“Latest Stem Cells News”

While applications of induced pluripotent stem cells in stem cell therapy may be limited to a few diseases, its applications in drug discovery are wide-ranging, and many more diseases can be targeted, Shinya Yamanaka, Director, Centre for iPS Cell Research and Application, Japan, has said.

The Japanese scientist, whose breakthrough was the creation of embryonic-like stem cells from adult skin cells, believes that the best chance for stem cell therapy lies in offering hope to those suffering from a few conditions, among them, macular disease, Type 1 Diabetes, and spinal cord injuries.

On the other hand, there were multiple possibilities with drug discovery for a range of diseases, and Prof. Yamanaka was hopeful that more scientists would continue to use iPS for studying this potential.

He currently serves as the Director of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application and as Professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University. He is also a Senior Investigator at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) – affiliated J. David Gladstone Institutes.

An invited speaker of the CellPress-TNQ India Distinguished Lectureship Series, co-sponsored by Cell Press and TNQ Books and Journals, Prof. Yamanaka spoke to a Chennai audience on Tuesday evening about those “immortal” cells, that he originally thought would take “forever” to create, but actually took only six years.

“My fixed vision for my research team was to re-programme adult cells to function like embryonic-like stem cells. I knew it could be done, but just didn’t know how to do it,” Prof. Yamanaka said.

Embryonic stem cells are important because they are pluripotent, or possess the ability to differentiate into any other type of cell, and are capable of rapid proliferation. However, despite the immense possibilities of that, embryonic cells are a mixed blessing: there are issues with post-transplant rejection (since they cannot be used from a patient’s own cells), and many countries of the world do not allow the use of human embryos.

Dr. Yamanaka’s solution would scale these challenges if only he and his team could find a way to endow non-embryonic cells with those two key characteristics of embryonic stem cells.

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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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SCIENTISTS HAVE taken another important step towards producing replacement tissues for the body using stem cells. A group in Germany has developed a simpler way to produce these cells using just one special factor instead of the usual four.

The work helps build knowledge of how to produce the most powerful or “pluripotent” stem cells but new treatments using them are still some distance into the future, according to stem cell specialist Dr Stephen Sullivan.

Prof Hans Schöler led the work at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine and details are published this morning online by the journal Nature.

Pluripotent stem cells have huge potential to treat diseases because they are a kind of universal starter-cell, capable of becoming any of the 200 or so cells found in the body.

The best pluripotent cells are found in the developing foetus, but there are immediate ethical issues given they can only be recovered by destroying the foetus. Therefore researchers are trying to find ways to change other types of cells including adult cells into pluripotent stem cells.

Prof Schöler converted human fetal brain stem cells into pluripotent cells using just one special factor called OCT4.

Late in 2007, Prof Shinya Yamanaka and colleagues of Kyoto University announced he had used four special factors to turn human adult cells into pluripotent cells, the first to have accomplished this.

The question remains, however, whether these artificially produced stem cells will perform like natural pluripotent cells, stated Dr Sullivan, the chief scientific officer of the Irish Stem Cell Foundation, which will be formally launched towards the end of September.

from Irish Times

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Former Vice President Al Gore Endorses Trans-Pacific Collaboration to Promote Use of Patient Cells for Drug Discovery and Development and Cell-Based Therapies iZumi Bio, Inc., and Kyoto University‘s Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), today announced a collaboration to promote the basic research, development and application of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technology – a form of cellular reprogramming which originated in Japan – with the goal of advancing drug discovery and enabling cell-based therapies.

“Stem cell research holds great promise for the creation of new therapies that could revolutionize the treatment of disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, diabetes and muscular dystrophy. The discovery that iPScell technology brings, that “stem cell-like” cells can be generated from a small amount of human skin rather than from embryos, opens a new door for stem cell research and its application to therapeutic discovery,” said Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States and a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. Noting that Science Magazine named cellular reprogramming the “breakthrough of the year” in 2008, Gore concluded, “The partnership between these two leading organizations is a critical step in furthering this research and turning stem cell research into therapeutic realities sooner.”

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One factor, not four like a majority of biologists throughout the world have said up until now, is sufficient to convert an adult stem cell into a cell that is similar to an embryonic stem cell. A recipe that is much more simple than what the scientific community has believed has been discovered by Hans Schöler and his colleagues, who include Italians ,Vittorio Sebastiano and Luca Gentile, from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Germany. The study, published in February’s edition of Cell, shows for the first time that nerve stem cells taken from an adult mouse can assume the characteristics of embryonic stem cells with the addition of only one transcription factor, or one gene that controls the activity of other genes.

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Professor Jeanne Loring

Stem cells show great potential to enable treatments for conditions such as spinal injuries or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and also as research tools. One of the greatest problems slowing such work is that researchers have found major complications in purifying cell mixtures, for instance to remove stem cells that can cause tumors from cells developed for use in medical treatments. But a group of Scripps Research scientists, working with colleagues in Japan, have developed a clever solution to this purification problem that should prove more reliable than other methods, safer, and perhaps 100 times cheaper.

The work appears in the current edition of the journal Cell Research.

Effective tricks for separating stem cells from other types are essential for many emerging medical treatments. These techniques begin with researchers inducing stem cells to take specific forms, or differentiate, for instance into nerve cells. These differentiated cells might then be used to repair a spinal cord injury. Other cells might enable a diabetic’s body to produce adequate insulin.

A key problem is that in the differentiation process, at least some stem cells inevitably remain in their undifferentiated, or pluripotent, state. These cells can grow to form tumors in patients if injected along with differentiated cells, a concern that has already led the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to delay clinical trials for promising stem cell-based therapies.

A New Approach

To date, almost all attempts at purification have focused on developing antibodies—immune system attack cells—that can remove or destroy stem cells in mixtures. But this approach has had shortcomings. Effective antibodies are difficult and expensive to develop, and their use in medical therapies raises safety issues because they are produced in animals.

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