“Latest Stem Cells News”

Don’t look for this just yet at your neighborhood clinic, but Minnesota scientists are pushing stem cell therapies into new frontiers — into territory that is so open that doctors and regulators still are shaping practices and policies as they go along.

In one breakthrough, researchers at Mayo Clinic in Rochester obtained stem cells derived from the bone marrow of heart disease patients and guided the cells to help heal, repair and regenerate damaged heart tissue. This is “landmark work,” said an editorial accompanying their research report in Monday’s Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

And last week, University of Minnesota researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that they had for the first time used stem cells from bone marrow to help children who suffer from a rare, fatal skin disease.

While these advances are significant, they also show why we have to be patient about waiting for stem cells to deliver their seemingly magical healing power for every day therapy. That has been especially true while ethical, religious and political concerns held up research on stem cells derived from early embryos.

But even with so-called adult stem cells (those not from early embryos), it takes years of painstaking work to isolate just the right cells and then concoct cultures that will not only nurture them in the laboratory but also coax them to perform new functions.

Dean Third used to look forward to weekends spent refereeing local football matches, and outings with his young family. But now even walking to the end of the road can leave him breathless and exhausted.

For the past four years, the father of four has suffered from dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), a disease of the heart muscle which causes it to enlarge, affecting its ability to pump blood to the arteries.
The condition afflicts 12,000 people in the UK, and for most sufferers the cause is unknown. If uncontrolled it can be fatal, and patients must adhere strictly to a regime of medication.

For Dean, a mature student from Brightlingsea, Essex, the only chance of a normal life is a heart transplant. But he says: ‘I am way down the list because there are so few. I may die before one becomes available.’
Dean, 39, also has to live with the knowledge that he may have given the disease to his children. Although his wife, Cathy, 40, does not have it, there is a 50 per cent chance he could have given it to Nadine, 16, William, 14, Ross, 12, and Charlotte Rose, nine.

They will have to be monitored for the rest of their lives.
However, Dean has just taken part in a BBC Horizon TV programme where he discovered that medics are on the brink of a major breakthrough, meaning conditions such as his could be cured by making new hearts from the patient’s own stem cells.

Often referred to as the body’s ‘building blocks’, stem cells have the remarkable potential to develop into many different cell types in the body during early life and growth. In addition, in many tissues they serve as a sort of internal repair system, dividing without limit to replenish other cells as they die out.

When a stem cell divides, each new cell has the ability either to remain a stem cell or become another type of cell with a more specialised function, such as a brain cell, a red blood cell or, as Dean learnt, healthy heart cells.
The documentary team examined the cases of three patients with chronic conditions to discover whether, within their lifetimes, they might be cured.

Dean visited Dr Anthony Mathur, from University College London, to witness the world’s first trial using stem cells taken from bone marrow. The cells are injected into the muscles of the heart to regenerate damaged tissue.
He also travelled to Minnesota in America to visit laboratories carrying out research to produce new hearts using stem cells (…)

But the prospect of creating new functioning hearts from a patient’s own tissue is now a real possibility. While researchers have yet to get results in human subjects, scientists at the University of Minnesota have produced new working hearts using rats’ and pigs’ stem cells.

Dr Doris Taylor, of the Centre for Cardiovascular Repair, has taken a heart from a dead rat and drained it of all its stem cells so that it is nothing more than a lump of protein, a process called whole-organ decellularisation.
She then took stem cells from a live rat and injected them into the inert heart. The stem cells are able to recognise it is a heart and begin working to form new cells, producing a new organ (…)

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1222671/Well-soon-building-new-hearts-order-just-24-hours-say-stem-cell-scientists.html

From left to right: A normal pig heart, a pig heart after being decellularised, the pig heart prepared for recellularisation. Photos courtesy of the University of Minnesota.

In a medical first, University researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory. Using detergents, they stripped away the cells from rat hearts until only the nonliving matrix, or “skeleton,” was left; they then repopulated the matrix with fresh heart cells.

If perfected, the technique may be used someday to generate new hearts for patients. In the United States alone, about 5 million people live with heart failure, 550,000 new cases are diagnosed every year, and 50,000 die waiting for a donor heart.

