“Latest Stem Cells News”

Frank LaFerla, left, Mathew Blurton-Jones and colleagues found that neural stem cells could be a potential treatment for advanced Alzheimer's disease

UC Irvine scientists have shown for the first time that neural stem cells can rescue memory in mice with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, raising hopes of a potential treatment for the leading cause of elderly dementia that afflicts 5.3 million people in the U.S.

Mice genetically engineered to have Alzheimer’s performed markedly better on memory tests a month after mouse neural stem cells were injected into their brains. The stem cells secreted a protein that created more neural connections, improving cognitive function.

“Essentially, the cells were producing fertilizer for the brain,” said Frank LaFerla, director of UCI’s Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders, or UCI MIND, and co-author of the study, which appears online the week of July 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Lead author Mathew Blurton-Jones, LaFerla and colleagues worked with older mice predisposed to develop brains lesions called plaques and tangles that are the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s.

To learn how the stem cells worked, the scientists examined the mouse brains. To their surprise, they discovered that just 6 percent of the stem cells had turned into neurons. (The majority became the other two main types of brain cells, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes.) The stem cells didn’t improve cognition by becoming new neurons, nor did they act by reducing the number of plaques and tangles.

Rather, the stem cells were found to have secreted a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. This caused existing tissue to sprout new neurites, strengthening and increasing the number of connections between neurons. When the team selectively reduced BDNF from the stem cells, the benefit was lost, providing strong evidence that BDNF is critical to the effect of stem cells on memory and neuronal function.

“If you look at Alzheimer’s, it’s not the plaques and tangles that correlate best with dementia; it’s the loss of synapses – connections between neurons,” Blurton-Jones said. “The neural stem cells were helping the brain form new synapses and nursing the injured neurons back to health.”

Diseased mice injected directly with BDNF also improved cognitively but not as much as with the neural stem cells, which provided a more long-term and consistent supply of the protein.

“This gives us a lot of hope that stem cells or a product from them, such as BDNF, will be a useful treatment for Alzheimer’s,” LaFerla said.

In April, LaFerla, Blurton-Jones and colleagues were awarded $3.6 million by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine toward the development of an Alzheimer’s therapy involving human neural stem cells.

In addition to LaFerla and Blurton-Jones, Masashi Kitazawa, Hilda Martinez-Coria, Nicholas Castello, Tritia Yamasaki, Wayne Poon and Kim Green of UCI worked on the study, along with Franz-Josef Muller and Jeanne Loring of the Scripps Research Institute. Funding for the study was provided by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the National Institutes of Health.

from UC Irvine

Research in Italy, in the coming years, will suffer much more compared to research in other countries, because, explained a study on the future of biomedical research in Italy described yesterday in Siena by Stefano Palumbo, “the national debate on bioethical issues will continue to be affected by pre-established ideological positions, and often, will be aimed at imposing limits on scientific research”.

Due to the overwhelming “majority of Catholic members in the National Bioethics Committee, Italy will be,” according to the study, “the most conservative country in the world regarding stem cells,” which will result in great delays in finding treatments for serious diseases like “diabetes, Parkinson’s, cancer, Huntington’s, and Alzheimer’s”.

Between 2009 and 2015, Italian research will be affected by the economic crisis, and, according to the study, which was financed by the MPS Foundation and Siena Biotech, “will also be affected by the crisis in the pharmaceutical sector, resulting from the expiration of patents and the inability to replace products whose patents have expired with new products”. According to the experts, Italian research groups will be increasingly dependent on international financing.

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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According to Science magazine, reprogrammed adult stem cells that regress to an embryonic state and have the same ability to transform into all the different tissues in the human body just like embryonic stem cells are the most important discovery of 2008. The prestigious magazine awarded the so-called ethical stem cells for their possible efficiency in curing degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and muscular dystrophy without the ethical implications associated with embryonic stem cell use. The direct observation of extrasolar planets and the development of new superconductors were also in the ranking.