“Latest Stem Cells News”

The metabolic state of glioma stem cells, which give rise to deadly glioblastomas, is significantly different from that of the brain cancer cells to which they give birth, a factor which helps those stem cells avoid treatment and cause recurrence later.

Researchers with the UCLA Department of Radiation Oncology at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center also found for the first time that these glioma stem cells can change their metabolic state at will, from glycolysis, which uses glucose, to oxidative phosphorylation, which uses oxygen.

The glioma stem cells’ ability to change their metabolic state at will also allow these stem cells that seed new cancer growth to evade treatment and remain alive, said Dr. Frank Pajonk, an associate professor of radiation oncology and senior author of the study.

“We found these cancer stem cells are substantially different in their metabolic states than the differentiated cancer cells they create, and since they act differently, they can’t be killed in the same way,” Pajonk said. “And as yet, we don’t have anything to target these glioma stem cells specifically.”

The study is published this week in the early online edition of the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cancer cells take up large amounts of glucose, which fuels their grow and spread, and allows them to be differentiated from normal cells under Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanning, which captures metabolic activity. Pajonk and his team found that the glioma stem cells took up much less glucose, which makes them difficult to detect with PET.

Targeting cancer metabolic pathways as a treatment has gained new interest in recent years. However, these cancer stem cells that take up less glucose could evade those treatments by utilizing glucose more efficiently through oxidative phosphorylation, which would not be targeted by such drugs.

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Thursday August 4, 2011
3:01

Jocelyn Kaiser:
Hi everyone. This is Jocelyn Kaiser, a news writer for Science magazine. In today’s chat, we’re talking about last week’s court decision finding that federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research is legal. We’ll discuss what’s next for Sherley v. Sebelius and what it’s like to work in an area of research where policies are always changing. Guest Hank Greely, a law professor at Stanford, is here now and we’re hoping to be joined later by Amander Clark, a stem cell researcher at UCLA. Let’s start with a question for Hank.

Hank, why was this lawsuit so important?
3:02

Hank Greely:
Well, when Judge Lamberth ruled last August that the NIH policy was illegal, he stopped, for several weeks, all federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research. That was a pretty dramatic effect, and, as long as this suit is pending, it makes that funding somewhat uncertain.
3:03

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Madison, Wisconsin – Soon, some treatments for blinding eye diseases might be developed and tested using retina-like tissues produced from the patient’s own skin, thanks to a series of discoveries reported by a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison stem cell researchers.

The team, led by stem cell scientist and ophthalmologist Dr. David Gamm of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and former UW scientist Dr. Jason Meyer, used human embryonic stem (ES) cells and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to generate three-dimensional structures that are similar to those present at the earliest stages of retinal development.

The Gamm laboratory, based at UW-Madison’s Waisman Center, isolated these early retinal structures from other cell groups and grew them in batches in the laboratory, where they produced major retinal cell types, including photoreceptors and retinal pigment epithelium (RPE).

Importantly, cells from these structures matured and responded appropriately to signals involved in normal retinal function, making them potentially valuable not only for studying how the human retina develops, but also how to keep it working in the face of disease.

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Drs. Scott Kitchen, Zoran Galic, Jerry Zack of the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center and AIDS Institute and their colleagues demonstrated for the first time that human blood stem cells can be engineered into cells that can target and kill HIV-infected cells. The process could potentially be used against a range of chronic viral diseases.

The study, published Dec. 7 in the-peer reviewed online journal PLoS ONE, provides proof-of-principle, a demonstration of feasibility, that human stem cells can be engineered into the equivalent of a genetic vaccine.

“We have demonstrated in this proof-of-principle study that this type of approach can be used to engineer the human immune system, particularly the T-cell response, to specifically target HIV-infected cells,” said lead investigator Scott G. Kitchen, assistant professor of medicine in the division of hematology and oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a member of the UCLA AIDS Institute. “These studies lay the foundation for further therapeutic development that involves restoring damaged or defective immune responses toward a variety of viruses that cause chronic disease, or even different types of tumors.”

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