“Latest Stem Cells News”

An ‘antenna’ molecule, which is capable of guiding blood stem cells to their natural ‘home’, the bone marrow, has been discovered. The discovery could improve the efficiency of umbilical cord stem cell transplants. This type of transplant is not efficient when there are not many umbilical cord stem cells present, since few of them are able to reach the bone marrow from the blood.
Reported by Nature magazine, the discovery was made by David Scadden of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Boston. The stem cells, which normally renew the population of blood cells in the body (red and white blood cells and platelets), are found in the bone marrow, but continuously move throughout blood in circulation, and eventually end up back in the bone marrow.

This is the reason why blood stem cells transplants are never highly efficient. In fact, the injected stem cells are not always able to make it back to the bone marrow, where they need to be present in order to function. These researchers have discovered a guide molecule, a protein called ‘GSA’, which is like an antenna placed on the surface of the cells, which guides them back to the marrow. Researchers have demonstrated in mice that have received stem cell transplants, that with drugs that activate GSA, the injected stem cells easily find their way to the bone marrow and the transplant functions more efficiently.

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A new research has suggested that cardiac stem cells - even in elderly and sick patients – could generate new heart muscle and vessel tissue and be used to treat heart failure.

Scientists surgically removed tissue from the muscular wall of the heart’s chambers in 21 patients.

They then isolated and multiplied the cardiac stem cells (CSCs) found there.

Most of the patients had ischemic cardiomyopathy (enlarged and weakened muscle due to coronary artery disease). Eleven also had diabetes. The average age of patients was about 65.

“Regardless of the gender or age of the patient, or of diabetes, we were able to isolate in all of them a pool of functional cardiac stem cells that we can potentially use to rescue the decompensated human heart,” said Domenico D’Amario, author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Harvard, Boston, Mass.

The study has been presented at the American Heart Association‘s Scientific Sessions 2010. (ANI)

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Several cell-based therapy approaches could provide new treatments for patients with Alport syndrome, reports an upcoming paper in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

“Our study opens up many considerations of how new therapies related to the use of stem cells can be devised for our kidney patients with chronic disease,” comments Raghu Kalluri, MD, PhD (Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA) (…)

The experiments provide evidence that stem cell treatments could repair the kidney defects associated with Alport syndrome. “We found that stem cells derived from adult bone marrow are equally useful as embryonic stem cells,” says Kalluri. “This will make it easier to translate these scientific discoveries to a treatment protocol for patients with Alport syndrome.” (…)

from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091015171451.htm

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