“Latest Stem Cells News”

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.

The great promise of induced pluripotent stem cells is that the all-purpose cells seem capable of performing all the same tricks as embryonic stem cells, but without the controversy.

However, a new study published this week (Feb. 15) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences comparing the ability of induced cells and embryonic cells to morph into the cells of the brain has found that induced cells — even those free of the genetic factors used to program their all-purpose qualities — differentiate less efficiently and faithfully than their embryonic counterparts.

The finding that induced cells are less predictable means there are more kinks to work out before they can be used reliably in a clinical setting, says Su-Chun Zhang, the senior author of the new study and a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.

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

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.

In the beginning, one cell becomes two, and two become four. Being fruitful, they multiply into a ball of many cells, a shimmering sphere of human potential. Scientists have long dreamed of plucking those naive cells from a young human embryo and coaxing them to perform, in sterile isolation, the everyday miracle they perform in wombs: transforming into all the 200 or so kinds of cells that constitute a human body. Liver cells. Brain cells. Skin, bone, and nerve.

James A. Thomson

The dream is to launch a medical revolution in which ailing organs and tissues might be repaired—not with crude mechanical devices like insulin pumps and titanium joints but with living, homegrown replacements. It would be the dawn of a new era of regenerative medicine, one of the holy grails of modern biology.

Revolutions, alas, are almost always messy. So when James Thomson, a soft-spoken scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, reported in November 1998 that he had succeeded in removing cells from spare embryos at fertility clinics and establishing the world’s first human embryonic stem cell line, he and other scientists got a lot more than they bargained for. It was the kind of discovery that under most circumstances would have blossomed into a major federal research enterprise. Instead the discovery was quickly engulfed in the turbulent waters of religion and politics. In church pews, congressional hearing rooms, and finally the Oval Office, people wanted to know: Where were the needed embryos going to come from, and how many would have to be destroyed to treat the millions of patients who might be helped? Before long, countries around the world were embroiled in the debate.