“The results were a home run,” says Doris Taylor, director of the University’s Center for Cardiovascular Repair and a principal investigator on the study. “We knew that cell therapy–that is, transplanting cells into [a patient's damaged] heart–is not a panacea. So we started thinking, ‘Is there a way to use cells to engineer heart tissue?’”

The idea, she says, is to create whole new blood vessels or organs by implanting a patient’s own cells into a matrix derived from a donor organ. This approach ought to bypass the problem of organ rejection because the matrix, being devoid of cells, shouldn’t provoke an immune response. Even if it did, the new cells would create a fresh matrix of their own, which would turn off the immune response and free patients from the need to take immunosuppressive drugs.

The process, called whole organ recellularization, can be done “with virtually any organ,” Taylor says.

A simple plan

The main hurdle in creating new hearts wasn’t finding the right cells but recreating the vastly complex architecture of the heart, Taylor explains. In puzzling it over, she and Harald Ott, a research associate in the center (now a surgical resident at Harvard Medical School and first author of the study), hit on a way to get nature to solve the problem for them.

To remove cells from fresh rat hearts, the researchers pumped solutions of detergents through the network of blood vessels that normally nourish the organ. The treatment popped all the cells like balloons and washed away the debris, leaving the matrix of protein fibers that form the backbone of a living heart’s connective tissue. It’s called the extracellular matrix, or ECM.

The University of Minnesota is proceeding with embryonic stem cell research, despite an anti-abortion group’s claim that it is illegal under a new ban on the use of state tax dollars for human cloning.

Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life called on the university Tuesday to “cease its pursuit of human cloning and to end its violation of state law through its ongoing destruction of human embryos.” The organization cited the new cloning ban, along with legislative testimony from a U executive that the ban would stifle “ongoing” research if passed.

University spokeswoman Mary Koppel said the executive’s comments referred to earlier versions of the bill that were broader in scope. The ban doesn’t apply, she added, because the university is not using state tax dollars for any cloning or creation of new embryonic stem cell lines. Koppel said the university already has an internal policy against the use of state tax funds for such purposes.

“This just sort of codifies what we already have in place,” she said.

The ban was a key issue in the final days of budget negotiations between Gov. Tim Pawlenty and the Legislature. Pawlenty was prepared to fight a higher education budget bill unless it included the ban, which state Senate and House leaders agreed to add in final conference sessions.

The term cloning evokes images of creating a whole new person. And while the funding ban certainly covers this form of “reproductive cloning,” it also applies to “therapeutic” cloning, the process of copying human cells by transferring a person’s DNA into an unfertilized human egg.

The university is conducting research with stem cell lines that were created years ago — research that is eligible for taxpayer funding. Diabetes researcher Meri Firpo is also using private funds to create new stem cell lines out of embryos that are left over from fertility procedures. However, she said this process doesn’t involve cloning, nor does university policy even allow this type of cloning.

She said it was nonetheless “worrisome” to see a political body dictate what type of research can take place.

Abortion opponents are also against the creation of new stem cell lines from human embryos, because potential human lives are destroyed in the process.

U researchers counter that embryonic cells may unlock treatments for diabetes and cancer.

The university’s Stem Cell Institute is engaged in a variety of stem cell research, including treatments that use the cells from a patient’s own body. U researchers have also replicated a Japanese study in which ordinary skin cells were reprogrammed into an embryonic state.

from Twincities

A 3-year-old South Dakota boy whose brain tumor treatment had been in question because of an insurance dispute is set to begin chemotherapy in Minnesota this week.
Cooper Urbaniak, who suffers from ependymoma, is to be admitted to the University of Minnesota Medical Center Tuesday to begin high-dose chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant.

The family’s insurance provider initially declared the procedure experimental and refused to pay for it. But under an agreement reached last month between Sanford Health Plan and the university, Sanford will pay for the chemotherapy and pay a discounted rate on the stem cell transplant.
Cooper’s father, Joe Urbaniak, said his son will undergo eight days of chemotherapy treatments followed by a day of rest. Doctors then will give him back the stem cells they harvested earlier this fall.