“Latest Stem Cells News”

Doctors hope a Nottinghamshire boy with leukaemia can undergo a stem cell transplant in May.

Roman Cusick, from Calverton, is currently recovering from chemotherapy.

If he is deemed to be well enough, he will receive cells from an umbilical cord from a German donor in a procedure at Sheffield Children’s Hospital.

In February almost 200 people in Calverton helped took part in a saliva test to see if they were a suitable match.

Leukaemia occurs when large numbers of white blood cells take over the bone marrow, leaving the body unable to produce enough normal blood cells.

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Tweaking the levels of factors used during the reprogramming of adult cells into induced pluriopotent stem (iPS) cells greatly affects the quality of the resulting iPS cells, according to Whitehead Institute researchers.

“This conclusion is something that I think is very surprising or unexpected—that the levels of these reprogramming factors determine the quality of the iPS cells,” says Whitehead Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch. “We never thought they’d make a difference, but they do.”

An article describing this work is published in the December 2 issue of Cell Stem Cell.

“This conclusion is something that I think is very surprising or unexpected—that the levels of these reprogramming factors determine the quality of the iPS cells,” says Whitehead Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch. “We never thought they’d make a difference, but they do.”

iPS cells are made by introducing specific reprogramming genes into adult cells. These factors push the cells into a pluripotent state similar to that of embryonic stem (ES) cells. Like ES cells, iPS cells can become any cell type in the body, a characteristic that could make them well-suited for therapeutic cell transplantation or for creating cell lines to study such diseases as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

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In a surprise result that can help in the understanding of both aging and cancer, researchers working with an engineered type of stem cell said they reversed the aging process in a rare genetic disease.

The team at Children’s Hospital Boston and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute were working with a new type of cell called induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells, which closely resemble embryonic stem cells but are made from ordinary skin cells.

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Scientists have developed a new tool that illuminates connections between stem cells and cancer.
Researchers have been successful in breaking apart human prostate tissue, extract the stem cells in the tissue, and alter those cells genetically so that they spur cancer.

Many tissues contain pools of stem cells that replenish the tissue when it’s damaged or when changes take place. For example, stem cells in the skin produce new cells to replace those irreparably damaged by the sun, and stem cells in the breast create milk-producing cells when a woman is pregnant.

A characteristic of these stem cells is that they self-renew. This means that in addition to making cells with a specific function, they also make many new stem cells.

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By irradiating typical polystyrene lab plates with ultraviolet (UV) waves, Whitehead Institute and MIT scientists have created a surface capable of tripling the number of human embryonic stem (ES) and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells that can be grown in culture by current methods. Use of this novel surface also eliminates the need for layers of mouse “feeder cells” to support ES- and iPS-cell growth.

“Polystyrene is the most common cell culture surface used in labs, and to be able to do a simple treatment and get something that works better than the mouse feeder layers is great and potentially has a lot of utility,” says Daniel Anderson, Associate Professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology.

The research is published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“I think it’s going to be a useful technique,” says Krishanu Saha, a postdoctoral researcher in Whitehead Member Rudolf Jaenisch’s lab. “There is a lot of push, at least in the field, to [eliminate animal products]. If you were one day to inject these cells into patients, you wouldn’t have to worry about as many safety risks as if you had co-cultured them with animal cells.”

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UW-Milwaukee researcher Andrew Cohen has successfully developed a software program that facilitates predicting the evolution of stem cells. The program essentially speeds up what has been a tedious process for researchers in the past.

The program was published last week in the journal Nature Methods. It applies algorithmic information theory to the growth and movement of stem cells tracked over time to show what type of cells (i.e. brain, skin, etc.) they will eventually develop into.

“People look at images and take measurements by hand,” Cohen explained. “It takes a long time, and using computers makes the process a lot less tedious.”

Stem cells all start out the same before they develop into the different cells of our bodies. Scientists do not know what triggers the stem cell’s future growth pattern into a particular type of cell, but researchers like Cohen are figuring out how to predict the cell’s future based on measurements and math.

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