“Latest Stem Cells News”

While applications of induced pluripotent stem cells in stem cell therapy may be limited to a few diseases, its applications in drug discovery are wide-ranging, and many more diseases can be targeted, Shinya Yamanaka, Director, Centre for iPS Cell Research and Application, Japan, has said.

The Japanese scientist, whose breakthrough was the creation of embryonic-like stem cells from adult skin cells, believes that the best chance for stem cell therapy lies in offering hope to those suffering from a few conditions, among them, macular disease, Type 1 Diabetes, and spinal cord injuries.

On the other hand, there were multiple possibilities with drug discovery for a range of diseases, and Prof. Yamanaka was hopeful that more scientists would continue to use iPS for studying this potential.

He currently serves as the Director of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application and as Professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University. He is also a Senior Investigator at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) – affiliated J. David Gladstone Institutes.

An invited speaker of the CellPress-TNQ India Distinguished Lectureship Series, co-sponsored by Cell Press and TNQ Books and Journals, Prof. Yamanaka spoke to a Chennai audience on Tuesday evening about those “immortal” cells, that he originally thought would take “forever” to create, but actually took only six years.

“My fixed vision for my research team was to re-programme adult cells to function like embryonic-like stem cells. I knew it could be done, but just didn’t know how to do it,” Prof. Yamanaka said.

Embryonic stem cells are important because they are pluripotent, or possess the ability to differentiate into any other type of cell, and are capable of rapid proliferation. However, despite the immense possibilities of that, embryonic cells are a mixed blessing: there are issues with post-transplant rejection (since they cannot be used from a patient’s own cells), and many countries of the world do not allow the use of human embryos.

Dr. Yamanaka’s solution would scale these challenges if only he and his team could find a way to endow non-embryonic cells with those two key characteristics of embryonic stem cells.

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A new cornea may be the only way to prevent a patient going blind – but there is a shortage of donated corneas and the queue for transplantation is long. Scientists at the Sahlgrenska Academy have for the first time successfully cultivated stem cells on human corneas, which may in the long term remove the need for donators.

Approximately 500 corneal transplantations are carried out each year in Sweden, and about 100,000 in the world. The damaged and cloudy cornea that is turning the patient blind is replaced with a healthy, transparent one. But the procedure requires a donated cornea, and there is a severe shortage of donated material. This is particularly the case throughout the world, where religious or political views often hinder the use of donated material.

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As former House speaker Newt Gingrich courts evangelical voters in advance of Tuesday’s Florida primary, he is drawing an increasingly hard line against the use of embryonic stem-cell research — a position that contrasts not only with that of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, but also with statements that Gingrich himself has made on the subject in the past.

Speaking at a Baptist church in Winter Park on Saturday, the former speaker received a standing ovation when he declared that embryonic stem-cell research amounts to “the use of science to desensitize society over the killing of babies.”

And in a news conference Sunday, he said he would ban all embryonic stem-cell research, including that done on discarded embryos created by in vitro fertilization.

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Advanced Cell Technology, a leader in the field of regenerative medicine, today announced treatment of the first patient in its Phase 1/2 clinical trial for Stargardt’s macular dystrophy (SMD) using retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells derived from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). The surgery was performed on Friday, Jan. 20, at the Moorfields Eye Hospital in London by a team of surgeons led by Professor James Bainbridge, consultant surgeon at Moorfields and Chair of Retinal Studies at University College London. The patient successfully underwent the procedure without any complications. ACT and Moorfields Eye Hospital received clearance in September from the U.K.’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to begin this trial in Europe.

“Our clinical trial program for hESC-derived RPE cells has taken another critical step as we move forward with treating patients at Moorfields Eye Hospital,” said Gary Rabin, chairman and chief executive officer of ACT. “The treatment of the first patient in Europe is tangible evidence that stem cell research and development of cell therapies is making progress. It is a milestone for scientists, stem cell advocates and patients hoping for cures as well as much as it is one for ACT. Stargardt’s macular dystrophy affects up to 100,000 patients in Europe and North America, and causes progressive vision loss often ending with blindness. We are honored to be working with Professor Bainbridge at Moorfields Eye Hospital, and are very pleased with the smooth progress of the trial thus far.”

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Scientists have improved the sight of two people who were almost blind by injecting their eyes with stem cells from embryos.

The two women, both registered as blind, saw their vision improve in a matter of weeks after being given the embryo-derived cells in the US safety trial.

The breakthrough holds out the hope of a cure in the future for age-related macular degeneration, which currently affects some 500,000 people in Britain.
The results, published this week in The Lancet, provide a major boost for the field of stem cell reseach.

Professor Daniel Brison, of the North West Embryonic Stem Cell Centre in Manchester, said: “This is a very exciting moment for embryonic stem cell therapies.
This is the first peer-reviewed scientific report showing that cells derived from human embryonic stem cells can be transplanted safely into a patient with no sign of complications (…)

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Cells grown in culture are not alone: They are constantly communicating with one another by sending signals through their culture media that are picked up and transmitted by other cells in the media. When thousands of cells are cultured together in a dish, there are hundreds of thousands of these signals present every minute, all competing to be heard.

Scientists trying to direct cells to do useful things — like causing stem cells to turn into neurons or heart cells — typically try to overcome these signals by adding their own exogenous factors. These exogenous factors are often added at saturating concentrations, blanketing the cells with a particular growth factor or cytokine to activate specific pathways to produce a desired outcome, such as controlling stem cell differentiation. However, the constant din of cell communications is still present, causing alternate and perhaps opposing pathways to be stimulated.

This unstoppable secretion by cells in culture makes it difficult to determine the exact “recipe” of exogenous factors needed to elicit a specific phenotype, particularly in fast-growing cells like embryonic stem cells. MIT researchers Laralynne Przybyla, a graduate student in biology, and Joel Voldman, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, report in a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences how they were able to silence this din by using a microfluidic device to culture embryonic stem cells under continuous liquid flow (known as perfusion) such that factors secreted by the cells were removed before they could be transmitted to other cells. They used this device to investigate the influence of these factors on stem cells.

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