“Latest Stem Cells News”

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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Italian researchers have discovered new stem cells that could be potential sources of ‘spare’ neurons. A study carried out at the University of Verona has led to the discovery of Leptomeningeal Stem Cells (LeSC), a new population of stem cells located in the the meninges, which cover the entire central nervous system in mammals.

LeSCs are immature cells able to maintain themselves and differentiate into mature excitable neurons. This demonstrates that the brain has a greater regenerative capacity than what was believed until now. The results of the study, conducted on an animal model, were published recently in the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine.

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Human embryonic stem cells implanted into mice specifically engineered to have a serious retinal dysfunction resulting in blindness have restored the animal’s capacity to sense light during tests.
The results, published in international magazine, Cell Stem Cell, were obtained in the United States by a research group in the Department of Biological Structure at the University of Washington in Seattle. The study, performed by Deepak Lamba, Juliane Gust, and Thomas Reh, demonstrated that it is possible to obtain retina progenitor cells from stem cells derived from the embryo. The researchers observed, “In principle, embryonic stem cells could be a source of photoreceptors” which are specialized nerve cells found on the retina and could be “used to repair the retina”.

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The addition of two particular gene snippets to a skin cell’s usual genetic material is enough to turn that cell into a fully functional neuron, report researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine. The finding, published online July 13 in Nature, is one of just a few recent reports of ways to create human neurons in a lab dish.

The new capability to essentially grow neurons from scratch is a big step for neuroscience research, which has been stymied by the lack of human neurons for study. Unlike skin cells or blood cells, neurons are not something that’s easy for a living human to donate for research.

“A major problem in neurobiology has been the lack of a good human model,” said senior author Gerald Crabtree, MD, professor of pathology and of developmental biology. “Neurons aren’t like blood. They’re not something people want to give up.”

Generating neurons from easily accessible cells, such as skin cells, makes possible new ways to study neuronal development, model disease processes and test treatments.

It also helps advance the effort, still in its infancy, to replace damaged or dead neurons with new ones.

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A research breakthrough has proven that it is possible to reprogram mature cells from human skin directly into brain cells, without passing through the stem cell stage. The unexpectedly simple technique involves activating three genes in the skin cells; genes which are already known to be active in the formation of brain cells at the foetal stage.

The new technique avoids many of the ethical dilemmas that stem cell research has faced.

For the first time, a research group at Lund University in Sweden has succeeded in creating specific types of nerve cells from human skin. By reprogramming connective tissue cells, called fibroblasts, directly into nerve cells, a new field has been opened up with the potential to take research on cell transplants to the next level. The discovery represents a fundamental change in the view of the function and capacity of mature cells. By taking mature cells as their starting point instead of stem cells, the Lund researchers also avoid the ethical issues linked to research on embryonic stem cells.

Head of the research group Malin Parmar was surprised at how receptive the fibroblasts were to new instructions.

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Scientists have discovered a new way to generate human motor nerve cells in a development that will help research into motor neurone disease.

A team from the Universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge and Cardiff has created a range of motor neurons – nerves cells that send messages from the brain and spine to other parts of the body – from human embryonic stem cells in the laboratory.

It is the first time that researchers have been able to generate a variety of human motor neurons, which differ in their make-up and display properties depending on where they are located in the spinal cord.

The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, could help scientists better understand motor neurone disease. The process will enable scientists to create different types of motor neurons and study why some are more vulnerable to disease than others.

Motor neurons control muscle activity such as speaking, walking, swallowing and breathing. However, in motor neurone disease – a progressive and ultimately fatal disorder – these cells break down leading to paralysis, difficulty speaking, breathing and swallowing.

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