“Latest Stem Cells News”

Research in Italy, in the coming years, will suffer much more compared to research in other countries, because, explained a study on the future of biomedical research in Italy described yesterday in Siena by Stefano Palumbo, “the national debate on bioethical issues will continue to be affected by pre-established ideological positions, and often, will be aimed at imposing limits on scientific research”.

Due to the overwhelming “majority of Catholic members in the National Bioethics Committee, Italy will be,” according to the study, “the most conservative country in the world regarding stem cells,” which will result in great delays in finding treatments for serious diseases like “diabetes, Parkinson’s, cancer, Huntington’s, and Alzheimer’s”.

Between 2009 and 2015, Italian research will be affected by the economic crisis, and, according to the study, which was financed by the MPS Foundation and Siena Biotech, “will also be affected by the crisis in the pharmaceutical sector, resulting from the expiration of patents and the inability to replace products whose patents have expired with new products”. According to the experts, Italian research groups will be increasingly dependent on international financing.

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“You can make liver. You can make pancreas. You can make bone. Therefore you can make neuro cells. You can make heart cells,” said Dr. Robert Carpenter
Yes, he said make a liver make a heart. From what? Stem cells from your teeth.

“We recently discovered that adult stem cells that don’t have the controversy related to it like embryonic cells have the ability to regenerate and treat a number of illnesses and injuries,” Carpenter said.
Stem cells are being studied to affect other disease like diabetes, kidney problems; liver problems even Parkinson’s disease. It’s in human clinical trials, and it is expected to be available within the next decade. Stem cells from teeth are proving much better than those from even bone marrow.

“With dental stem cells, since they are closely linked to bone and cartilage. It is easy to manipulate these immature cells into cartilage. They’ve actually in the laboratory, have made an exact human ACL,” said Carpenter.Baby teeth have the most viable cells.

“Stem cells in teeth particularly deciduous teeth or wisdom teeth and the follicles the surround wisdom teeth are very immature very plastic stem cells, plastic being the key word that are manipulable into a number of different tissue types,” the doctor said.
Wisdom teeth are also a great source of stem cells and that is why Abby DelGiacco is sending wisdom teeth to a lab to have them preserved with a program called Stemsave. Once her teeth are extracted, they are placed in a container, sealed in a temperature-controlled thermos and overnighted to a cryolab where her cells are preserved if she needs them.

“You never really know what is going to happen and never want to think about it but something you could awful disease and that is what this is for it is not only for degenerative neurological diseases. It is for tissue, bone muscle, tendons if I tear my ACL,” said DelGiacco.
Insurance doesn’t pay to store your stem cells there is a $590 set up laboratory fee and each year thereafter Abby will pay $100.

The cells are there if and when she needs them and studies are showing they maintain viability at least fifty years, probably more. And if you don’t have wisdom teeth left, don’t worry. All you need is one healthy tooth.

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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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A new method to reprogram adult cells making them similar to stem cells has been discovered. The key protein in the discovery is Wnt, already known to scientists for its involvement in numerous phases of development in vertebrates and invertebrates. The study, conducted by the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine (TIGEM) in Naples by Maria Pia Cosma, was published in the online version of Cell Stem Cell magazine. The study involved various types of adult cells including fibroblasts, thymus cells, and neural precursor cells, which were fused with embryonic stem cells in the presence of the Wnt protein. Following the manipulation, the adult cells transformed into undifferentiated cells (pluripotent) able to give rise to cells and tissues different from their initial programming.

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According to Science magazine, reprogrammed adult stem cells that regress to an embryonic state and have the same ability to transform into all the different tissues in the human body just like embryonic stem cells are the most important discovery of 2008. The prestigious magazine awarded the so-called ethical stem cells for their possible efficiency in curing degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and muscular dystrophy without the ethical implications associated with embryonic stem cell use. The direct observation of extrasolar planets and the development of new superconductors were also in the ranking.

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Deep in the brain, buried in the hippocampus and subventricular zone, reside adult neural stem cells, cells that retain the ability to become other types of neural cells and could serve as possible treatments for ailments ranging from vision impairment to Parkinson’s to spinal cord injuries. Doctors, scientists and patients, however, are understandably hesitant to go digging around for them, their location being “a great deterrent,” Sally Temple, founder of the New York Neural Stem Cell Institute, said at the 2009 World Stem Cell Summit here on Wednesday.

Researchers, therefore, are anxious to uncover other, more accessible neural stem cell candidates. Temple and her team have turned their sights to the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), a layer of tissue at the base of the retina that comes into being within 30 to 50 days of conception, before many other parts of the neural system differentiate. Cells from this area of the eye can be easily harvested from retinal fluid that is usually discarded during retinal surgery, she explained (…)

from http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=stem-cells-bring-new-insights-to-fu-2009-09-24

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