“Latest Stem Cells News”

Sir John Gurdon

One of the most prestigious prizes in medicine is being awarded this year to scientists working on stem cells and leukemia — and to New York‘s mayor for his fight to cut tobacco use (…)

The Lasker Basic Medical Research Award goes to John Gurdon, 76, of Cambridge University and Shinya Yamanaka, 47, of Kyoto University and San Francisco‘s Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease. Their work has helped pave the way for the possibility of made-to-order stem cell treatments for individual patients

Gurdon began working with frog eggs in the 1950s and was the first to successfully clone a frog, in the 1960s. This led directly to the cloning of mammals in the 1990s.

Yamanaka’s ground-breaking announcement in 2006 that he had successfully reprogrammed a mouse skin cell to turn into stem cells holds promise for creating stem cells without destroying an embryo, up until now a major ethical and legal hurdle (…)

read more on http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-09-14-lasker-awards_N.htm

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Five years after Harvard researchers first received institutional permission to attempt to produce stem cell lines via somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), a young scientist who worked in the Harvard program as a postdoctoral fellow has succeeded in using the process — known as therapeutic cloning — to produce a stem cell line containing the genes of a patient with type 1 diabetes.

In papers in Nature, Nature Communications, and Cell Stem Cell, that scientist, who is now at the independent New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) laboratory, and Harvard researchers, report on the SCNT advance. In addition, they report on an experiment explaining why other attempts at SCNT have been unsuccessful and offer a commentary reporting that it is impractical, if not impossible, to recruit ova donors without paying them.

Ironically, all three reports serve to underscore how astoundingly fast the field of stem cell science has advanced since 2006, when it looked as though SCNT provided the only path to the creation of disease-specific stem cell lines from patients. These stem cell lines might then be used for studying disease development, for transplanting to treat diseases, and as targets for the development of conventional drugs.

The creation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) and the successful reprogramming of one form of adult cell into another form of adult cell have provided researchers with alternatives to SCNT, and decreased interest in it. However, because it is still too early to know which avenue of research will prove the most useful in increasing understanding of various diseases, groups have continued their research efforts in SCNT as well.

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