Category Archives: Regenerative Medicine

Dec. 16, 2013 Mayo Clinic researchers and colleagues in Belgium have developed a specialized catheter for transplanting stem cells into the beating heart. The novel device includes a curved needle and graded openings along the needle shaft, allowing for increased distribution of cells. The result is maximized retention of stem cells to repair the heart. The findings appear in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions.

"Although biotherapies are increasingly more sophisticated, the tools for delivering regenerative therapies demonstrate a limited capacity in achieving high cell retention in the heart," says Atta Behfar, M.D., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic cardiology specialist and lead author of the study. "Retention of cells is, of course, crucial to an effective, practical therapy."

Researchers from the Mayo Clinic Center for Regenerative Medicine in Rochester and Cardio3 Biosciences in Mont-Saint-Guibert, Belgium, collaborated to develop the device, beginning with computer modeling in Belgium. Once refined, the computer-based models were tested in North America for safety and retention efficiency.

What's the significance?

* The new curved catheter eliminates backflow and limits loss of cells

* Graded small to large side holes limit pressures in the heart to keep cells targeted

* The design has proved to be more effective in both healthy and damaged hearts

This new catheter is being used in the European CHART-1 clinical trials, now underway. This is the first Phase III trial to regenerate hearts of patients who have suffered heart attack damage. The studies are the outcome of years of basic science research at Mayo Clinic and earlier clinical studies with Cardio3 BioSciences and Cardiovascular Centre in Aalst, Belgium, conducted between 2009 and 2010.

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Regenerative medicine: New tool for transplanting stem cells

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Newswise Today, December 17, JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, has published a novel technique that could resolve a snag in stem cell research for application in regenerative medicinea strategy for reprograming cells in vivo to act like stem cells that forgoes the risk of causing tumors.

Dr. Kostas Kostarelos, principal investigator of the Nanomedicine Lab at the University of Manchester, said that he and his colleagues have discovered a safe approach to reprogramming somatic cells (which constitute most of the cells in the body) into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Research in this field has been embraced as an alternative to the controversial use of embryonic stem cells.

We have induced somatic cells within the liver of adult mice to transiently behave as pluripotent stem cells, said Dr. Kostas Kostarelos, the labs principal investigator, This was done by transfer of four specific genes, previously described by the Nobel-prize winning Shinya Yamanaka, without the use of viruses but simply plasmid DNA [a small circular, double-stranded piece of DNA used for manipulating gene expression in a cell].

The technique comes as an alternative to Dr. Shinya Yamanakas reprograming methods, which won him the Nobel prize in 2012. Dr. Yamanakas approach involved reprogramming somatic cells in vitro by introducing four genes through the use of a virus. While promising, the use of this method has been limited. As Dr. Kostareloss article states, One of the central dogmas of this emerging field is that in vivo implantation of [these stem] cells will lead to their uncontrolled differentiation and the formation of a tumor-like mass.

Dr. Kostarelos and his team have determined that their technique does not share the risk of uncontrolled stem cell growth into tumors as seen in in vitro, viral-based methods. [This is the] only experimental technique to report the in vivo reprogramming of adult somatic cells to pluripotency using non-viral, transient, rapid and safe methods, Kostarelos said.

The Nanomedicine Labs approach involves injecting large volumes of plasmid DNA to reprogram cells. However, because plasmid DNA is short-lived in this scenario, the risk of uncontrolled growth is reduced.

The research group chose to publish their technique with JoVE as a means to emphasize the novelty, uniqueness and simplicity of their procedure. Along with their article, a demonstration of their technique has been published as a peer-reviewed video to ensure the proper replication of this technique by other researchers in the field.

*** About JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments: JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, is the first and only PubMed/MEDLINE-indexed, peer-reviewed journal devoted to publishing scientific research in a video format. Using an international network of videographers, JoVE films and edits videos of researchers performing new experimental techniques at top universities, allowing students and scientists to learn them much more quickly. As of December 2013, JoVE has published video-protocols from an international community of more than 9,300 authors in the fields of biology, medicine, chemistry, and physics.

