“Latest Stem Cells News”

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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Nerve stem cell transplants may help slow the progression of macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness in the developed world, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

They said putting nerve stem cells from StemCells Inc near the retinas of rats with a form of macular degeneration helped keep the disease from advancing to blindness for several months.

“These cells improve the chemical environment in the back of the eye,” said Ray Lund of the Casey Eye Institute at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, whose findings were presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago.

Lund said the mechanism is not clear, but he suspects that when immature nerve cells are placed near the retina, they produce growth factors that protect the cells from damage by the disease.

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