“Latest Stem Cells News”

New technique produces one hundred-fold increase in efficiency in reprogramming human cells

Researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have today (10/10/2011) announced a new technique to reprogramme human cells, such as skin cells, into stem cells. Their process increases the efficiency of cell reprogramming by one hundred-fold and generates cells of a higher quality at a faster rate.

Until now cells have been reprogrammed using four specific regulatory proteins. By adding two further regulatory factors, Liu and co-workers brought about a dramatic improvement in the efficiency of reprogramming and the robustness of stem cell development. The new streamlined process produces cells that can grow more easily.

“This research is a milestone in human stem cells,” explains Wei Wang, first author on the research from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. “Our technique provides a foundation to unlock the full potential of stem cells.”

Stem cells are unspecialized cells that are able to renew themselves through cell division and can be induced to become functional tissue- or organ-specific cells. It is hoped that stem cells will be used to replace dying or damaged cells with healthy, functional cells. This could have wide-ranging uses in medicine such as organ replacement, bone replacement and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases.

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I just had a birthday, and to honor such occasions, my sister always gives me silver. Not just any silver: It’s our parents’ simple wedding flatware pattern, which Margaret collects for me, one piece at a time. Over the years that the slender boxes have appeared, I’ve wondered if any of it is from the full service for 12 that I pulled in a suitcase through Manhattan’s Diamond District and sold one dreadful day 25 years ago.

It had been my assignment to sell it —- that, and a ring of Margaret’s, one of mine and, right off our mother’s finger, her engagement ring and platinum wedding band. The sum received was probably a quarter of their monetary worth, and nothing near their emotional value, but it financed two more weeks of home care for our mother, an Alzheimer’s patient. After five years of caring for her at home, we had run through the family savings.

It was a few years before the sale of the silver that I first wrote about us, in a 1983 magazine article that, impossible as it may seem now, introduced Alzheimer’s disease to millions of people who didn’t know what it was, including the seasoned magazine editor to whom I first pitched the story. Last Sunday, HBO began a three-night series, produced by California’s first lady, Maria Shriver, about a disease that now needs no introduction.

When I first wrote about Alzheimer’s, I searched out some of the best minds of the time, including Lewis Thomas, the great science writer, former dean of Yale Medical School and then-chancellor of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He called Alzheimer’s disease “the disease of the century” because, he said, “of all the health problems in the 20th century, this one is the worst.”

That quote got people’s attention, as did the words “angry, incompetent, hostile and incontinent,” which is how I described my mother. She was then 51, two years younger than I am now. I exposed her for who she had become in exchange for the attention I hoped the article might bring for her disease.

In years that followed, congressional hearings were held, state task forces were convened and city committees were formed. Research dollars were allotted as well. But those were the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president, and despite the fact that embryonic stem cell research had been conducted in the U.S. since the middle of the 20th century, contributing to such wonders as vaccines for both rubella and polio, it was rebranded and became strongly associated with abortion. In the years that followed, despite the well-known fact that stem cell research was the most promising path to finding cures for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and other diseases, this country allowed the personal beliefs of the anti-abortion forces to become public policy. And that lasted a very long time.

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Flip past the big photo on page 65 of beaming software magnate Bill Gates and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and there, on page 67, beside a picture of U.S. president Barack Obama, is a microscope image of a cell.

That induced embryonic stem cell has vaulted Toronto scientist Andras Nagy into this high-flying company in Scientific Magazine’s inaugural Top 10 awards for work in science-related endeavours.

“It’s an enormous honour and a recognition of the science we do in the lab, and what we do in Mount Sinai, and what we do in Toronto and what we do in Canada,” says Nagy, an investigator at Mount Sinai Hospital who nabbed his award for a genetic coup, announced in February, that may well change the face of stem-cell biology.

Nagy’s team at Mount Sinai’s Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute won a global race to find a safe way to transform adult skin cells into embryonic-like stem cells.

While it had been shown before that this reprogramming could be achieved, past methods had dangerously contaminated the resulting stem cell, Nagy explains.

He says under previous methods, the new stem cells, which like the real embryonic version can transform into any tissue type, still contained the reprogramming material and the DNA of the viruses used to transport it into the adult cell’s nucleus.

His method, however, enables scientists to introduce the reprogramming material without a viral transporter and then draw it back out again after it has accomplished the transformation.

“In effect, Nagy and his colleagues had, for the first time, created the equivalent of embryonic stem cells that were uncontroversially ethical, safe and efficient,” the magazine wrote in the June issue, released today.

Using patients’ own transformed cells for organ repair would allow them to avoid the immune system rejection that plagues all person-to person transplantation.

Nagy, for one, sees a legitimate fit to his prestigious Obama pairing.

“The heavy science that we do at Mount Sinai for humanity is there beside (Obama’s) massive, massive message that science is important for society and the economy,” Nagy said.

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Five years after Harvard researchers first received institutional permission to attempt to produce stem cell lines via somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), a young scientist who worked in the Harvard program as a postdoctoral fellow has succeeded in using the process — known as therapeutic cloning — to produce a stem cell line containing the genes of a patient with type 1 diabetes.

