“Latest Stem Cells News”

In a landmark paper, researchers at Stanford University have described a new way to derive human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) without the use of contaminating mouse feeder cells. Using adipose cells as the starting cell population and mTeSR1, a defined medium that allows the expansion of human embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells without the use of feeders, the researchers were able to fully reprogram the cells to the pluripotent state.

mTeSR1 is a fully defined medium and is the most widely used feeder-independent method for culturing human pluripotent stem cells, with citations in more than 25 publications.

read more on http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS155006+14-Sep-2009+BW20090914

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The drug metformin, a mainstay of diabetes care for 15 years, may have a new life as a cancer treatment, researchers said.
In a study in mice, low doses of the drug, combined with a widely used chemotherapy called doxorubicin, shrank breast-cancer tumors and prevented their recurrence more effectively than chemotherapy alone.

The findings add to a growing body of evidence that metformin, marketed as Glugophase by Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and available in generic versions, could be a potent antitumor medicine.
They also lend support to an emerging theory that cancer’s ability to survive and resist therapy is regulated by cancer stem cells that drive a tumor’s growth and survival.

Chemotherapy is effective against many tumors, said Kevin Struhl, a Harvard Medical School researcher and principal investigator of the study. “The problem is cancer stem cells acquire resistance” to treatment, he said. “They are able to regenerate the tumor and as a result you end up with a relapse.”
About 5% to 10% of a tumor’s cells are believed to be cancer stem cells, he said.

In the report, being published in the Oct. 1 edition of Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, researchers said the combination of metformin and doxorubicin killed both regular cancer cells and cancer stem cells.
In contrast, doxorubicin alone had limited effect on the stem cells.

(…)

read more on http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203278404574413273870984920.html

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Sir John Gurdon

One of the most prestigious prizes in medicine is being awarded this year to scientists working on stem cells and leukemia — and to New York‘s mayor for his fight to cut tobacco use (…)

The Lasker Basic Medical Research Award goes to John Gurdon, 76, of Cambridge University and Shinya Yamanaka, 47, of Kyoto University and San Francisco‘s Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease. Their work has helped pave the way for the possibility of made-to-order stem cell treatments for individual patients

Gurdon began working with frog eggs in the 1950s and was the first to successfully clone a frog, in the 1960s. This led directly to the cloning of mammals in the 1990s.

Yamanaka’s ground-breaking announcement in 2006 that he had successfully reprogrammed a mouse skin cell to turn into stem cells holds promise for creating stem cells without destroying an embryo, up until now a major ethical and legal hurdle (…)

read more on http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-09-14-lasker-awards_N.htm

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What might become the first drug derived from human stem cells failed in two late-stage clinical trials, dealing a setback to the drug’s developer and to the stem cell field (…)

Prochymal is a preparation of mesenchymal stem cells, which are obtained from the bone marrow of healthy young adults.
Because the cells are derived from adults, they sidestep the ethical issues stemming from the destruction of human embryos needed to make embryonic stem cells. Unlike most other types of adult stem cells, mesenchymal cells grow well in culture, so thousands of doses can be produced from a single donation.

Stem cells, particularly in the form of bone marrow transplants, are already used in medicine. Osiris is hoping that Prochymal will become the first stem cell product approved by the Food and Drug Administration and sold as a mass-produced pharmaceutical product (…)

from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/health/research/09drug.html

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Dr Foteini Hassiotou has discovered stem cells can be obtained from breast milk

Serious and fatal diseases such as pancreatic cancer, Parkinson‘s disease and diabetes may eventually be treated using stem cells from breast milk following a remarkable discovery at the University of Western Australia.

UWA PhD student Foteini Hassiotou has potentially broken through the greatest hurdle in stem cell research – the ability to ethically obtain stem cells in a non-invasive manner.

Her finding that stem cells from breast milk can be directed to become other body cell types such as bone, fat, liver and brain cells, could reduce the need to use embryonic stem cells and therefore fast-track future therapies.

Dr Hassiotou’s research follows the 2008 discovery by a team of UWA scientists that breast milk contained embryonic-like stem cells.

Her work was boosted on Sunday when she won the AusBiotech-GlaxoSmithKline national student excellence award. She will now present her findings at an international conference.

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Globs of human fat removed during liposuction conceal versatile cells that are more quickly and easily coaxed to become induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, than are the skin cells most often used by researchers, according to a new study from Stanford’s School of Medicine. The findings were published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We’ve identified a great natural resource,” said Stanford surgery professor and co-author of the research, Michael Longaker, who has called the readily available liposuction leftovers “liquid gold.” Reprogramming adult cells to function like embryonic stem cells is one way researchers hope to create patient-specific cell lines to regenerate tissue or to study specific diseases in the laboratory.

“Thirty to 40 percent of adults in this country are obese,” agreed cardiologist Joseph Wu, the paper’s senior author. “Not only can we start with a lot of cells, we can reprogram them much more efficiently. Fibroblasts, or skin cells, must be grown in the lab for three weeks or more before they can be reprogrammed. But these stem cells from fat are ready to go right away.”

Longaker is the deputy director of Stanford’s Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine Institute and director of children’s surgical research at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. Wu is an assistant professor of cardiology and radiology, and a member of Stanford’s Cardiovascular Institute (…)

Even those of us who are not obese would probably be happy to part with a couple of pounds (or more) of flab. Nestled within this unwanted latticework of fat cells and collagen are multipotent cells called adipose, or fat, stem cells. Unlike highly specialized skin-cell fibroblasts, these cells in the fat have a relatively wide portfolio of differentiation options — becoming fat, bone or muscle as needed. It’s this pre-existing flexibility, the researchers believe, that gives these cell an edge over the skin cells (…)

Sun found that the fat stem cells actually express higher starting levels of two of the four reprogramming genes than do adult skin cells — suggesting that these cells are already primed for change. When he added all four genes, about 0.01 percent of the skin-cell fibroblasts eventually became iPS cells but about 0.2 percent of the fat stem cells did so — a 20-fold improvement inefficiency.

The new iPS cells passed the standard tests for pluripotency: They formed tumors called teratomas when injected into immunocompromised mice, and they could differentiate into cells from the three main tissue types in the body, including neurons, muscle and gut epithelium. The researchers are now investigating whether the gene expression profiles of the fat stem cells could be used to identify a subpopulation that could be reprogrammed even more efficiently (…)

from http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-09/08/content_12011915.htm

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