“Latest Stem Cells News”

Transplanting own stem cells into heart of severe angina patients lessens their pain and improves their ability to walk, a new study has revealed.

The largest national stem cell study for heart disease showed that transplant subjects also experienced fewer deaths than those who didn’t receive stem cells.

In the 12-month Phase II, double-blind trial, subjects’ own purified stem cells, called CD34+ cells, were injected into their hearts in an effort to spur the growth of small blood vessels that make up the microcirculation of the heart muscle (…)

He also said that this study provides the first evidence that a person’s own stem cells can be used as a treatment for their heart disease. However, he cautioned that the findings of the 25-site trial with 167 subjects, require verification in a larger, Phase III study.

The stem cell transplant is the first therapy to produce an improvement in severe angina subjects’ ability to walk on a treadmill. Twelve months after the procedure, the transplant subjects were able to double their improvement on a treadmill compared to the placebo group (…)

from http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life/health-fitness/health/Your-own-stem-cells-can-help-treat-heart-disease/articleshow/5242519.cms

In a fresh demonstration of science’s newfound ability to alter the basic units of human life, researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin have turned the cells in human skin into those in the liver, work that opens new avenues for treating diseases of the liver without relying on organ transplants.

Professor and stem cell researcher Stephen A. Duncan and other scientists in his lab reported this week in the journal Hepatology that they have created reprogrammed mouse liver cells that were identical to those grown in nature and were able to integrate and grow alongside those in a mouse liver.

Duncan and his fellow researchers also showed that human liver cells made through reprogramming are virtually the same as those grown from embryonic stem cells, though both appear to differ from adult liver cells in one respect. Those grown with reprogrammed or embryonic stem cells in the lab had fewer of the enzymes that fulfill the liver’s function of filtering out toxins than adult liver cells that have developed in the body.

from http://www.jsonline.com/features/health/63820732.html

Italy is ranked among the top countries in Europe for the number of bone marrow transplants performed. This is one of the elements that emerged on the first day of the 3rd GITMO conference (Italian group for bone marrow transplants), which began today in Florence.

Italy plays a leading role for bone marrow transplants, said a statement, demonstrated by the fact that our country is one of the top contributors to the number of transplants performed in Europe. The European Bone Marrow Transplant Group (EMBT) collects and stores data regarding transplants performed in various countries, and Italy is ranked 3rd/4th place for the total number of transplants it performs. This is an indication of the important work performed in Italy by GITMO and demonstrates that Italian transplant centers make use of top-level expertise and technology.

This is encouraging data because it opens up possibilities for the future, with important implications for patients suffering from neoplastic diseases, for which stem cells could play a key role in future treatments.

The procedure of stem cell transplants is very invasive for the patient and not all individuals are able to adequately tolerate the procedure, especially older patients. In the past, it was not possible to perform a transplant in an individual over the age of 40, then the age was raised to 50, while today 60 could be an important objective. In the past 10 years, transplant technologies for family and non-family donors have been developed with the use of so-called reduced intensity transplants, meaning a transplant that uses technology to make the procedure tolerable for patients who are not able to undergo the traditional procedure.

Initially, this technique developed slowly, while today many transplant centers have adopted the procedure, which has substantially increased the number of people who are eligible to receive this type of treatment. For some diseases, like acute myeloid leukemia, donor stem cell transplants represent our most promising weapon, and since these diseases are most common in elderly individuals, in cases where the patient is in good condition and they are under 60 years old, it is possible to use this type of treatment.

Future prospects. Today stem cells can be obtained from various sources. While in the past family donors were used, now the use of non-family donors has become more widespread thanks to international donor banks. Furthermore, alternative sources are available, like umbilical cord stem cells, which have been collected in many EU and non-EU countries for about 15 years in special umbilical cord blood banks. They are also present in Italy and this expands the offer and possibility to quickly find a source of stem cells to be used in transplants.

From left to right: A normal pig heart, a pig heart after being decellularised, the pig heart prepared for recellularisation. Photos courtesy of the University of Minnesota.

In a medical first, University researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory. Using detergents, they stripped away the cells from rat hearts until only the nonliving matrix, or “skeleton,” was left; they then repopulated the matrix with fresh heart cells.

If perfected, the technique may be used someday to generate new hearts for patients. In the United States alone, about 5 million people live with heart failure, 550,000 new cases are diagnosed every year, and 50,000 die waiting for a donor heart.

“The results were a home run,” says Doris Taylor, director of the University’s Center for Cardiovascular Repair and a principal investigator on the study. “We knew that cell therapy–that is, transplanting cells into [a patient's damaged] heart–is not a panacea. So we started thinking, ‘Is there a way to use cells to engineer heart tissue?’”

The idea, she says, is to create whole new blood vessels or organs by implanting a patient’s own cells into a matrix derived from a donor organ. This approach ought to bypass the problem of organ rejection because the matrix, being devoid of cells, shouldn’t provoke an immune response. Even if it did, the new cells would create a fresh matrix of their own, which would turn off the immune response and free patients from the need to take immunosuppressive drugs.

The process, called whole organ recellularization, can be done “with virtually any organ,” Taylor says.

A simple plan

The main hurdle in creating new hearts wasn’t finding the right cells but recreating the vastly complex architecture of the heart, Taylor explains. In puzzling it over, she and Harald Ott, a research associate in the center (now a surgical resident at Harvard Medical School and first author of the study), hit on a way to get nature to solve the problem for them.

To remove cells from fresh rat hearts, the researchers pumped solutions of detergents through the network of blood vessels that normally nourish the organ. The treatment popped all the cells like balloons and washed away the debris, leaving the matrix of protein fibers that form the backbone of a living heart’s connective tissue. It’s called the extracellular matrix, or ECM.

The Ospedali Riuniti of Bergamo is the top center for the collection of umbilical cord blood in the Lombardy region, said the hospital, which received an award at the Policlinico di Milano (where the umbilical cord blood bank is located) for the second consecutive year for its commitment and professionalism with which it carries out its work, providing an important source of stem cells.

“Our collection program started in 2004,” explained Bruna Pasini, the head obstetrician, also in charge of the collection of umbilical cord blood for the hospital. “At that time we started to collaborate with the Milano Cord Blood Bank, which allowed us to collect over 1,000 units of blood.”

The remaining blood in the placenta after birth contains stem cells similar to those in the bone marrow. They are considered the new frontier to treat many diseases. “About 40-50% of patients with leukemia and lymphomas, who need bone marrow transplants,” explained Mariangelo Cossolini, the organ and tissue transplant coordinator for the province of Bergamo, “do not find compatible donors in their family or in the international registry of voluntary bone marrow donors. Therefore, umbilical cord blood is very precious because it can replace marrow in stem cell transplants and is able to regenerate bone marrow and the entire immune system.”

Stem cells injected into the eyes of mice with defective corneas returned the corneas to a more normal appearance, a new study has found.

Researchers hope the procedure might one day be in humans. About 40,000 such transplants are done each year in the United States.

“The stem cells took the scar-like matrix, remodeled it and made it more like normal,” said senior investigator James Funderburgh, an associate professor of ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh. “We were surprised and delighted.”

A report on the study is in the April 9 online edition of the journal Stem Cells.

The cornea is the transparent, front layer of the eye that serves as a protective barrier and, along with the lens, helps focus light. Corneas can develop scar tissue from chronic inflammation caused by infections or other conditions and by injuries, such as chemical or thermal burns or other trauma.