Category Archives: North Carolina Stem Cells

Two days before Christmas, Hallsville mother Sarah Pruitt got the phone call shed been waiting for.

After wrestling with Medicaid for what seemed like an eternity, the health care provider approved the paperwork to pay for testing for a new treatment at Duke University for 2-year-old Aurelia Onley, Pruitts daughter, who is dying from a rare, genetic disease.

God has blessed our family today Pruitt wrote on her daughters Facebook page Dec. 23. We finally got the approval from Medicaid and we are heading to Duke on Friday. God is going to give us a miracle. We will have a week of testing to see if they will except Aurelia into this treatment. We need prays for Aurelia now more then ever.

Aurelias diagnosis was confirmed last month to be metachromatic leukodystrophy, an inherited disorder characterized by the accumulation of fats, called sulfatides, in cells, according to the Genetics Home Reference, a National Library of Medicine project.

This accumulation affects cells in the nervous system that produce myelin. Sulfatide accumulation in myelin-producing cells causes progressive destruction of the nervous system, including cells that detect sensations such as touch, pain, heat and sound.

Without treatment, and a cure that doesnt exist, Aurelia will progressively lose the ability to walk and will develop loss of sensation in the extremities, incontinence, seizures, paralysis, an inability to speak, blindness and hearing loss.

Children diagnosed with the late infantile form of MLD, such as Aurelia, typically do not survive past childhood.

At Duke University, a new program could prolong Aurelias life. The family arrived in North Carolina at the Ronald McDonald House on Dec. 27 and on Dec. 29, started the series of tests that will determine if the childs brain is strong enough to withstand treatment.

Should Aurelia be approved for the treatment which includes cell replacement therapy, bone marrow and stem cell transplants using umbilical, fetal and cord blood cells and enzyme replacement therapy then this past week is just the beginning of a monthslong process to help the little girl survive past childhood.

They think this will, I dont want to say cure her, but stop her brain from dying because thats what happens with all the children they get, Pruitt said previously. The child has to be strong enough; their brain has to be able to repair.

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Dying child approved for new treatment testing

12 hours ago Credit: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers

The e-incubator, an innovative miniature incubator that is compatible with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), enables scientists to grow tissue-engineered constructs under controlled conditions and to study their growth and development in real-time without risk of contamination or damage. Offering the potential to test engineered tissues before human transplantation, increase the success rate of implantation, and accelerate the translation of tissue engineering methods from the lab to the clinic, the novel e-incubator is described in an article in Tissue Engineering, Part C.

"In the article "The e-Incubator: A Magnetic Resonance Imaging-Compatible Mini Incubator" , Shadi Othman, PhD, Karin Wartella, PhD, Vahid Khalilzad Sharghi, and Huihui Xu, PhD, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, present the results of a validation study using the device to culture tissue-engineered bone constructs for 4 weeks. The e-incubator is a standalone unit that automatically detects and regulates internal conditions such as temperature, carbon dioxide levels, and pH via a microcontroller. It performs media exchange to feed the cultures and remove waste products. The current design is compatible with MRI to monitor the constructs without removing them from the incubator. With proper adjustments, compatibility with other imaging technologies including computed tomography (CT) and optical imaging is also possible."

""Calibratable, hands-free tissue development environments are becoming increasingly important for the engineering of implantable tissues," says Tissue Engineering Co-Editor-in-Chief Peter C. Johnson, MD, Vice President, Research and Development, Avery Dennison Medical Solutions of Chicago, IL and President and CEO, Scintellix, LLC, Raleigh, NC. "In this new development, noninvasive imaging modalities are added to the spectrum of sensing and environmental capabilities that heretofore have included temperature, humidity, light, physical force, and electromagnetism. This represents a solid advance for the field.""

Explore further: Improving imaging of cancerous tissues by reversing time

More information: The article is available free on the Tissue Engineering website at http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ten.tec.2014.0273 until December 5, 2014."

As a child, it was fascinating to put a flashlight up to our palms to see the light shine through the hand. Washington University in St. Louis engineers are using a similar idea to track movement inside the ...

Because Brown University biomedical engineering graduate student Molly Boutin needed to study how neural tissues grow from stem cells, she wanted to grow not just a cell culture, but a sphere-shaped one. ...

Using a new technique to study an old problem, an Agricultural Research Service scientist in North Carolina has uncovered new details about what happens to a cereal plant when it freezes.

Biologists and doctors rely heavily on incubators and microscopes. Now the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering IBMT has come up with a novel solution that combines the functions of both these ...