In papers in Nature, Nature Communications, and Cell Stem Cell, that scientist, who is now at the independent New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) laboratory, and Harvard researchers, report on the SCNT advance. In addition, they report on an experiment explaining why other attempts at SCNT have been unsuccessful and offer a commentary reporting that it is impractical, if not impossible, to recruit ova donors without paying them.

Ironically, all three reports serve to underscore how astoundingly fast the field of stem cell science has advanced since 2006, when it looked as though SCNT provided the only path to the creation of disease-specific stem cell lines from patients. These stem cell lines might then be used for studying disease development, for transplanting to treat diseases, and as targets for the development of conventional drugs.

The creation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) and the successful reprogramming of one form of adult cell into another form of adult cell have provided researchers with alternatives to SCNT, and decreased interest in it. However, because it is still too early to know which avenue of research will prove the most useful in increasing understanding of various diseases, groups have continued their research efforts in SCNT as well.

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Stem Cell Therapeutics Corp. is pleased to announce the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has provided a verbal confirmation to remove its clinical hold placed on NTx®-265 on September 18, 2008. This will allow SCT to commence the recruitment of patients under an amended protocol using NTx®-265 for the Company’s Phase IIb clinical trial treating acute ischemic stroke.

Dr. Alan Moore, President and CEO, commented as follows:

“We are very pleased that our series of collaborative meetings with the FDA has resulted in this positive development. We are expecting to receive written notification from the FDA in the near future following which we will finalize the plans for our stroke trial. We will issue another press release once this has been determined.”

About REGENESIS: NTx®-265 is SCT’s lead therapeutic regimen of two approved and clinically well-defined drugs, human Chorionic Gonadotropin (“hCG”) and Erythropoietin (“EPO”), targeting the treatment of stroke. The twin objectives of the treatment are to stimulate the growth and differentiation of new neurons to replace the brain cells that were lost or damaged by the stroke, and importantly, to direct motor, visual, and cognitive recovery after the acute ischemic stroke. Encouraging clinical results from SCT’s BETAS Phase IIa stroke trial were presented at the International Stroke Conference in February 2009, showing clinically relevant recovery in 12 of 12 patients who received the complete treatment.

About Stem Cell Therapeutics Corp.: Stem Cell Therapeutics Corp. is a Canadian public biotechnology company  focused on the development and commercialization of drug-based therapies to treat central nervous system diseases. SCT is a leader in the development of therapies that utilize drugs to stimulate a patient’s own resident stem cells. The Company’s programs aim to repair brain and nerve function lost due to disease or injury. The Company’s extensive patent portfolio of owned and licensed intellectual property supports the potential expansion into future clinical programs in numerous neurological diseases such as traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis, Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and ALS.

These securities have not been registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or the securities laws of any state, and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to, or for the account or benefit of U.S. persons unless an applicable exemption from U.S. registration requirements is available.

Except for historical information, this press release may contain forward-looking statements, which reflect the Company’s current expectation regarding future events. These forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainties, which may cause but are not limited to, changing market conditions, the successful and timely completion of clinical studies, the establishment of corporate alliances, the impact of competitive products and pricing, new product development, uncertainties related to the regulatory approval process and other risks detailed from time to time in the Company’s ongoing quarterly and annual reporting.
The TSX Venture Exchange does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

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The Health Minister recently held a press conference to launch a program to strengthen the public biobank network, considering that currently on 20% of donations are completed successfully. An informative pamphlet was also distributed about “The appropriate use of umbilical cord stem cells“.

The StemWay Biotech company, through its Vice-President Dr. Paolo Rubini, in complete agreement with other biobanks in Italy, with great surprise and dismay, stressed that unfortunately, the measure seems to be more against the autologous conservation of stem cells rather than in favor of donation. As for the scientific statements contained in the informative pamphlet distributed by the ministry, Dr. Rubini said that “without getting into the scientific details, which should not be outlined in a mass communication to the public, the scientific world has already expressed itself in the appropriate ways and even the FIOG, the Italian Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology, has supported a biobank in the sector. It seems appropriate for me to highlight that based on internationally accepted scientific evidence, the Ministries of Health in the USA, Great Britain, Belgium, Austria, Holland, Norway, Dubai, India, Singapore, Switzerland, Hungary, and numerous other countries have adopted decisions that are completely different from those of the Italian Health Ministry, allowing private biobanks to operate and for the autologous conservation of stem cells.”

As for the possibility of gaining access to your own umbilical cord stem cells once you have decided to donate them as reported in the minister’s pamphlet, Dr. Rubini pointed out that: “if it is true that only about 20% of donations are successfully completed, it is evident that the 97% indicated by the Health Ministry can only be relative to these samples, and that the correct information to spread would be 97% of the 20% of the donors will have the possibility of accessing their own umbilical cord stem cells, and therefore in not more than 19.4% of the cases.” Finally, StemWay Biotech must emphasize that if the public biobank network is made up of about 100 facilities in the entire world, the choice to have 18 of them in Italy seems to be an anomaly in the use of public resources in the health sector, where it certainly cannot be said that it is a priority. “In this scenario,” said Dr. Rubini, “each citizen can easily make their own decisions regarding conservation and donation of umbilical cord stem cells and operate in the best way possible so this important biological asset is not lost in 95% of all births.”

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