Tag Archives: Boston

Stem cells from aged, damaged hearts could be used to treat heart failure

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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
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Molecule that leads stem cells to bone marrow discovered

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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
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New Hope For Kidney Disease Patients from Stem Cells

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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
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