“Latest Stem Cells News”

British scientists have reportedly perfected the technique for curing macular-degeneration related blindness with adult stem cells. Returning Hope, a pioneering Asian adult stem cell treatment portal, expects to be one of the first in the world to offer the treatment.

Researchers from the Institute of Ophthalmology at London’s University College used embryonic eye stem cells to replace the layer of damaged eye cells. While Pfizer is backing the British push to bring the therapy to patients, Brian Dardzinski, CEO of Returning Hope, expects that Adult Stem Cell treatments will be available both much sooner and much cheaper in Thailand.

“We have been helping patients with Multiple Sclerosis, autism, brain injury, stroke, ALS and Parkinson’s find treatment in Thailand for some time now. Overseas health care providers have been saying that there are years needed to bring these treatments to patients – we are already helping them get back to a normal life”, said Mr. Dardzinski. “We can already help patients with some eye diseases, and macular degeneration patients will join them very shortly”.

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Former Vice President Al Gore Endorses Trans-Pacific Collaboration to Promote Use of Patient Cells for Drug Discovery and Development and Cell-Based Therapies iZumi Bio, Inc., and Kyoto University‘s Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), today announced a collaboration to promote the basic research, development and application of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technology – a form of cellular reprogramming which originated in Japan – with the goal of advancing drug discovery and enabling cell-based therapies.

“Stem cell research holds great promise for the creation of new therapies that could revolutionize the treatment of disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, diabetes and muscular dystrophy. The discovery that iPScell technology brings, that “stem cell-like” cells can be generated from a small amount of human skin rather than from embryos, opens a new door for stem cell research and its application to therapeutic discovery,” said Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States and a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. Noting that Science Magazine named cellular reprogramming the “breakthrough of the year” in 2008, Gore concluded, “The partnership between these two leading organizations is a critical step in furthering this research and turning stem cell research into therapeutic realities sooner.”

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Professor Jeanne Loring

Stem cells show great potential to enable treatments for conditions such as spinal injuries or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and also as research tools. One of the greatest problems slowing such work is that researchers have found major complications in purifying cell mixtures, for instance to remove stem cells that can cause tumors from cells developed for use in medical treatments. But a group of Scripps Research scientists, working with colleagues in Japan, have developed a clever solution to this purification problem that should prove more reliable than other methods, safer, and perhaps 100 times cheaper.

The work appears in the current edition of the journal Cell Research.

Effective tricks for separating stem cells from other types are essential for many emerging medical treatments. These techniques begin with researchers inducing stem cells to take specific forms, or differentiate, for instance into nerve cells. These differentiated cells might then be used to repair a spinal cord injury. Other cells might enable a diabetic’s body to produce adequate insulin.

A key problem is that in the differentiation process, at least some stem cells inevitably remain in their undifferentiated, or pluripotent, state. These cells can grow to form tumors in patients if injected along with differentiated cells, a concern that has already led the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to delay clinical trials for promising stem cell-based therapies.

A New Approach

To date, almost all attempts at purification have focused on developing antibodies—immune system attack cells—that can remove or destroy stem cells in mixtures. But this approach has had shortcomings. Effective antibodies are difficult and expensive to develop, and their use in medical therapies raises safety issues because they are produced in animals.

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A team of Harvard stem cell researchers has succeeded in reprogramming adult mouse skin cells directly into the type of motor neurons damaged in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), best known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). These new cells, which researchers are calling induced motor neurons (iMNs), can be used to study the development of the paralyzing diseases and to develop treatments for them.

Producing motor neurons this way is much less labor intensive than having to go through the process of creating induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC, iPS cells), and is so much faster than the iPS method that it potentially could reduce by a year the time it eventually takes to produce treatments for ALS and SMA, said Kevin Eggan, leader of the Harvard team.

Importantly, the direct reprograming does not involve the use of any factors known to trigger cancer or any other disease states, and the factors in fact make the fibroblasts, the connective tissue cells that make and secrete collagen proteins, stop dividing.

The work by Eggan, a member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute principal faculty and an associate professor in Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology (SCRB), and his colleagues builds on and advances work by SCRB co-chair and Professor Doug Melton, who pioneered direct cellular reprogramming, and Marius Wernig of Stanford, who used direct reprogramming to produce generalized neurons.

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Abundant precursor cells can become many types of neurons without introducing tumor risk

In a paper published in the April 25 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco and colleagues report a game-changing advance in stem cell science: the creation of long-term, self-renewing, primitive neural precursor cells from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) that can be directed to become many types of neuron without increased risk of tumor formation.

“It’s a big step forward,” said Kang Zhang, MD, PhD, professor of ophthalmology and human genetics at Shiley Eye Center and director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine, both at UC San Diego. “It means we can generate stable, renewable neural stem cells or downstream products quickly, in great quantities and in a clinical grade – millions in less than a week – that can be used for clinical trials and, eventually, for clinical treatments. Until now, that has not been possible.”

Human embryonic stem cells hold great promise in regenerative medicine due to their ability to become any kind of cell needed to repair and restore damaged tissues. But the potential of hESCs has been constrained by a number of practical problems, not least among them the difficulty of growing sufficient quantities of stable, usable cells and the risk that some of these cells might form tumors.

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A revolutionary stem cell procedure may be able to stop ALS, or Lou Gehrig‘s disease, in its tracks.

HealthFirst reporter Leslie Toldo shares the story of one of the few people who have had it done.
ALS is a deadly disease, with a quick and devastating decline. This could be the hope thousands of people have been waiting for.

Fifty-five-year-old Tom Elliott is not a quitter. He has ALS and fights to keep up with the daily routines of his life, even as the disease makes everything harder. “Brushing the teeth has become a real chore. Turning and rolling in bed to get comfortable has become an impossibility. This disease is about having to give up and sacrifice a lot.”

As ALS progresses, it destroys the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control muscle movement until people “cease to be able to move, they become essentially locked in their bodies,” Dr. Nicholas Boulis said.

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