“Latest Stem Cells News”

Cellular Dynamics International‘s disclosure Wednesday that its researchers have generated stem cells from ordinary human blood samples holds enormous promise in the emerging field of personalized medicine.

The promise in the long term is that, by giving a vial or two of blood, we could all have our own personal stem cells to deploy in the event of a spinal cord injury or the onset of Parkinson’s disease or many other now-incurable diseases.

Cellular Dynamics is the first company to say it can make stem cells from something as readily available, and so representative of human diversity, as blood.

“This stuff sounds like science fiction, but it’s science fact – and we’re doing it in a lab in Madison,” said Bob Palay, the Madison biotech company’s chairman and chief executive.

The discovery will allow the company in the near term to more easily provide a diverse mix of stem cells to researchers to help them understand the basis of disease and how to treat it, he said.

“It opens up all human tissue cells, in all human diversity, to pharmaceutical and academic researchers. It’s so huge, and so few people understand it,” Palay said.

The stem cells, which scientists refer to as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, have all the characteristics of embryonic stem cells. They can turn into beating heart cells, liver cells or any other tissue cells in the body.

“From my knowledge of the market, there are companies out there that may be supplying a particular or specific cell type and offering it to industry, but CDI is doing it with a large suite of cells,” said Andy DeTienne, licensing manager for stem cells at the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

The foundation holds valuable patents on stem cell work done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has an ownership stake in Cellular Dynamics.

The company started out selling stem cell-derived heart cells to Roche and other pharmaceutical companies to help them test the toxicity of drugs.

The company has said it hopes to industrialize production of human cell types for research and create a bio-bank in which people could store stem cells engineered from their DNA for use in personalized therapies or in testing reactions to drugs.
Expanded deal with Roche

Cellular Dynamics said this month that it expanded its drug development testing agreement with Roche so that it will be supplying the drug industry giant with more iPS heart cells and other types of cells over the next two years. The companies also will collaborate to perform various tests on the cells.

Cellular Dynamics was formed in 2004 by stem cell pioneer James Thomson and three other UW researchers. The company has 65 employees and finished ramping up its stem cell production facility in June, Palay said. Cellular Dynamics has sales in the “multimillions” of dollars, he said.

Given its early lead in the industry and the additional products Cellular Dynamics is developing, DeTienne said he expects revenue to snowball.
Cellular Dynamics raised $18 million from mostly Wisconsin-based investors late last year.
Palay declined to comment about whether the company is trying to raise more financing.

from JSonline

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SAN DIEGO – Novocell, a small, privately held San Diego company, may have found new ways to make money from its technique for coaxing human embryonic stem cells into insulin-producing pancreatic cells.
That’s good news in a field that has had trouble attracting investor funding. Many venture capital firms have been skittish because of politics and the nascency of the embryonic stem cell science.

The biotechnology company announced Tuesday that it received a patent that essentially gives it control over all endoderm cells made from human embryonic stem cells.
Endoderm cells are precursor cells that can eventually develop into cells of the pancreas, lungs, intestine, liver, thymus, bladder and thyroid.

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Image via Wikipedia

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Image via Wikipedia

Ever since human induced pluripotent stem cells were first derived in 2007, scientists have wondered whether they were functionally equivalent to embryonic stem cells, which are sourced in early stage embryos.

Both cell types have the ability to differentiate into any cell in the body, but their origins — in embryonic and adult tissue — suggest that they are not identical.

Although both cell types have great potential in basic biological research and in cell- and tissue-replacement therapy, the newer form, called IPS cells, have two advantages. They face less ethical constraint, as they do not require embryos. And they could be more useful in cell-replacement therapies: growing them from the patient’s own cells would avoid immune rejection.

But until IPS cells are proven to have the same traits as embryonic stem cells, they cannot be considered to be identical.

In a study published today (Sept. 11), researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison report the first full measurement of the proteins made by both types of stem cells. In a study that looked at four embryonic stem cells and four IPS cells, the proteins turned out to be 99 percent similar, says Joshua Coon, an associate professor of chemistry and biomolecular chemistry who directed the project.

“We looked at RNA, at proteins and at structures on the proteins that help regulate their activity and saw substantial similarity between the two stem-cell types,” he says.

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Madison, Wisconsin – Soon, some treatments for blinding eye diseases might be developed and tested using retina-like tissues produced from the patient’s own skin, thanks to a series of discoveries reported by a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison stem cell researchers.

The team, led by stem cell scientist and ophthalmologist Dr. David Gamm of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and former UW scientist Dr. Jason Meyer, used human embryonic stem (ES) cells and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to generate three-dimensional structures that are similar to those present at the earliest stages of retinal development.

The Gamm laboratory, based at UW-Madison’s Waisman Center, isolated these early retinal structures from other cell groups and grew them in batches in the laboratory, where they produced major retinal cell types, including photoreceptors and retinal pigment epithelium (RPE).

Importantly, cells from these structures matured and responded appropriately to signals involved in normal retinal function, making them potentially valuable not only for studying how the human retina develops, but also how to keep it working in the face of disease.

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A year after President Barack Obama issued a landmark executive order to remove eight years of limitations on U.S. federal funding of stem cell research, the WiCell Research Institute has expanded the number of cell lines available through its WISC Bank (Wisconsin International Stem Cell) to 33.

WiCell, host of the former National Stem Cell Bank (NSCB) for five years under a contract from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has transitioned the distribution of all of the 20 human embryonic stem cell (hESC) lines formerly available through the NSCB to its own stem cell bank. The bank also continues to carry its previously banked seven induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell lines and six genetically modified hES cell lines.

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