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New Hope for Stem Cells, Regenerative Medicine Emerges From the Lab

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

16-Dec-2013

Contact: Jennifer Schutz newsbureau@mayo.edu 507-284-5005 Mayo Clinic

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Mayo Clinic researchers and colleagues in Belgium have developed a specialized catheter for transplanting stem cells into the beating heart. The novel device includes a curved needle and graded openings along the needle shaft, allowing for increased distribution of cells. The result is maximized retention of stem cells to repair the heart. The findings appear in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions.

"Although biotherapies are increasingly more sophisticated, the tools for delivering regenerative therapies demonstrate a limited capacity in achieving high cell retention in the heart," says Atta Behfar, M.D., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic cardiology specialist and lead author of the study. "Retention of cells is, of course, crucial to an effective, practical therapy."

Researchers from the Mayo Clinic Center for Regenerative Medicine in Rochester and Cardio3 Biosciences in Mont-Saint-Guibert, Belgium, collaborated to develop the device, beginning with computer modeling in Belgium. Once refined, the computer-based models were tested in North America for safety and retention efficiency.

What's the significance?

This new catheter is being used in the European CHART-1 clinical trials, now underway. This is the first Phase III trial to regenerate hearts of patients who have suffered heart attack damage. The studies are the outcome of years of basic science research at Mayo Clinic and earlier clinical studies with Cardio3 BioSciences and Cardiovascular Centre in Aalst, Belgium, conducted between 2009 and 2010.

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The development of the catheter and subsequent studies were supported by Cardio3 BioSciences; Walloon Region General Directorate for Economy, Employment & Research; Meijer Lavino Foundation for Cardiac Research Aalst (Belgium); the National Institutes of Health; Grainger Foundation; Florida Heart Research Institute; Marriott Heart Disease Research Program; and the Mayo Clinic Center for Regenerative Medicine.

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Regenerative medicine: Mayo Clinic and collaborators develop new tool for transplanting stem cells

Embracing Regenerative Medicine within the #FutureOfHealthCare
From the 2013 World Stem Cell Summit, Dr. Andre Terzic, director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Regenerative Medicine talks about how Mayo Clinic has embraced...

By: Mayo Clinic

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Embracing Regenerative Medicine within the #FutureOfHealthCare - Video

Tribute to Duane Roth
Speakers: Lawrence Goldstein, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor, Departments of Cellular Molecular Medicine Neurosciences; Director, UC San Diego Stem Cell ...

By: Alliance for Regenerative Medicine

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Tribute to Duane Roth - Video

Stem Cells, Regenerative Medicine, and Tissue Engineering

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Regenerative medicine helps natural healing processes to work faster and better. These technologies and techniques create an environment in which missing or damaged tissue that would not ordinarily regrow in fact regenerates fully.

Strategies presently under development include transplants of stem cells, the manipulation of the patient's own stem cells, and the use of scaffold materials that emit biochemical signals to spur stem cells into action. Regenerative therapies have been demonstrated (in trials or the laboratory) to heal broken bones, bad burns, blindness, deafness, heart damage, nerve damage, Parkinson's disease, and a range of other conditions. Work continues to bring these advances to patients.

Research undertaken since 2004 suggests that the stem cells in the adult body - which become less effective at their job of repair with age - could be rejuvenated, restored to action with the right biochemical cues. Furthermore, researchers already regularly manipulate the genes and biochemistry of stem cells taken from partients for use in trials of new therapies: there is every reason to expect that future medicine will involve the repair and restoration of aged stem cells prior to their use in regenerative medicine.

Reports on a few of the more promising applications of stem cell technologies in recent years are linked below:

Regenerative medicine will help to produce extended healthy longevity, as we will be able to repair some of the damage caused by aging, organ by organ. Aging damages every part of our bodies, however - including the stem cells required for regenerative therapies! Until we can address the root causes of age-related degeneration, we must learn how to regenerate every part of the human body.

We must also become capable of reliably preventing and defeating cancer in all its forms and repairing age-related damage to the brain in situ - increasing risk of cancer with age cannot be prevented through regenerative medicine, and the brain cannot simply be replaced with new tissue. These tasks will be a mammoth undertaking. Nonetheless, like all great advances in medicine, it is a worthy, noble cause. Today, hundreds of millions of people live in pain and suffering - and will eventually die - as a result of degenerative conditions of aging. Today, we stand within reach of alleviating all this death and anguish, preventing it from ever occuring again. We should rise to the challenge!

