“Latest Stem Cells News”

Scientists have made a breakthrough in stem cell research which raises the prospect of regrowing damaged sections of a person’s liver, pancreas or even their brain.
Researchers at the University of NSW have found a way to improve the lifespan and competitiveness of stem cells, overcoming a problem which otherwise saw their regenerative powers fade in about an hour.

Adult stem cells were given a gene to make them resistant to chemotherapy, handing them an “advantage” when used to treat damaged tissue in conjunction with the cancer-fighting treatment.
University of NSW Professor Peter Gunning said as the chemotherapy cleaned out damaged cells, resistant stem cells were left behind to complete their amazing process of turning into healthy replacements thereby restoring the tissue.

“What has been the realm of science fiction is looking more and more like the medicine of the future,” Prof Gunning said.
“The beauty of this technique is that chemotherapy makes space for stem cells coming into muscle and also gives the stem cells an advantage over the locals.

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Professor Jeanne Loring

Stem cells show great potential to enable treatments for conditions such as spinal injuries or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and also as research tools. One of the greatest problems slowing such work is that researchers have found major complications in purifying cell mixtures, for instance to remove stem cells that can cause tumors from cells developed for use in medical treatments. But a group of Scripps Research scientists, working with colleagues in Japan, have developed a clever solution to this purification problem that should prove more reliable than other methods, safer, and perhaps 100 times cheaper.

The work appears in the current edition of the journal Cell Research.

Effective tricks for separating stem cells from other types are essential for many emerging medical treatments. These techniques begin with researchers inducing stem cells to take specific forms, or differentiate, for instance into nerve cells. These differentiated cells might then be used to repair a spinal cord injury. Other cells might enable a diabetic’s body to produce adequate insulin.

A key problem is that in the differentiation process, at least some stem cells inevitably remain in their undifferentiated, or pluripotent, state. These cells can grow to form tumors in patients if injected along with differentiated cells, a concern that has already led the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to delay clinical trials for promising stem cell-based therapies.

A New Approach

To date, almost all attempts at purification have focused on developing antibodies—immune system attack cells—that can remove or destroy stem cells in mixtures. But this approach has had shortcomings. Effective antibodies are difficult and expensive to develop, and their use in medical therapies raises safety issues because they are produced in animals.

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Stem cells can thrive in segments of well-vascularized tissue temporarily removed from laboratory animals, say researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Once the cells have nestled into the tissue’s nooks and crannies, the so-called “bioscaffold” can then be seamlessly reconnected to the animal’s circulatory system.

The new technique neatly sidesteps a fundamental stumbling block in tissue engineering: the inability to generate solid organs from stem cells in the absence of a reliable supply of blood to the interior of the developing structure.

“Efforts to use tissue engineering to generate whole organs have largely failed,” said Geoffrey Gurtner, MD, associate professor of surgery, “primarily due to the lack of available blood vessels. Now we’ve essentially hijacked an existing structure to overcome this problem.” The key, the researchers discovered, is to keep the tissue adequately supplied with oxygen and nutrients while outside of the body.

In the near future, the researchers believe that the stem cells in the tissue could be induced to become an internal, living factory of healthy, specialized cells churning out proteins missing in people with conditions such as hemophilia or diabetes. In the long run, they hope to encourage the cells to become entire transplantable organs such as livers or pancreases.

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Health Minister Nelson Bascome on January 28 said his Ministry will not be doing anything about Bermuda’s lack of adult stem cell regulations at this stage — but pledged to ensure good practices would be in place before a stem cell clinic opens.
At a news conference yesterday about a revised Bermuda Health Council, Mr. Bascome was questioned about his position on the Brown-Darrell Clinic, which is scheduled to open early this year.

When asked specifically about introducing legislation to effectively monitor and regulate the clinic, the Minister said nothing had come across his desk.
He said: “Anything that has to do with health in Bermuda will come across the desk of the Health Minister. Right now and I told the media last week, we put out the regulations for medical clinics.

“As the development of that clinic goes and other clinics on the Island, in terms of health we will ensure best practices and that the public is protected and at this time that is all we can say because there have been no official applications that have come across my desk.
“Until we see something that has to be affected by legislation I cannot really answer. It would have to be something proposed to use to deal with.”

In June last year, Premier Ewart Brown and his wife Wanda announced the opening of a stem cell research clinic in partnership with the American company Stemedica Cell Technologies on the site of the former Winterhaven property in Smith’s.
Since then, doctors have aired concerns about the lack of adult stem cell regulations in Bermuda, compared with jurisdictions such as the US, Canada and the UK, where the practice is heavily monitored by legislation introduced by those governments.

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Image via Wikipedia

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Adult stem cells and their more committed kin, progenitor cells, are prized by medical researchers for their ability to produce different types of specialised cells. The potential of using these cells to repair or replace damaged tissue holds great promise for cancer therapies and regenerative medicine. However, the question that must first be answered is what determines the ultimate fate of a stem or progenitor cell? A team of researchers led by Berkeley Lab’s Mark LaBarge and Mina Bissell appear to be well on the road to finding out.

Working with unique microenvironment microarrays (MEArrays) of their own creation, LaBarge and Bissell and their collaborators have shown that the ultimate fate of a stem or progenitor cell in a woman’s breast – whether the cell develops normally or whether it turns cancerous – may depend upon signals from multiple microenvironments.

‘We found that adult human mammary stem and progenitor cells exhibit impressive plasticity in response to hundreds of unique combinatorial microenvironments,’ said LaBarge, a cell and molecular biologist in Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. ‘Our results further suggest that rational modulation of the microenvironmental milieu can impose specific differentiation phenotypes on normal stem or progenitor cells, and perhaps even impose phenotypically normal behaviour on malignant cells during tissue genesis. All of this points to the rational manipulation of adult stem and progenitor cells as a promising pathway for beneficial therapies.’

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