“Latest Stem Cells News”

A group of British doctors are preparing for human clinical trials that will take a person’s bone marrow stem cells, transform them into heart stem cells and inject them into the heart, where they can go to work repairing damage.

“Placing heart stem cells into the heart to repair has a very good chance of working; because the stem cells are the patient’s own there are no problems with rejection,” said Professor Sian Harding, of Imperial College London.

The British researchers plan to use a technique that was pioneered at the Mayo Clinic. They will remove 40 milliliters of bone marrow from a patient and then grow heart stem cells from them through the use of growth factors. Once injected back into the heart, doctors say they can expect a physical improvement in the patient in as little as two weeks.

A research group at Imperial College London has designed a new treatment able to significantly improve the body’s capacity to repair damage caused by a heart attack or bone fracture. The new therapy, described in Cell Stem Cell, ‘fools’ the spinal cord inducing it to ’overproduce’ stem cells which repair damaged tissues in the body. Researchers hope to test the treatment on animals by the end of the year. If testing is successful, the next step will be to experiment on human beings attempting to induce them to use their own stem cells to regenerate damaged or infected organs.