anchors the tooth within the bone and houses the pulp (tiny blood vessels and nerves) which extends to the underlying bone and helps to nourish and give feeling to the tooth.
Any trauma to the teeth may lead to infection and death of the pulp, infection in the bone and arrest of the root development. Such roots are very fragile and may fracture, ultimately leading to loss of tooth.

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Drs. Scott Kitchen, Zoran Galic, Jerry Zack of the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center and AIDS Institute and their colleagues demonstrated for the first time that human blood stem cells can be engineered into cells that can target and kill HIV-infected cells. The process could potentially be used against a range of chronic viral diseases.

The study, published Dec. 7 in the-peer reviewed online journal PLoS ONE, provides proof-of-principle, a demonstration of feasibility, that human stem cells can be engineered into the equivalent of a genetic vaccine.

“We have demonstrated in this proof-of-principle study that this type of approach can be used to engineer the human immune system, particularly the T-cell response, to specifically target HIV-infected cells,” said lead investigator Scott G. Kitchen, assistant professor of medicine in the division of hematology and oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a member of the UCLA AIDS Institute. “These studies lay the foundation for further therapeutic development that involves restoring damaged or defective immune responses toward a variety of viruses that cause chronic disease, or even different types of tumors.”

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Gregg Semenza, M.D., Ph.D.

Blood vessel blockage, a common condition in old age or diabetes, leads to low blood flow and results in low oxygen, which can kill cells and tissues. Such blockages can require amputation resulting in loss of limbs. Now, using mice as their model, researchers at Johns Hopkins have developed therapies that increase blood flow, improve movement and decrease tissue death and the need for amputation. The findings, published online last week in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hold promise for developing clinical therapies.

“In a young, healthy individual, hypoxia — low oxygen levels — triggers the body to make factors that help coordinate the growth of new blood vessels but this process doesn’t work as well as we age,” says Gregg Semenza, M.D., Ph.D., professor of pediatrics and genetic medicine and director of the vascular biology program at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering. “Now, with the help of gene therapy and stem cells we can help reactivate the body’s response to hypoxia and save limbs.”

Previously, Semenza’s team generated a virus that carries the gene encoding an active form of the HIF-1 protein, which turns on genes necessary for building new blood vessels. When injected into the hind legs of otherwise healthy mice and rabbits that had been treated to reduce blood flow, the HIF-1 virus treatment partially restored blood flow.

People with diabetes have a 40 times higher risk of losing a limb to amputation, says Semenza. To find out if HIF-1 gene therapy could improve blood flow in a diabetic animal, the team then tested the same virus in diabetic and non-diabetic mice that had blood flow cut off to one hind leg. Twenty-one days after treatment, the HIF-1 virus-treated mice had 85 percent recovery of blood flow compared with 24 percent in the mock-treated mice. And, treated, diabetic mice had much less tissue damage compared to the untreated diabetic mice. These results were reported in the Nov. 3 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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The body is a battle zone. Cells constantly compete with one another for space and dominance. Though the manner in which some cells win this competition is well known to be the survival of the fittest, how stem cells duke it out for space and survival is not as clear. A study on fruit flies published in the October 2 issue of Science by Johns Hopkins researchers describes how stem cells win this battle by literally sticking around.

“Our work exemplifies how one signal coordinately maintains two types of stem cells in a single niche, or microenvironment,” says Erika Matunis, Ph.D., associate professor of cell biology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “What we found may emerge as common themes of mammalian stem cell niches as they become better characterized.”

To tackle the stem cell competition quandary, the team looked at fruit fly testes where two different stem cells exist: germline stem cells which give rise to sperm, and somatic stem cells which develop into non-reproductive cell types.

Using genetics, the researchers grew flies lacking the SOCS protein, which controls other molecules that promote stem cell growth. SOCS normally ensures that the right numbers of stem cells are present in the stem cell niche, a region at the far end of the fly testis where new cells are born. In a normal testis, the germline stem cells are surrounded by somatic stem cells at a ratio of about one germline stem cell for every two somatic stem cells.

The researchers isolated testes from flies lacking SOCS and, under a microscope, counted the number of germline stem cells and somatic stem cells. They found that nearly half of the germline stem cells were gone and the somatic stem cells appeared to be occupying that space.

“The somatic stem cells almost look like they’ve invaded the niche area,” says Melanie Issigonis, a graduate student in the Biochemistry, Cellular, and Molecular Biology graduate program at Johns Hopkins. “I saw that image and said, ‘Wow, it’s right there. Germline stem cell loss.’”

To figure out where the lost germline stem cells went and how they lost the battle for space, the team returned to the microscope. This time, they examined the cells for whether they contained integrin, a protein that helps cells stick to each other. They found that somatic stem cells from flies lacking SOCS seemed to contain more integrin than somatic stem cells from flies with functional SOCS. According to Matunis, it’s the increase in integrin that allows somatic stem cells to gain the upper hand because they can stick to the niche better than neighboring germline stem cells can.

Though the somatic stem cells were invading the niche, germline stem cells were not dying. In the microscope images, the team found that all remaining germline stem cells still looked alive and healthy, but elbowed out of their niche by somatic stem cells. Says Matunis, no matter how healthy a germline stem cell is, if it cannot stick, it will eventually be outcompeted by the somatic cells and pushed all the way out of the niche. Issigonis found the discovery remarkable: “The germline stem cells are perfectly fine,” she says. “They’re just leaving the niche and differentiating.”

The team believes this model can be applied to other stem cell niches such as cancer. Just like the somatic stem cells overrunning the fly testes, cancer stem cells in mammalian systems become a danger when they become the stickiest cell in the niche. In both cases, the important control protein, SOCS, is lost. Knowing what is necessary for some stem cells to thrive and others to dwindle could have great importance to understanding the roots of stem cell diseases.

from http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2009/12_04a_09.html

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