“Latest Stem Cells News”

Research in Italy, in the coming years, will suffer much more compared to research in other countries, because, explained a study on the future of biomedical research in Italy described yesterday in Siena by Stefano Palumbo, “the national debate on bioethical issues will continue to be affected by pre-established ideological positions, and often, will be aimed at imposing limits on scientific research”.

Due to the overwhelming “majority of Catholic members in the National Bioethics Committee, Italy will be,” according to the study, “the most conservative country in the world regarding stem cells,” which will result in great delays in finding treatments for serious diseases like “diabetes, Parkinson’s, cancer, Huntington’s, and Alzheimer’s”.

Between 2009 and 2015, Italian research will be affected by the economic crisis, and, according to the study, which was financed by the MPS Foundation and Siena Biotech, “will also be affected by the crisis in the pharmaceutical sector, resulting from the expiration of patents and the inability to replace products whose patents have expired with new products”. According to the experts, Italian research groups will be increasingly dependent on international financing.

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Summit at Lake Como with 100 European stem cell experts.
At the summit, 16 research teams part of the Neurostemcell consortium that have been working for months on finding treatments for Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease met. The network, coordinated by Elena Cattaneo, Director of Unistem, the interdepartmental stem cell research centre of the University of Milan, met on April 1 in Bellagio, on the shores of Lake Como for their first annual meeting.

“The meeting is an opportunity to discuss the results obtained until now and to refine our methods,” explained Cattaneo, who pointed out the objective of the project, which is financed by the EU with 12 million euros: “Compares all stem cells and evaluates them as a potential tool for treatments for Huntington’s and Parkinson’s diseases.” The researchers, from various European laboratories, continued the specialist, “must work to institute stem cells to develop into neurons that die in individuals with Parkinson’s and Huntington’s. The strategy is to take immature stem cells and to push them in a specific direction, rebuilding the codes, or transcription factors of genes and proteins in the laboratory.

The stock of stem cells that we have available today is ample, observed Cattaneo. There are reprogrammed pluripotent stem cells (Ips), adult stem cells, and embryonic stem cells “which particularly fascinate me”. In Cattaneo’s view, for the two neurodegenerative diseases that are the focus of the project, “embryonic stem cells have a strong ability to produce neurons. We are not talking about treatment. These cells are exceptional because they mainly have the ability to receive messages that you send them. With adult stem cells, it does not exactly work in the same way, it seems that they do not have the same abilities to be manipulated.” Embryonic stem cells, concluded a smiling Cattaneo, “are wide awake. It is more satisfying working with them”.

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An experiment successfully performed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Missouri in Colombia, described in Nature magazine shows that cells removed from a patient’s skin and transformed into cells similar to embryonic stem cells have become a laboratory model for diseases and can be observed in real time and studied to find new cures. The researchers recreated spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) pluripotent stem cells removed from the skin of a child affected by the neurodegenerative genetic disease. In the laboratory, the cells behaved exactly as they do in a human being, giving the researchers an opportunity to observe the progression of the disease. This is an entirely new opportunity, made possible by a discovery by a Japanese research group, which less than a year ago was able to reprogram adult embryonic-like stem cells.

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