“Latest Stem Cells News”

Inability to control autoimmunity is the primary barrier to developing a cure for type 1 diabetes (T1D). Evidence that human cord blood-derived multipotent stem cells (CB-SCs) can control autoimmune responses by altering regulatory T cells (Tregs) and human islet beta cell-specific T cell clones offers promise for a new approach to overcome the autoimmunity underlying T1D.

Methods

We developed a procedure for Stem Cell Educator therapy in which a patient’s blood is circulated through a closed-loop system that separate lymphocytes from the whole blood and briefly co-cultures them with adherent CB-SCs before returning them to the patient’s circulation. In an open-label, phase1/phase 2 study, patients (n = 15) with T1D received one treatment with the Stem Cell Educator. Median age was 29 years (range, 15 to 41), and median diabetic history was 8 years (range, 1 to 21).

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A DRUG said to cure diabetes could mean that sufferers will no longer need to take daily insulin injections.
The treatment uses stem cells made from human bone marrow and has been tested on patients suffering from Type 1 diabetes – which affects about 900,000 people in Britain.

Diabetes causes the immune system to attack the pancreas, the organ that makes insulin, which then controls blood-sugar levels.
Sufferers must take insulin injections to stay alive because if blood-sugar levels are allowed to rise too high or get too low, they could fall into a coma and die.
But early trials by American scientists have shown that the drug Prochymal can stop the immune system destroying the pancreas.
It is hoped the drug could be on the market in less than two years.

Professor Aaron Vinik, a hormone specialist in Norfolk, Virginia, said the cure could change diabetes sufferers’ lives.
He said: “This is a very exciting discovery.
Shock “When people get told they have diabetes, it comes as a tremendous shock.
“They have to live with having to take insulin injections for the rest of their lives.

“In future, we will have a cure that will stop the disease in its tracks.”
Prochymal has proved effective because stem cells in the drug form a barrier to protect the pancreas from attack. This allows the organ to recover and to continue making insulin.
The stem cells are taken from volunteers and then multiplied in the lab to produce hundreds of millions of cells.
In early tests, patients have been given three infusions of the cells into their bloodstream over 60 days.

It has been tested on 60 patients with early diabetes.
Those already on insulin were able to reduce the amount as the stem cells started saving the pancreas.
Prof Vinik said most patients would still need insulin at first but would probably be off it “in a matter of months”.

from Daily record

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Douglas A. Melton

Scientists have created stem cells from patients suffering from 10 incurable diseases, from Down syndrome to diabetes and Parkinson’s – immortal cells that might one day be turned into repair material for wasting muscles or damaged brains.
The Harvard University-led team has taken skin and bone marrow cells from diseased patients and re-programmed those cells to behave like cells from days-old embryos.

The feat allows scientists for the first time to watch muscular dystrophy and other diseases unfold in a petri dish, “that is, to watch what goes right or wrong,” said Doug Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. The cells will also allow researchers to screen new drugs to treat the diseases.
“In these complex genetic diseases, we’re so ignorant at the moment we don’t even know when a patient gets diabetes if they all get it the same way,” Melton said. “There could be 50 different ways to get Type 1 diabetes.” The stem cell lines could help researchers hone in on exactly which mutations are responsible and find “the weak point where you could try to prevent, or treat it.”
“We have good reason to believe that this will make it possible to find new treatments, and eventually drugs, to slow or even stop the course of a number of diseases,” Melton said.
The new cells are “pluripotent” cells that can be coaxed into making any tissue in the human body, and can grow forever.

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Image via Wikipedia

Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have converted stem cells from the human endometrium into insulin-producing cells and transplanted them into mice to control the animals’ diabetes.

The endometrium, or uterine lining, is a source of adult stem cells. Normally, these cells generate uterine tissue each month as part of the menstrual cycle. Like other stem cells, however, they can divide to form other kinds of cells.

The study’s findings suggest the possibility that endometrial stem cells could be used to develop insulin-producing islet cells. These islet cells could then be used to advance the study of islet cells transplantation as a treatment for people with diabetes. If the transplantation of islet cells derived from endometrial cells is perfected, the study authors write that women with diabetes could provide their own endometrial tissue for such a transplant, sidestepping the chance of rejection posed by tissue from another person. Endometrial stem cells are readily available and can be collected easily during a simple outpatient procedure. Endometrial tissue could also be collected after hysterectomy, the surgical removal of the uterus.

“The study findings are encouraging,” said Louis V. DePaolo, Ph.D., chief of the Reproductive Sciences Branch at the NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), which funded the study. “Research to transplant insulin-producing cells into patients with diabetes could proceed at a much faster pace with a relatively accessible source of donor tissue.”

The study authors note that such a treatment would be more useful for people with Type 1 diabetes, in which no insulin is produced. The treatment would be less useful for Type 2 diabetes, in which insulin is usually produced, but in which cells have difficulty using the insulin that is available.

The findings appear in Molecular Therapy. The study was conducted by Xavier Santamaria, Efi E. Massasa, Yuzhe Feng, Erin Wolff and Hugh Taylor, M.D., all of Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

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Men with type 1 diabetes may be able to grow their own insulin-producing cells from their testicular tissue, say Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) researchers who presented their findings today at the American Society of Cell Biology’s 50th annual meeting in Philadelphia.

Their laboratory and animal study is a proof of principle that human spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs) extracted from testicular tissue can morph into insulin-secreting beta islet cells normally found in the pancreas. And the researchers say they accomplished this feat without use of any of the extra genes now employed in most labs to turn adult stem cells into a tissue of choice.

“No stem cells, adult or embryonic, have been induced to secrete enough insulin yet to cure diabetes in humans, but we know SSCs have the potential to do what we want them to do, and we know how to improve their yield,” says the study’s lead investigator, G. Ian Gallicano, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Cell Biology and director of the Transgenic Core Facility at GUMC.

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Alan Lewis of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation distinguishes type 1 and type 2 diabetes, and continues to explain how stem cells are being used today to develop new treatments for type 1 diabetes (a.k.a. juvenile diabetes). Human embryonic stem cells (hESC) are being differentiated to the beta (insulin producing) cells that type 1 diabetics lack, and are being transplanted , in animal models. Since type 1 diabetes is an auto-immune disease, the transplanted cells must be protect from destruction by the immune system. Currently, researchers are working towards that goal with encapsulating technologies and a “gentle” immuno-modulation. In order to treat a diabetic patient, access to an unlimited number of cells is necessary. Alan compares embryonic stem cells, adult stem cells, and iPS as source of cells. And finally, in a future outlook, Alan comments on the FDA’s concern for safety, the risk of creating a tumor, artificial pancreas (as an alternative approach), and cell therapy‘s potential to CURE diseases

from http://biobusiness.tv/videos/223

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