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New e-Incubator enables real-time imaging of bioengineered tissues in controlled unit

The Committee on Development, Regeneration, and Stem Cell Biology (DRSB) takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the fundamental question of how a single cell, the fertilized egg, ultimately produces a complex fully patterned adult organism, as well as the intimately related question of how adult structures regenerate. Stem cells play critical roles both during embryonic development and in later renewal and repair. More than 35 faculty from both basic science and clinical departments in the Division of Biological Sciences belong to DRSB. Their research uses traditional model species including nematode worms, fruit-flies, Arabidopsis, zebrafish, amphibians, chick and mouse as well as non-traditional model systems such as lampreys and cephalopods. Areas of research focus include stem cell biology, regeneration, developmental genetics, cellular basis of development, developmental neurobiology, and evo-devo.

Student invited seminar speakers for 2013 2014

10/15/13 Jonathan Henry, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign The Eyes Have it: Cornea Stem Cells and Lens Regeneration

11/19/13 Bob Goldstein, University of North, Carolina at Chapel Hill Cellular Mechanisms of Morphogenesis

1/21/14 Adam Martin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Shaping tissues with contractile ratchet

2/18/14 Rebecca Burdine, Princeton University Telling Left from Right - from cilia to organ morphogenesis

3/18/14 Utpal Banjeree, University of California, Los Angeles Title TBA

4/15/14 Jose Luis Gmez-Skarmeta, Centro Andaluz de Biologa del Desarrollo Deep conserved 3D architecture of developmental tool

5/20/14 Jin Jiang, University of Texas, Southwestern Hippo signaling in organ size control and regeneration

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Committee on Development, Regeneration, and Stem Cell ...

NEW BERN -

A doctor in New Bern is using stem cells from a patients own body fat to heal injuries.

Dr. Angelo Tellis uses a new procedure, it's a type of regenerative medicine that takes fat from a patient's body, then in a special mixture, is injected back into the body to spur healing. According to Tellis, stem cells grow naturally in fat. Using those stem cells, the body's natural healing processes can take injuries, such as sports injuries, and heal them naturally.

"It's called regenerative medicine," Tellis said. "The idea of it being we can harvest your body's own natural healing capabilities and use that to repair, restore and rebuild tissue."

Tellis said it was discovered that body fat contained stem cells in the early 2000's. Since then, doctors have started to use the cells to perform this type of procedure.

"It's minimally invasive which is one thing I like," Tellis said. "It's also very natural, there's no artificial substances that we put inside your body."

First, body fat is extracted from the patient's body through liposuction. The fat is taken and impurities are separated from it. The patient also has a blood sample removed from their body. That sample is separated as well. Tellis then takes the platelets from the blood and mixes them with the fat stem cells. That mixture is injected into the body at the site of the injury.

"It's a process that builds over time," Tellis said. "Around the three month point about 80% of people are significantly improved and people continue up to six months out, where the healing process is still ongoing."

Fat can be taken from pretty much anywhere in the body. Because of this, Tellis said, many patients also ask to have some cosmetic work done as the the procedure happens.

"Originally we started with this limited procedure and eventually it became 'can you do this, or can you do that?' And it just sort of grew from there," Tellis said.

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Local doctor uses stem cells to heal

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Newswise WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. Oct. 1, 2014 Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center is one of a few centers in the world and the only one in North Carolina offering young boys with cancer the opportunity to participate in a research study focused on fertility preservation and restoration.

The research, conducted by the Medical Centers Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) under the direction of Anthony Atala, M.D., institute director, gives boys who have a high risk of becoming sterile the option to bank a small piece of testicular tissue prior to treatment.

The average survival rates for childhood cancer are around 80 percent, but a side effect of some treatments can be permanent sterility, said Thomas W. McLean, M.D., a pediatric cancer specialist, who co-leads the experimental biological bank with Hooman Sadri-Ardekani, M.D., Ph.D., a male infertility specialist at WFIRM. Preserving or restoring the ability of our patients to one day have children is an important aspect of their treatment.

From the stored tissue, researchers can extract spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs), which are responsible for the continuous production of sperm throughout adult life. Physicians and scientists hope that when the boys reach adulthood, the cells can be transplanted back into their testicles through a simple injection and they will be able to produce sperm.

SSC transplantation has not yet been attempted in humans, but has been performed successfully in several species of animals, including monkeys, said Sadri-Ardekani, who developed the first laboratory protocol to isolate and grow human SSCs from small testicular biopsies.

McLean said a treatment to preserve fertility in boys who are not sexually mature is especially needed because no options currently exist for them. Older boys and men, on the other hand, can bank sperm for future use and women and girls can bank eggs or ovarian tissue.

SSCs are particularly sensitive to radiation and chemotherapy. Examples of cancers that involve these treatments that have a high risk of infertility are certain leukemias, Hodgkins disease, brain tumors and bone cancer.

For the current research study, participants have a small piece of testicular tissue harvested under general anesthesia while they are undergoing another procedure associated with their care, such as putting a catheter in the chest to deliver chemotherapy drugs.

