“Latest Stem Cells News”

IntelliCell BioSciences filed its patent application with the US Patent office that will claim priority to its provisional US patent serial #61/427, 221 that was filed on December 27, 2010. The title of the patent application is Ultrasonic Cavitation Derived Stromal or Mesenchymal Vascular Extracts and Cells Derived Therefrom Obtained from Adipose Tissue and use Thereof. It covers the methods of manufacturing using ultrasonic cavitation to dissociate the fat cells and blood vessels contained within the adipose tissue, thereby obtaining multi-potent, mesenchymal or stromal vascular fractions for use in human subjects. These methods do not include the use of any exogenous dissociating enzymes such as collagenase and result in increased number of cells which constitute the multi-potent, mesenchymal or stromal vascular fractions (about ten folds greater than methods which use collagenase to isolate these cells).

Dr. Steven Victor, the inventor, and CEO of IntelliCell BioSciences commented “we are extremely excited to have filed this patent in the US and around the world. The use of ultrasonic cavitation allows physicians to use less than 60cc’s of adipose tissue (fat) to manufacture approximately a half billion to 1.4 billion stromal vascular fraction cells (SVF cells) within five to ten minutes. The use of sound and water allows this manufacturing method to be utilized by physicians in the US underneath FDA (PHS Act Section 361 1271.10 (a)) of the health bill passed by Congress in 2009.

This manufacturing method has significant cost and time advantages over any other method of producing SVF cells. These cells have been used around the world for conditions caused by inflammation, such as lower back pain, migraines, MS, autism, fibromyalgia, tinnitus, arthritis; tissue repair, such as growing cartilage for bone on bone knee repair; bone and gingival tissue (gum disease): cosmetic indications such as fat grafting, wrinkle removal and other cosmetic procedures. The success rate for these patients has been approximately 80% plus. We believe that the use of non-enzymatic SVF cell therapy will find its first applications in treating sports related injuries. We are proud to have numerous luminaries on our advisory board who are leaders in the sports medicine world. We anticipate significant revenues from the utilization of SVF cells from the various IntelliCell BioSciences Centers of Excellence in the year 2012.

An Iranian scientist managed to develop a new method to propagate human spermatogonial stem cells from small testicular biopsies to obtain adequate number of cells for successful transplantation for 18000-fold in vitro, leading to protection of the fertility of immature boys suffering from cancer.

The research carried out jointly with Amsterdam University in Holland is the first developed method in the world.

Hooman Sadri-Ardekani, Ph.D in Reproductive Medicine and a Professor in Avicenna Institute-ACECR told ISNA, “Young boys treated with high-dose chemotherapy are often confronted with infertility once they reach adulthood and cryopreserving testicular tissue before chemotherapy and auto transplantation of spermatogonial stem cells at a later stage could theoretically allow for restoration of fertility.”

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Hepatitis C, an infectious disease that can cause inflammation and organ failure, has different effects on different people. But no one is sure why some people are very susceptible to the infection, while others are resistant.

Scientists believe that if they could study liver cells from different people in the lab, they could determine how genetic differences produce these varying responses. However, liver cells are difficult to obtain and notoriously difficult to grow in a lab dish because they tend to lose their normal structure and function when removed from the body.

Now, researchers from MIT, Rockefeller University and the Medical College of Wisconsin have come up with a way to produce liver-like cells from induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, which are made from body tissues rather than embryos; the liver-like cells can then be infected with hepatitis C. Such cells could enable scientists to study why people respond differently to the infection.

This is the first time that scientists have been able to establish an infection in cells derived from iPSCs — a feat many research teams have been trying to achieve. The new technique, described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could also eventually enable “personalized medicine”: Doctors could test the effectiveness of different drugs on tissues derived from the patient being treated, and thereby customize therapy for that patient.

The new study is a collaboration between Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT; Charles Rice, a professor of virology at Rockefeller; and Stephen Duncan, a professor of human and molecular genetics at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

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For years, researchers seeking new therapies for traumatic brain injury have been tantalized by the results of animal experiments with stem cells. In numerous studies, stem cell implantation has substantially improved brain function in experimental animals with brain trauma. But just how these improvements occur has remained a mystery.

Now, an important part of this puzzle has been pieced together by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. In experiments with both laboratory rats and an apparatus that enabled them to simulate the impact of trauma on human neurons, they identified key molecular mechanisms by which implanted human neural stem cells — stem cells that are in the process of developing into neurons but have not yet taken their final form — aid recovery from traumatic axonal injury.

A significant component of traumatic brain injury, traumatic axonal injury involves damage to axons and dendrites, the filaments that extend out from the bodies of the neurons. The damage continues after the initial trauma, since the axons and dendrites respond to injury by withdrawing back to the bodies of the neurons.

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While applications of induced pluripotent stem cells in stem cell therapy may be limited to a few diseases, its applications in drug discovery are wide-ranging, and many more diseases can be targeted, Shinya Yamanaka, Director, Centre for iPS Cell Research and Application, Japan, has said.

The Japanese scientist, whose breakthrough was the creation of embryonic-like stem cells from adult skin cells, believes that the best chance for stem cell therapy lies in offering hope to those suffering from a few conditions, among them, macular disease, Type 1 Diabetes, and spinal cord injuries.

On the other hand, there were multiple possibilities with drug discovery for a range of diseases, and Prof. Yamanaka was hopeful that more scientists would continue to use iPS for studying this potential.

He currently serves as the Director of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application and as Professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University. He is also a Senior Investigator at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) – affiliated J. David Gladstone Institutes.

An invited speaker of the CellPress-TNQ India Distinguished Lectureship Series, co-sponsored by Cell Press and TNQ Books and Journals, Prof. Yamanaka spoke to a Chennai audience on Tuesday evening about those “immortal” cells, that he originally thought would take “forever” to create, but actually took only six years.

“My fixed vision for my research team was to re-programme adult cells to function like embryonic-like stem cells. I knew it could be done, but just didn’t know how to do it,” Prof. Yamanaka said.

Embryonic stem cells are important because they are pluripotent, or possess the ability to differentiate into any other type of cell, and are capable of rapid proliferation. However, despite the immense possibilities of that, embryonic cells are a mixed blessing: there are issues with post-transplant rejection (since they cannot be used from a patient’s own cells), and many countries of the world do not allow the use of human embryos.

Dr. Yamanaka’s solution would scale these challenges if only he and his team could find a way to endow non-embryonic cells with those two key characteristics of embryonic stem cells.

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StemCells Inc. today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized the initiation of a Phase I/II clinical trial of the Company’s proprietary HuCNS-SC® product candidate (purified human neural stem cells) in dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the most common form of AMD. AMD is the leading cause of vision loss and blindness in people over 55 years of age, and approximately 30 million people worldwide are afflicted with the disease. There are no approved treatments for dry AMD.

“With the approval of this trial, we have accomplished something truly unique in the stem cell field, which is the extension of clinical testing of our proprietary human neural stem cell platform to all three elements of the central nervous system: the brain, spinal cord and eye,” said Martin McGlynn, President and CEO of StemCells, Inc. “The preclinical data supporting our IND is particularly compelling and we look forward to getting this trial underway.”

The Phase I/II trial will evaluate the safety and preliminary efficacy of HuCNS-SC cells as a treatment for dry AMD. The trial will be an open-label, dose-escalation study, and is expected to enroll a total of 16 patients. The HuCNS-SC cells will be administered by a single injection into the space beneath the retina. Patients’ vision will be evaluated using conventional methods of ophthalmological assessment at predetermined intervals over a one-year period. Patients will then be followed for an additional four years in a separate observational study.

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