“Latest Stem Cells News”

Hepatitis C, an infectious disease that can cause inflammation and organ failure, has different effects on different people. But no one is sure why some people are very susceptible to the infection, while others are resistant.

Scientists believe that if they could study liver cells from different people in the lab, they could determine how genetic differences produce these varying responses. However, liver cells are difficult to obtain and notoriously difficult to grow in a lab dish because they tend to lose their normal structure and function when removed from the body.

Now, researchers from MIT, Rockefeller University and the Medical College of Wisconsin have come up with a way to produce liver-like cells from induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, which are made from body tissues rather than embryos; the liver-like cells can then be infected with hepatitis C. Such cells could enable scientists to study why people respond differently to the infection.

This is the first time that scientists have been able to establish an infection in cells derived from iPSCs — a feat many research teams have been trying to achieve. The new technique, described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could also eventually enable “personalized medicine”: Doctors could test the effectiveness of different drugs on tissues derived from the patient being treated, and thereby customize therapy for that patient.

The new study is a collaboration between Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT; Charles Rice, a professor of virology at Rockefeller; and Stephen Duncan, a professor of human and molecular genetics at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

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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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Mouse skin cells can be converted directly into cells that become the three main parts of the nervous system, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The finding is an extension of a previous study by the same group showing that mouse and human skin cells can be directly converted into functional neurons.

The multiple successes of the direct conversion method could refute the idea that pluripotency (a term that describes the ability of stem cells to become nearly any cell in the body) is necessary for a cell to transform from one cell type to another. Together, the results raise the possibility that embryonic stem cell research and another technique called “induced pluripotency” could be supplanted by a more direct way of generating specific types of cells for therapy or research.

This new study, published online Jan. 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a substantial advance over the previous paper in that it transforms the skin cells into neural precursor cells, as opposed to neurons. While neural precursor cells can differentiate into neurons, they can also become the two other main cell types in the nervous system: astrocytes and oligodendrocytes. In addition to their greater versatility, the newly derived neural precursor cells offer another advantage over neurons because they can be cultivated to large numbers in the laboratory — a feature critical for their long-term usefulness in transplantation or drug screening.

In the study, the switch from skin to neural precursor cells occurred with high efficiency over a period of about three weeks after the addition of just three transcription factors. (In the previous study, a different combination of three transcription factors was used to generate mature neurons.) The finding implies that it may one day be possible to generate a variety of neural-system cells for transplantation that would perfectly match a human patient.

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Parkinson’s Disease – Medical world has struggled in finding permanent cure for this condition that usually affects men over the age of 50 years, but now this maybe changing with the advent of stem cell based research in regenerative medicine. A significant clinical human trial using these technique now seems feasible in the near future.

Stem Cells and its Potential:

Stem cells have the remarkable potential to develop into many different cell types in the body during early life and growth. In addition, in many tissues they serve as a sort of internal repair system, dividing essentially without limit to replenish other cells as long as the person or animal is still alive. When a stem cell divides, each new cell has the potential either to remain a stem cell or become another type of cell with a more specialized function, such as a muscle cell, a red blood cell, or a brain cell.

Stem cell therapy in Parkinson’s disease:

The race to find permanent cure for Parkinson’s disease seems to be on with many exciting and rapid developments taking place in stem cell based regenerative research. However on a cautious note it remains to be shown whether stem cell-derived dopamine neurons can efficiently reinnervate the regions of the brain like the striatum and provide functional recovery in Parkinson’s patients.

The transplantation of the human foetal midbrain tissue in animals and humans has provided knowledge of a number of requirements for establishing a clinically competitive Stem Cell-based therapy in Parkinson’s disease.

The stem cell grafts should:

1. Exhibit a regulated release of dopamine and molecular, electrophysiological, and morphological properties similar to those of substantia nigra neurons(substantianigra lies in the midbrain immediately dorsal to the cerebral peduncles);
2. Enable survival of more than 100,000 dopamine neurons per human putamen(round structure located at the base of the forebrain);
3. Re-establish the dopamine network within the striatum and restore the functional connectivity with host extra-striatal neural circuitries;
4. Reverse the motor deficits resembling human symptoms in animal models of Parkinson’s disease and induce long-lasting andmajor symptomatic relief in patients;
5. Produce no adverse-effects such as tumor formation, immune reactions and gastric disorders.

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Howie Lindeman was facing the loss of his career and Neim Malo wasn’t supposed to see 2011. They were each treated for heart disease years ago using their own stem cells to repair their damaged heart tissue. Several years following treatment, both men continue to see improvement in their condition and quality of life.

Howie Lindeman, 60, had a heart attack at 39 years old that severely damaged his heart. He went through several procedures including having stents placed in his arteries and his physicians were considering open heart surgery for a quintuple bypass. He was in constant pain and struggled to walk just 25 feet, but when Zannos G. Grekos, MD, MAAC, FACC, chief medical officer of Regenocyte and a Florida-based pioneer in the field of adult stem cell therapy suggested he have the Regenocyte Adult Stem Cell procedure, he jumped at the opportunity. A normal ejection fraction (EF) is over 50 percent and Lindeman’s was down to a dangerous 22 percent before the adult stem cell procedure. Shortly after receiving treatment, his EF improved to a near-normal 47 percent, and is now at a stable 54 percent.

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