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Study Offers Fertility Preservation Option to Young Boys with Cancer

Fayetteville NC Stem Cell Research is a complex and beneficial science using stem cells in a lab environment to better understand how normal human development works, and also to look for and develop new treatments for a wide range of human ailments. Fayetteville North Carolina Stem Cell Research involves two types of stem cells, classified as either embryonic stem cells or adult stem cells, which are used according to the type of Fayetteville NC Stem Cell Research that is desired.

Embryonic stem cells are derived from pre-embryos, called blstocysts, approximately three to five days old. They are created specifically for fertilization treatments in the Fayetteville North Carolina Stem Cell Research lab, will not be used to start a pregnancy, and will be discarded if not used for research. Doctors use in-vitro fertilization to create an embryo in a culture dish, which after three to five days becomes a blstocysts. Fayetteville NC Stem Cell Research lab technicians then extract the inner cell mass from the blstocysts, which is used to derive embryonic stem cells in the Fayetteville North Carolina Stem Cell Research facility.Embryonic stem cells are classified as pluripotent.

This means they can develop into any type of cell in a fully developed human body. It should be noted that embryonic stem cells cant develop into placenta or umbilical cord tissues, but they do appear to be able to develop into any other type of cell in a human body. What is so important about embryonic Fayetteville NC Stem Cell Research is that it enables very flexible research, as the stem cells can be grown into any type of cell needing to be researched, at any time, at the Fayetteville North Carolina Stem Cell Research facility. This makes for more efficient and more productive stem call research, promising a faster path to cures for ailments that devastate humanity. Fayetteville NC Stem Cell Research cannot use adult stem cells to generate just any desired tissues since they are already programmed. They are quite useful nonetheless, and Fayetteville North Carolina Stem Cell Research doctors have identified caches of adult stem cells in several tissues of the human body.

Fayetteville NC Stem Cell Research in general has been able to make some wonderful advancement and create excellent treatments using adult stem cells. But there are limitations to doing Fayetteville North Carolina Stem Cell Research using "only" adult stem cells. Adult stem cells are able to give rise to related kinds of cells in their home tissues, but for example Kidney stem cells cannot generate heart cells, and liver stem cells cannot generate brain cells.

A great deal of Fayetteville NC Stem Cell Research remains to be done, and at this point Fayetteville North Carolina Stem Cell Research doctors have developed a technique for getting an adult stem cell to behave similar to an embryonic stem cell. This specialized Fayetteville NC Stem Cell Research technique creates what are called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS). They can be produced from adult cells in skin, fatty tissue, and other sources. With this, Fayetteville North Carolina Stem Cell Research remains a promising field. There is of course a great deal more work to do, but Fayetteville NC Stem Cell Research promises to benefit mankind in many profound ways.

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Fayetteville North Carolina Stem Cell Research ...

Charlotte, North Carolina

Nicknamed the Queen City, Charlotte and the county containing it are named in honor of the German Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg, who had become queen consort of British King George III the year before the city's founding. A second nickname derives from later in the 18th century. During the American Revolutionary War, British commander General Cornwallis occupied the city but was driven out afterwards by hostile residents, prompting him to write that Charlotte was "a hornet's nest of rebellion," leading to another city nickname: The Hornet's Nest. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte)

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Charlotte NC Resources - Stem Cells: Get Facts on Uses ...

Media contacts: Michelle Maclay, 919-843-5365; Les Lang, (919) 966-9366, llang@med.unc.edu

Thursday, April 4, 2013

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. For the first time, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have isolated adult stem cells from human intestinal tissue.

The accomplishment provides a much-needed resource for scientists eager to uncover the true mechanisms of human stem cell biology. It also enables them to explore new tactics to treat inflammatory bowel disease or to ameliorate the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation, which often damage the gut.

Not having these cells to study has been a significant roadblock to research, said senior study author Scott T. Magness, PhD, assistant professor in the departments of medicine, biomedical engineering, and cell biology and physiology at UNC. Until now, we have not had the technology to isolate and study these stem cells now we have to tools to start solving many of these problems

The UNC study, published online April 4, 2013, in the journal Stem Cells, represents a leap forward for a field that for many years has had to resort to conducting experiments in cells from mice. While significant progress has been made using mouse models, differences in stem cell biology between mice and humans have kept researchers from investigating new therapeutics for human afflictions.

While the information we get from mice is good foundational mechanistic data to explain how this tissue works, there are some opportunities that we might not be able to pursue until we do similar experiments with human tissue, lead study co-author Adam D. Gracz, a graduate student in Magness lab. Megan K. Fuller, MD, was also co-lead author of the study.

