“Latest Stem Cells News”

BRITISH face surgeons are to grow new skull, cheek and jaw bones on patients’ backs using their own stem cells.
The surgeons, from Barts and the London NHS Trust, hope to use the technique to help people whose facial bones have been destroyed by cancer or injury.

Four patients are awaiting the treatment, which the surgeons believe could eventually become a less risky alternative to face transplants. Two are cancer victims and two have had accidents.
The team, led by Iain Hutchison, will make the first attempt to grow replacement bone from a patient’s own stem cells in Britain.

The procedure involves constructing a mould in the shape of the bone required and filling it with the patient’s bone marrow. This contains stem cells which can be persuaded to grow into different types of tissue. A genetically modified protein coaxes the stem cells to grow into bone. The mould is then inserted into the patient’s back muscles below the shoulder blade where it establishes a blood supply from the patient.

It is left to grow there for three to six months when it will be transplanted onto the patient’s face.
According to Hutchison, the stem cell procedure also has advantages over existing techniques of removing bones from other parts of the body. (…)

Read full article on Times Online

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Treating a heart attack with the patients’ own bone marrow stem cells boosts blood flow within the heart and may help reduce long-term complications, a new U.S. study finds.
The study included 31 patients who underwent angioplasty and stent placement after a heart attack. Within one week of the attacks, 16 of the patients received infusions of their own bone marrow cells into the coronary artery in which a blockage had caused the event.

The 16 patients received different amounts of bone marrow stem cells — 5 million, 10 million and 15 million cells. The 15 patients in the control group received standard medication only. All the patients were followed for up to five years.
After three to six months, patients who received higher doses of bone marrow stem cells showed greater improvement in blood flow within the heart than patients who received lower doses and those in the control group, the researchers said.

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Stem cells can thrive in segments of well-vascularized tissue temporarily removed from laboratory animals, say researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Once the cells have nestled into the tissue’s nooks and crannies, the so-called “bioscaffold” can then be seamlessly reconnected to the animal’s circulatory system.

The new technique neatly sidesteps a fundamental stumbling block in tissue engineering: the inability to generate solid organs from stem cells in the absence of a reliable supply of blood to the interior of the developing structure.

“Efforts to use tissue engineering to generate whole organs have largely failed,” said Geoffrey Gurtner, MD, associate professor of surgery, “primarily due to the lack of available blood vessels. Now we’ve essentially hijacked an existing structure to overcome this problem.” The key, the researchers discovered, is to keep the tissue adequately supplied with oxygen and nutrients while outside of the body.

In the near future, the researchers believe that the stem cells in the tissue could be induced to become an internal, living factory of healthy, specialized cells churning out proteins missing in people with conditions such as hemophilia or diabetes. In the long run, they hope to encourage the cells to become entire transplantable organs such as livers or pancreases.

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One in every 20 Americans over the age of 50 suffers from something called, peripheral arterial disease or PAD. It can result in clogged arteries in your legs, which can cause a heart attack, if left untreated. But now there’s a new approach. Doctors using a patient’s own stem cells to clear things up. (…)

The arteries in her leg are clogged with plaque which puts her at risk for heart attack, stroke and amputation. Traditionally, doctors treat PAD with stents, angioplasties or bypasses. But now, they’re using a patient’s own stem cells to try and save her legs.

“We basically take stem cells from their hips to help grow blood vessels,” said Dr. Randall Franz of Grant Medical Center.

Doctors use a needle to remove bone marrow from the patient’s hip. The marrow goes into a centrifuge to separate the stem cells.

“When we put it in you can see it was just all red. Now we have plasma, a buff coat and stem cells,” said Dr. Tom Hankins of Grant Medical Center.

Then, doctors inject the stem cells into the patient’s leg.

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MIT engineers have boosted stem cells’ ability to regenerate vascular tissue (such as blood vessels) by equipping them with genes that produce extra growth factors (naturally occurring compounds that stimulate tissue growth). In a study in mice, the researchers found that the stem cells successfully generated blood vessels near the site of an injury, allowing damaged tissue to survive.

Why it matters: Stem cells hold great potential as a way to promote tissue regeneration. However, this approach has been limited because stem cells don’t produce enough growth factors after transplantation. The researchers’ new super-charged stem cells could be used to treat an infarction (death of tissue caused by blockage of the blood supply, by a clot or another obstruction), or to induce blood supply for engineered tissues.

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Like Samson, researchers in the field of stem cells have used the jawbone to make a point. Dr. Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic and her team at Columbia University have manipulated adult stem cells to grow one of the most difficult sections of bone to replace, the temporomandibular joint. This jawbone was created by allowing pluripotent cells harvested from marrow to grow in a scaffold that was fashioned to mimic the TMJ’s shape.

It is the first accurate and anatomically sized bone created by stem cells in a lab. Dr. Vunjak-Novakovic hopes that this new creation will serve as a proof of concept — if they can make the complex TMJ, they should be able to grow many other bones in your body. While this work is truly amazing, it still has some major hurdles to jump before it could be used to replace damaged or cancerous bones in humans (…)

Growing a fully functional part of the human body depends not only on coaxing adult stem cells to replicate and specialize, it also requires one heck of a nursery. The Columbia team has developed a bioreactor which provides all of the necessary nutrients for stem cells to develop into bone. The shape of the scaffold inside the bioreactor was defined through the use of many digital pictures. Which raises the possibility that eventual bone recipients could have the new body part made to look exactly like the old one. While the bioreactor is top notch, work still has to be done to find a way for the newly created bone to carry its own blood supply that can be easily adapted into the host (…)

from http://singularityhub.com/2009/10/13/stem-cells-used-to-create-new-jaw-bone/

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