“Latest Stem Cells News”

The ‘White Room’ at Meyer pediatric hospital in Florence needs to complete a few more procedures to become completely functional. This stem cell and cellular product ‘factory’ will allow cells to be manipulated for therapies used in bone marrow treatments against leukemia and tumors and in reconstructive medicine to reproduce bone, cartilage, fat, and nervous tissue in metabolic and neurological diseases and treatments for serious autoimmune disorders.

“The certification procedures are very long,” explained the head of transfusions and cellular therapy, Franco Bambi, “because we will be considered a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility, but we are planning to finish the procedures by the end of the year.” The facility is made up of three laboratories, including a quarantine area, a sterilization and decontamination lab, a filter area and as a cryopreservation lab, which will store cells and tissues in containers with liquid nitrogen at -193 degrees. This morning the White Room was given a 300 thousand dollar donation collected from 15,000 Unicoop Florence and Coop members.
The check was delivered this morning by the president of the Unicoop Florence management council Golfredo Biancalani to the president of the Meyer Foundation and the commissioner of pediatrics Tommaso Langiano.

Already 1,500 Coop members have visited the White Room at Meyer after making their donation. Yesterday morning 35 Unicoop sectional presidents were taken on a guided visit by Doctor Franco Bambi together with Regional Health Councilman Enrico Rossi, Meyer President Tommaso Langiano, Unicoop Florence management council president Goffredo Biancalani, and president of the Medical Department at the University of Florence Gianfranco Gensini. “Citizens know that when faced with an important health-care problem, our system is capable of responding,” commented councilman Rossi during the delivery of the check to Meyer by Unicoop Florence. “Initiatives like this one make citizens more involved in their health-care.”

At the event, the ‘Meyermeo’ experimental project for TV and radio for the children at Meyer, done by the students of the Florence art institute and coordinated by director Giovanni Micoli, was also inaugurated.

In the upcoming weeks, all of the hospital rooms will be given multimedia stations, radio ethernet in every room, and areas where videos will be played in playrooms for the children and in the oncohematology unit.
The White Room at Meyer, which should be fully functioning by the end of the year, is already working on several activities. Today, the stem cell manufacturing facility directed by Franco Bimbi received bone marrow from a donor in Honolulu, which was used in a transplant in a child with leukemia.
The marrow arrived to the cellular therapy laboratory through the international donor registry and was requested by Meyer’s oncohematology unit directed by Maurizio Aricò, who currently is treating a patient for leukemia.

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After making news on several occasions, scientists may have made a definitive breakthrough, with the first possible transfusion using blood obtained from embryonic stem cells possibly coming within the next three years. The transfusion would be done with type O blood, which can be donated to any patient, and would be obtained by researchers using excess embryos from assisted fertilization. The project, which will be led by Marc Turner of Edinburgh University, will also receive contributions from the Transfusion and Transplant Service of the British National Health Service, as well as the same department and Scotland, and the Welcome Trust, a large charitable group for medical research. The story was reported by the Independent and immediately created controversy and distorted information.

“This isn’t just talk, this time it is a serious breakthrough, and the group behind the project is very serious,” said Professor Carlo Alberto Redi, the scientific director of the IRCCS (Hospital and Medical Treatment) Foundation of the San Matteo General Hospital in Pavia, commenting on the story. Redi emphasized that the capability for the regeneration of the hematopoietic progenitor cells in vitro is well-known and the time is right for real blood to be created, with the term artificial blood no longer appropriate. “When the term synthetic blood is used, people imagine silicone blood, when in reality, in all effects, this is real blood,” said Redi.

IT CANNOT REPLACE BLOOD DONATIONS

The blood that the British researchers plan to use in human treatments in the next three years will only “support and complement” blood donation. Giuseppe Novelli, a geneticist of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, commenting to Adnkronos Salute, was less optimistic. “This is only an announcement, and it seems premature to talk about a victory. This research is starting off well because it has millions in financing and is based on evidence that is very hopeful. But we are only talking about one piece of a very complex puzzle.”

The puzzle, in this case, is represented by the blood that runs through our veins and arteries, “made up of red and white blood cells, platelets, and plasma,” said Novelli. “It is a very complex liquid, which carries out an essential function in our body.” The British study which is currently being launched “is limited to red blood cells, which are certainly not able to resolve all of the problems with transfusions”. The British studies are also developing type O negative blood, a group that is able to donate to any patient without any risk of rejection. “This is blood that can be used, and is used, only in case of emergency.” Novelli continued to say that “the new blood will not be able to replace real blood donation, and I don’t want these announcements to inhibit people from donating blood, or make them underestimate the value or the importance blood donation”.

As for an estimate on how much time it will take to create a synthetic blood that will resolve all problems linked to a lack of donations, Novelli said: “I’m not a magician! Science needs realism, and predictions cannot be made for this type of study. Certainly,” he concluded optimistically, “the progress made with stem cells in the past 12 years since their discovery is a great cause for hope”.

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Transplanting stem cells from one’s own bone marrow (autologous stem cell transplants) improves the symptoms of muscular sclerosis (MS), and in some cases the neurological disease actually regressed. These are the encouraging results obtained from a small study performed on 21 remittent MS patients by a group from the Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago and published in Lancet Neurology. “All of the patients,” said the neurologists, “witnessed an improvement in their conditions three years after the stem cell transplants were performed. Of these, 81pct benefited from visible progress, measured in terms of the scale of their disability.”

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A 21-year-old leukemia patient underwent pioneering surgery in a Shanghai hospital Wednesday, when doctors transfused 30 milliliters of umbilical-cord blood donated by a Shanghai cord bank. Today they will transplant a batch of his father’s stem cells, which are an imperfect match.

This combination of umbilical-cord blood and half-matched stem cells can offer lifesaving transplant opportunities to many more patients than traditional methods, which require a perfect match between patient and donor, said doctors from Shanghai No. 1 People’s Hospital.

It will be a month before results of the transplant are determined.

About 40,000 to 50,000 people on China’s mainland are diagnosed with leukemia every year – alf of them children. Only about 1,000 are able to receive a stem-cell transplant because of the difficulty of finding a matching donor.

The chances of finding a perfectly matched donor are as little as one in 100,000, when direct blood-relatives are not available. The possibility of an exact match is one in four between immediate relatives.

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For patients who suffer a major heart attack, get treatment at the hospital but are left with a damaged heart, Dr. Roger Gammon of the Heart Hospital of Austin is testing a new process to reverse that damage.

Just as a Houston hospital is investigating stem cells to repair the brains of stroke patients (see yesterday’s blog), the Heart Hospital is trying out a new stem cell therapy to fix the hearts of patients who suffered their first attack.
It is one of the nation’s first hospitals to test the new therapy.

Gammon, an interventional cardiologist, is leading the clinical trial in which patients are injected with donated adult stem cells from the bone marrow of others. The stems cells are purified by Osiris Therapeutics, Inc., which markets them as a product called Prochymal. Osiris is financing the research project, which is being done in the gold-standard way: Half of the patients are getting stem cells, and half are getting a placebo (a harmless product that looks the same). The researchers and patients don’t know which patients are getting the stem cells and which one aren’t.

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