“Latest Stem Cells News”

Researchers at UTHealth have demonstrated in rats that transplanting genetically modified adult stem cells into an injured spinal cord can help restore the electrical pathways associated with movement. The results are published in today’s issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

In spinal cord injury, demyelination, or the destruction of the myelin sheath in the central nervous system, occurs. The myelin sheath, produced by cells called oligodendrocytes, wraps around the axons of nerves and helps speed activity and insulate electrical conduction. Without it, the nerves cannot send messages to make muscles move.

The research team, led by Qilin Cao, M.D., principal investigator and associate professor of neurosurgery at UTHealth (The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston), discovered that transplanted adult stem cells (oligodendrocyte precursor cells or OPC) from the spinal cord could become oligodendrocytes. The new cells helped restore electrical pathways of the spinal cord and therefore, function, in a process called remyelination.

Scientists have developed a new tool that illuminates connections between stem cells and cancer.
Researchers have been successful in breaking apart human prostate tissue, extract the stem cells in the tissue, and alter those cells genetically so that they spur cancer.

Many tissues contain pools of stem cells that replenish the tissue when it’s damaged or when changes take place. For example, stem cells in the skin produce new cells to replace those irreparably damaged by the sun, and stem cells in the breast create milk-producing cells when a woman is pregnant.

A characteristic of these stem cells is that they self-renew. This means that in addition to making cells with a specific function, they also make many new stem cells.

Korean scientists are moving closer to cloning embryonic stem cells, the unprecedented breakthrough that their compatriot and disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk claimed to have achieved in 2004, only to have this disproved later.

Currently, a team at the Cha Medical Center is working on a project after getting state approval last year, while another team headed by professor Park Se-pill at Jeju National University is also set to begin research.
Park and his associates are awaiting final approval from the National Bioethics Committee.

“If the endorsement is made before June, we should be able to clone human embryonic stem cells sometime next year,” said Park, who extracted stem cells from human embryos, not cloned ones, in 2000.
“Our embryologists’ technology is leading on the global scene. Hence, I believe that Korean teams should be able to create cloned embryonic stem cells in the not-so-distant future,” he said.

UW-Milwaukee researcher Andrew Cohen has successfully developed a software program that facilitates predicting the evolution of stem cells. The program essentially speeds up what has been a tedious process for researchers in the past.

The program was published last week in the journal Nature Methods. It applies algorithmic information theory to the growth and movement of stem cells tracked over time to show what type of cells (i.e. brain, skin, etc.) they will eventually develop into.

“People look at images and take measurements by hand,” Cohen explained. “It takes a long time, and using computers makes the process a lot less tedious.”

Stem cells all start out the same before they develop into the different cells of our bodies. Scientists do not know what triggers the stem cell’s future growth pattern into a particular type of cell, but researchers like Cohen are figuring out how to predict the cell’s future based on measurements and math.

Chinese researchers have become the world’s fifth most prolific contributors to peer-reviewed scientific literature on Regenerative Medicine (RM), according to an international study published on Friday (…)
Regenerative Medicine is an emerging interdisciplinary field of research and clinical applications focused on the repair, replacement or regeneration of cells, tissues, or organs, which uses a combination of approaches including gene therapy, stem cell transplantation, tissue engineering, and the reprogramming of cell and tissue types.

But as the stem cell research develops fast in recent years, RM becomes more and more dependent on this side, and shared some ethic criticism against stem cell research since it involves the usage of human embryos.

BioTime Inc.announced today that it has initiated shipments of stem cell research products to its worldwide distributor, Millipore Corporation, according to the terms of the co-marketing agreement between the two companies that was announced on July 9, 2009. BioTime has shipped inventory of six ACTCellerate™ progenitor cell lines to Millipore and plans to begin shipments of additional cell lines and ESpan™ cell growth media in the next several weeks. Derived from human embryonic stem cells but not fully differentiated into specific cell types, each ACTCellerate™ line provides a convenient, highly purified source of progenitor cells that may have applications in drug discovery, research, and the development of therapeutic products.

BioTime’s research products will soon be available to be ordered by researchers through Millipore’s stem cell homepage, www.millipore.com/stemcells. Millipore, which is already a leading supplier of stem cell research reagents, plans a full launch for BioTime’s progenitor cell lines and growth media during the first quarter of 2010.