“Latest Stem Cells News”

Never mind facial masks and exfoliating scrubs, skin takes care of itself. Stem cells located within the skin actively generate differentiating cells that can ultimately form either the body surface or the hairs that emanate from it. In addition, these stem cells are able to replenish themselves, continually rejuvenating skin and hair. Now, researchers at Rockefeller University have identified two proteins that enable these skin stem cells to undertake this continuous process of self-renewal.

The work, published in Nature Genetics, brings new details to the understanding of how stem cells maintain — and lose — their status as stem cells and are able to specialize into various types of cells. It also further dissects a ubiquitous Rube Goldberg-like pathway whose molecular gears and levers play an important role in activating stem cells to divide and transform into tissue-making cells.

Lead researcher Elaine Fuchs, head of the Laboratory of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development, and first author Hoang Nguyen, a former postdoc in the lab, worked with mice engineered to lack the proteins TCF3 and TCF4, which reside in the nucleus of skin stem cells, where they bind to DNA to turn genes off that would otherwise cause the stem cells to differentiate. They found that without TCF3 and TCF4, all of the layers of the mice’s skin still develop properly, but they cannot be maintained.

“The epidermal stem cells — one of the types of stem cells in the skin — lose their capacity to self-renew and replace skin cells that have died,” says Nguyen, who is now an assistant (…)

from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090927152828.htm

Study May be Key to Unlocking a Cure

An article published in the Summer 2009 edition of Multiple Sclerosis Quarterly Report, a joint publication of United Spinal Association (www.UnitedSpinal.org) and the North American Research Committee on Multiple Sclerosis (NARCOMS), highlights the positive initial results of patients who have improving neurologic function after receiving a stem cell transplant, despite no longer taking any MS medications.

The results are reported in a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored study called HALT-MS to confirm whether high-dose immunosuppression followed by autologous stem cell transplantation will prevent MS attacks in patients who are not responding to available treatment options and ultimately protect against the degeneration of nerve fibers.

The article, written by George H. Kraft, MD, MS, director of the Western MS Center in Seattle, Washington, and colleagues, reveals the promising outcomes of the first three patients entered into the HALT-MS Study, including a 27-year-old woman with an 8-year history of relapsing MS who was treated with five different MS drugs, but continued to have relapses.

The study involves wiping out the patient’s immune system through high-dose chemotherapy or other means, such as radiation, to destroy most blood cells and bone marrow. Blood “stem cells” with the capacity to generate new blood and immune cells are then transplanted into the patient. These stem cells can either be the patient’s own or those from a matched donor. Once the cells are transplanted, they repopulate the bone marrow and restart building all the cell types found in the blood, a process called “engraftment”. After transplantation, the patient would effectively have a “new” immune system that would not attack nerves in the brain and spinal cord as seen in MS.

Currently, there are approximately 400 patients with MS worldwide who have been treated with stem cell transplantation. Research demonstrates that patients with highly active forms of relapsing-remitting MS have responded best to treatment.

The Halt-MS Study is taking place at four centers in the US: The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center/University of Washington Western MS Center; Ohio State University; Baylor College of Medicine; and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and is currently open to participants with severe relapsing forms of MS. For more information, visit HALT-MS Website

from PR newswire

Hundreds of thousands of people suffer from hereditary diabetes, a condition that destroys cells in the pancreas and leaves the body unable to regulate blood sugar levels.
Sufferers are forced to inject themselves with insulin everyday and adopt special diets to cope with the irreversible condition.

But now scientists claim a cure could be developed after cells in the liver were converted to insulin producers in research on mice.
They believe the process, described in the journal Developmental Cell, could one day lead to a permanent one-off cure for the disease.