“Latest Stem Cells News”

Two critical programs funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state stem cell agency, got a $11 million increase today when the agency’s 29-member Governing Board voted to approve funding for two additional grants in the Training II program and five additional grants in the Bridges program.

The grants voted in today had been recommended by the Scientific and Medical Research Funding Working Group for funding if funds permit. In January 2009, when the Board considered those applications, they voted to fund only the top tier due to uncertainty in the bond market. With improvements in the state’s bond situation, the Board chose to reconsider the second tier of grants in order to further bolster successful programs training the next generation of stem cell scientists and laboratory staff.

Drs. Scott Kitchen, Zoran Galic, Jerry Zack of the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center and AIDS Institute and their colleagues demonstrated for the first time that human blood stem cells can be engineered into cells that can target and kill HIV-infected cells. The process could potentially be used against a range of chronic viral diseases.

The study, published Dec. 7 in the-peer reviewed online journal PLoS ONE, provides proof-of-principle, a demonstration of feasibility, that human stem cells can be engineered into the equivalent of a genetic vaccine.

“We have demonstrated in this proof-of-principle study that this type of approach can be used to engineer the human immune system, particularly the T-cell response, to specifically target HIV-infected cells,” said lead investigator Scott G. Kitchen, assistant professor of medicine in the division of hematology and oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a member of the UCLA AIDS Institute. “These studies lay the foundation for further therapeutic development that involves restoring damaged or defective immune responses toward a variety of viruses that cause chronic disease, or even different types of tumors.”

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) have agreed to collaborate on stem cell research. The agreement will make it easier to form cross-border teams that are working in similar areas. If the teams’ funding requests are approved, the researchers in each country will be supported by their respective agency, CIRM or MOST. The formal announcement, made today, adds details to a story that ChinaBio® Today originally broke late last week (…)

“Our collaboration will benefit patients in our countries and patients around the globe,” said Wan Gang, Minister, MOST. “We should be aware that stem cell research will require a long-term effort and basic research to address unanswered questions. When we move to medical therapies, it must be with the highest standards.”

“One of CIRM’s primary goals is to accelerate the field of stem cell research as a whole, and in some instances we can do this more effectively through collaborations that involve the best scientific endeavors, regardless of geography,” said CIRM’s Trounson. “China is developing a major national program in stem cells and regenerative medicine that can be effectively matched with California’s excellence in stem cell science that is rapidly evolving in academic and biotechnology settings. I would expect major developments for patients to occur through this new partnership.”

CIRM was established in 2005 by a California ballot initiative that provided $3 billion in funding for stem cell research in California institutions. The money is to be allocated over 10 years. So far, CIRM has approved 307 research and facility grants for a total of more than $781 million. CIRM claims to be the largest source of funding for human embryonic stem cell research in the world.

from http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewarticle/articleid/3562981

In the decades-long war on cancer, as of late, researchers had been making little progress in comparison to colleagues treating other conditions, such as cardiac or infectious diseases. “Cancer research has really plateaued out,” William Matsui, an associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University‘s School of Medicine, said at the 2009 World Stem Cell Summit here on Tuesday. But pushing cancer stem cell research “gives us a novel way to study cancer,” said Matsui, who also runs a lab at the university’s Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Cancer and stem cells have had a fraught relationship—not in the least because of early concern that stem cell treatments could in fact spur on cancer through their encouragement of undifferentiated cell growth. But cancer stem cells themselves have gained a more solid toe-hold in the past several years as a potential new target for cancer research.

Cancer stem cells—or CSCs—are presumed to have similar capabilities as healthy stem cells: they can regenerate and differentiate into any cell that makes up the cancer. Such cells are often blamed for relapses in patients who by all other measures appear to have been cured. One of the large problems, however, has been in finding these cells. In some cancers, such as some leukemias, they are suspected to be only one cell in a million.

Cancer stem cells’ persistence has given rise to the so-called dandelion theory of cancer treatment. Researchers and doctors have traditionally worked to obliterate the visible cancerous menace—the tumor, or dandelion weed, as it were. But as anyone with a lawn may be well aware, hacking off the flower does little to stop the root—that is, the stem cell—from regenerating another attack later. So, posits Richard Jones, also at the Sidney Kimmel Comparative Cancer Center, it’s possible that effective drugs may have been abandoned because they were not creating quick, visible responses. Eliminating the root stem cells will cause the tumors to stop growing, but not right away, he explained at the summit.

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

An agreement on funding stem cell research is closer than previously thought. A change in direction on financing stem cell research by US President Barack Obama has excited the American scientific community, starting with the major universities in California, including the San Francisco State, San Jose’ University, Stanford, and Berkeley. This time it will be the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) to open its wallet, ready to fund grants worth 58 million dollars to groups and researchers studying stem cells.