The Magness lab was the first in the United States to isolate and grow single intestinal stem cells from mice, so they had a leg up when it came to pursuing similar techniques in human tissue. Plus the researchers were able to get sections of human small intestine for their experiments that otherwise would have been discarded after gastric bypass surgery at UNC.

To develop their technique, the researchers investigated whether the approach they had taken in mice would work in human tissue. They first looked to see if the same molecules they had found stuck on the surface of mouse stem cells were also present on human stem cells. The researchers established that these specific molecules called CD24 and CD44 -- were indeed the same between the two species. They then attached fluorescent tags to these molecules and used a special machine called a fluorescence activated cell sorter to identify and isolate the stem cells from the small intestine samples.

They found that not only could they isolate the human stem cells from human intestinal tissue, but that they also could separate different types of intestinal stem cells from each other. These two types of stem cells active and reserve are a hot topic for stem cell researchers who are still trying to figure out how reserve stem cells cycle in to replenish active stem cells damaged by injury, chemotherapy or radiation.

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For the first time, researchers isolate adult stem cells ...

Growing nerve tissue and organs is a sci-fi dream. Moheb Costandi met the pioneering researcher who grew eyes and brain cells.

The train line from mainland Kobe is a marvel of urban transportation. Opened in 1981, Japan's first driverless, fully automated train pulls out of Sannomiya station, guided smoothly along elevated tracks that stand precariously over the bustling city streets below, across the bay to the Port Island.

The island, and much of the city, was razed to the ground in the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 which killed more than 5,000 people and destroyed more than 100,000 of Kobe's buildings and built anew in subsequent years. As the train proceeds, the landscape fills with skyscrapers. The Rokk mountains come into view, looming menacingly over the city, peppered with smoke billowing from the dozens of narrow chimneys of the electronics, steel and shipbuilding factories.

Today, as well as housing the Port of Kobe, the man-made island contains hotels, medical centres, universities, a large convention centre and an Ikea store. There are also three government-funded RIKEN research institutions: the Advanced Institute of Computational Science (which is home to what was, until 2011, the world's fastest supercomputer), the Center for Life Science Technologies, and the Centre for Developmental Biology (CDB).

At the entrance to one of the labs, a faded poster in a thin plastic frame shows the crew of the Starship Enterprise, a young Captain Kirk sitting proudly at the helm. Underneath is the famous Star Trek slogan: "To boldly go where no man has gone before."

On the other side of the door, scientists in the Laboratory for Organogenesis and Neurogenesis are working on something that has fired the imagination of science fiction authors for many years. They are at the cutting edge of an emerging field: rebuilding the body by growing tissues and organs from stem cells. They hope to develop the next generation of therapies for a variety of debilitating human diseases, and unravel the mysteries of brain development.

Not long after fertilisation, the embryo consists of a tiny sphere of identical, non-specialised cells, referred to as pluripotent stem cells. These have the ability to stay in this state indefinitely, while dividing to produce daughter cells that are capable of turning into any cell type found in the adult body. These embryonic stem cells offered hope for researchers trying to develop disease treatments, but the fact that they could only be obtained from human embryos raised serious ethical questions about their use.

Then, in 2007, a team led by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University demonstrated that connective tissue cells from adult rats could be made to revert to a pluripotent, stem cell-like state and reprogrammed to form different cell types. Others went on to show that cells taken from just about anywhere in the human body can be similarly reprogrammed, into just about any other type of cell.

By 2008, US researchers had taken skin cells from an 82-year-old woman with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, a form of motor neuron disease), placed them into petri dishes and reprogrammed them to form the same motor neurons that are destroyed by the disease. By 2010, researchers at Stanford had shown that mouse connective tissue cells could be reprogrammed directly into neurons, bypassing the pluripotent state.

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The Man Who Grew Eyes From Scratch

Welcome to the Carolina Stem Cell Treatment Center, located in the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina area. We are offering institutional review board treatment protocols for a variety of medical conditions. Our highly qualified and trained team of physicians are dedicated to forwarding the science of adipose derived mesenchymal stem cell therapy is for a variety of chronic illnesses.

Carolina Stem Cell Treatment Center is part of the Essential Health & Wellness practice. Our mission is to focus on the prevention of diseases by guiding our patients to lead a long and truly healthy life. Through diet, exercise, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT), and sharing our technical knowledge and skills, we assist our patients in the anti-aging process to reach their goalto total wellness.

Contact our office if you are interested in participating in Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved research into the use of your own fat derived stem cells. We are at the forefront of legitimate medical research into the use of autologous stem cell rich treatments of a variety of chronic illnesses.

We are now actively engaged in IRB approved studies looking into the treatment of the following conditions/illnesses:

MAP AND DIRECTIONS: Click on the map below for directions to our location.

FOR MORE INFORMATION CALL (919) 830-5949 or you may use the form below

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