“Latest Stem Cells News”

Australian scientists have developed a new technique using stem cells, in the hope to replace damaged cells in Parkinson’s disease. The technique could be developed for application in other degenerative conditions.

Drs Clare Parish and Lachlan Thompson lead the research from the Florey Neuroscience Institutes and the University of Melbourne. They are members of the newly established Stem Cells Australia collaboration launched at the University of Melbourne today.

Stem Cells Australia is a new $21m Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative bringing together Australia’s leading stem cell scientists.

Led by internationally renowned stem cell expert Professor Martin Pera and administered by the University of Melbourne, the Initiative links Australia’s leading experts in bioengineering, nanotechnology, stem cell biology, advanced molecular analysis and clinical research to solve some of the our biggest health challenges.

“Stem Cells Australia will not only play a major role in leading Australian research into stem cell science, it will help the Australian community to understand the impact of scientific breakthroughs in this fast-paced and fascinating field,” he said.

Opening Stem Cells Australia on behalf of Innovation Minister Senator Kim Carr, ARC Chief Executive Officer Professor Margaret Sheil said the Initiative would make an important contribution to life-changing research.

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Oregon Health & Science University’s unique method of transforming a person’s own skin cells into stem cells has officially been patented. The United States Patent and Trademark Office, an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, issued the patent earlier this year. Securing a patent is a key step in commercializing discoveries, an important objective for OHSU. Revenue from commercialized discoveries has the potential to bring financial benefit to the university and the state of Oregon.

The procedure, developed by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, Ph.D. at OHSU’s Oregon National Primate Research Center, accelerated efforts to generate stem cell therapies for humans. The method involves transplanting the nucleus of the cell, which contains an individual’s DNA, to an egg cell that has had its genetic material removed. This cell then develops into stem cells, which are undifferentiated cells that can transform into various other cell types – the building blocks of an organism. For various reasons and despite numerous attempts, previous efforts by others to clone stem cells in primates had failed repeatedly.

When the breakthrough was announced in November 2007, it received worldwide media attention and was named one of TIME Magazine’s top two research achievements of the year. Many also hailed the procedure because it avoided the need for embryonic stem cells. The use of embryonic stem calls has been the subject of debate for many years.

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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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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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Using two distinct methods, Whitehead Institute researchers have successfully and consistently manipulated targeted genes in both human embryonic stem (ES) cells and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells (adult cells that have been reprogrammed to an embryonic stem cell-like state).

In one case, scientists employed proteins known as zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) to change a single base pair in the genome, allowing them either to insert or remove mutations known to cause early-onset Parkinson’s disease (PD). The second method relies on proteins called transcription activator like effector nucleases (TALENs) capable of altering specific genes with similar efficiency and precision as ZFNs. Both sets of experiments were conducted in close collaboration with scientists at Sangamo BioSciences.

Targeted genetic manipulation addresses a problem that has been plaguing human stem cell research – the ability to cleanly and site-specifically modify the genomes of human ES and iPS cells. Realizing the therapeutic promise of these cells depends on such changes to fix disease-causing mutations before the cells could be transplanted into patients or to create cell lines that researchers can use to study genetic diseases.

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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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