As of 2008, researchers have found what may be a shortcut to the growth of replacement organs from a patient's own stem cells. Called recellularization or decellularization, the process takes a human or animal donor organ and chemically strips the cells from it, leaving only the scaffolding of the extracellular matrix behind. Stem cells from the organ recipient are then used to repopulate the scaffold, creating a functioning organ ready for transplant that has little to no risk of rejection.

Some of the most impressive demonstrations of regenerative medicine since the turn of the century have used varying forms of stem cells - embryonic, adult, and most recently induced pluripotent stem cells - to trigger healing in the patient. A great deal of press attention, for example, has been given to successes in alleviating life-threatening heart conditions. However, successes have been demonstrated in repairing damage in other organs - such as the liver, kidneys, and so forth.

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Stem Cells, Regenerative Medicine, and Tissue Engineering

Transcript Stephen J. Russell, M.D., Ph.D. Deputy Director Regenerative Medicine Translation

Stephen J. Russell, M.D., Ph.D.: Regenerative medicine is a very broad, new approach to medicine which uses the advances in stem cell technology, primarily, to advance clinical care. And what that really converts into is that instead of treating chronic diseases with drugs that have a short-term effect, and that need to be continued long term as a consequence, we can think in terms of regenerative medicine of solutions to problems.

If you think about what kind of illnesses people get, most of them are a consequence of degeneration or aging. I mean, as you go through life things stop working properly, so, you know, your eyesight begins to fail, your hearing begins to fail, you start to get problems with your joints, your muscles become weak, your heart begins to fail, your liver, your kidneys, everything, as you get older, is more likely to stop functioning correctly. And regeneration is the exact opposite of this degenerative process. I mean, the whole idea is to try and restore organs and prevent the deterioration.

I see regenerative medicine as the new surgery. I mean if you go back over Mayo Clinic's history, we were built on the brilliance of the Mayo brothers' surgery. We're seeing some real opportunity in certain specific areas that we're focusing on at this point in time. One of those is diabetes. I mean we do know that if we transplant a pancreas or if we transplant islets, the part of the pancreas that produces insulin and senses glucose, we can cure diabetes. There simply are not enough pancreas transplants available or islets available to be able to serve the need of the population because diabetes is common. So that's where regenerative medicine comes in as a way to generate islets from other cell types, generate islets from the patient's own skin cells or whatever, and so we really see that as a major opportunity.

Regenerative medicine is a game-changing technology with the potential to offer definitive, affordable health care solutions that treat the underlying cause of diseases, rather than only manage disease symptoms.

Regenerative medicine itself isn't new the first bone marrow and solid organ transplants were done decades ago. But advances in developmental and cell biology, immunology and other fields have unlocked new opportunities for the Center for Regenerative Medicine to refine existing regenerative therapies and develop novel ones.

To repair the root causes of diseases, the center takes three interrelated approaches:

Stem cells have the ability to develop through a process called differentiation into many different types of cells, such as skin cells, brain cells, lung cells, and so on. Stem cells are a key component of regenerative medicine, as they open the door to new clinical applications that can heal the body from within.

Center for Regenerative Medicine teams are studying a variety of stem cells, including adult and embryonic stem cells. Also being studied are various types of progenitor cells, such as those found in umbilical cord blood, and bioengineered cells called induced pluripotent stem cells. Each type has unique qualities, with some being more versatile than others.

Many of the regenerative therapies under development in the Center for Regenerative Medicine begin with the particular patient's own cells. For example, a patient's own skin cells may be collected, reprogrammed in a laboratory to give them certain characteristics, and delivered back to the patient to treat his or her disease.

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What is Regenerative Medicine? - Center for Regenerative ...

Presentation of Stevens Rehen - Nairobi Cell Biology/Regenerative Medicine Meeting 2013
Cell Biology and Regenerative Meeting, Nairobi, Kenya, 2013. Induced pluripotent stem cells to study brain diseases by Stevens Rehen. National Laboratory for...

By: Stevens Rehen

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Presentation of Stevens Rehen - Nairobi Cell Biology/Regenerative Medicine Meeting 2013 - Video

Tim Kamp talks about stem cell and regenerative medicine research discoveries
University of Wisconsin-Madison Stem Cell Regenerative Medicine Center.

By: Jordana Lenon

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Tim Kamp talks about stem cell and regenerative medicine research discoveries - Video

Regenerative medicine is the "process of replacing or regenerating human cells, tissues or organs to restore or establish normal function".[1] This field holds the promise of regenerating damaged tissues and organs in the body by replacing damaged tissue and/or by stimulating the body's own repair mechanisms to heal previously irreparable tissues or organs.

Regenerative medicine also includes the possibility of growing tissues and organs in the laboratory and safely implant them when the body cannot heal itself This can potentially solves the problem of the shortage of organs available for donation, and the problem of organ transplant rejection if the organ's cells are derived from the patient's own tissue or cells.[2][3][4]

Widely attributed to having first been coined by William Haseltine (founder of Human Genome Sciences),[5] the term "Regenerative Medicine" was first found in a 1992 article on hospital administration by Leland Kaiser. Kaisers paper closes with a series of short paragraphs on future technologies that will impact hospitals. One such paragraph had Regenerative Medicine as a bold print title and went on to state, A new branch of medicine will develop that attempts to change the course of chronic disease and in many instances will regenerate tired and failing organ systems.[6][7]

Regenerative medicine refers to a group of biomedical approaches to clinical therapies that may involve the use of stem cells.[8] Examples include the injection of stem cells or progenitor cells (cell therapies); the induction of regeneration by biologically active molecules administered alone or as a secretion by infused cells (immunomodulation therapy); and transplantation of in vitro grown organs and tissues (Tissue engineering).[9][10]

A form of regenerative medicine that recently made it into clinical practice, is the use of heparan sulfate analogues on (chronic) wound healing. Heparan sulfate analogues replace degraded heparan sulfate at the wound site. They assist the damaged tissue to heal itself by repositioning growth factors and cytokines back into the damaged extracellular matrix.[11][12][13] For example, in abdominal wall reconstruction (like inguinal hernia repair), biologic meshes are being used with some success.

At the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, in North Carolina, Dr. Anthony Atala and his colleagues have successfully extracted muscle and bladder cells from several patients' bodies, cultivated these cells in petri dishes, and then layered the cells in three-dimensional molds that resembled the shapes of the bladders. Within weeks, the cells in the molds began functioning as regular bladders which were then implanted back into the patients' bodies.[14] The team is currently[when?] working on re-growing over 22 other different organs including the liver, heart, kidneys and testicles.[15]

From 1995 to 1998 Michael D. West, PhD, organized and managed the research between Geron Corporation and its academic collaborators James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and John Gearhart of Johns Hopkins University that led to the first isolation of human embryonic stem and human embryonic germ cells.[16]

Dr. Stephen Badylak, a Research Professor in the Department of Surgery and director of Tissue Engineering at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, developed a process for scraping cells from the lining of a pig's bladder, decellularizing (removing cells to leave a clean extracellular structure) the tissue and then drying it to become a sheet or a powder. This cellular matrix powder was used to regrow the finger of Lee Spievak, who had severed half an inch of his finger after getting it caught in a propeller of a model plane.[17][18][19][dubious discuss] As of 2011, this new technology is being employed by the military to U.S. war veterans in Texas, as well as to some civilian patients. Nicknamed "pixie-dust," the powdered extracellular matrix is being used success to regenerate tissue lost and damaged due to traumatic injuries.

In June 2008, at the Hospital Clnic de Barcelona, Professor Paolo Macchiarini and his team, of the University of Barcelona, performed the first tissue engineered trachea (wind pipe) transplantation. Adult stem cells were extracted from the patient's bone marrow, grown into a large population, and matured into cartilage cells, or chondrocytes, using an adaptive method originally devised for treating osteoarthritis. The team then seeded the newly grown chondrocytes, as well as epithileal cells, into a decellularised (free of donor cells) tracheal segment that was donated from a 51 year old transplant donor who had died of cerebral hemorrhage. After four days of seeding, the graft was used to replace the patient's left main bronchus. After one month, a biopsy elicited local bleeding, indicating that the blood vessels had already grown back successfully.[20][21]

In 2009 the SENS Foundation was launched, with its stated aim as "the application of regenerative medicine defined to include the repair of living cells and extracellular material in situ to the diseases and disabilities of ageing." [22]

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Regenerative medicine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia