Category Archives: Stem Cell Videos

The 1,300-pound patient trembled slightly as an 8-inch needle, carefully placed on the upper rump area, sucked about two ounces of fat tissue from his sleek body.

Its like grating cheese, said a winded Robert Brusie, the staff surgeon at Palm Beach Equine Clinic in Wellington who is performing the medical procedure on a 12-year-old show jumper horse. Racehorses have a lot less body fat, like Olympic swimmers or runners.

Liposuctionfor horses?

Sort of. But its more like regenerative medicine thats helping save careers and even lives.

For the past nine months, to help show horses with slow-healing ligament or tendon injuries, Palm Beach Equine Clinic has been extracting stem cells from fat tissue and injecting those cells back into the horses to repair the injured areas.

Stem cells are simple cells in the body that can develop into various kinds of cells, including blood, skin or intestinal tissues. Stem-cell therapy has had success in treating soft-tissue injuries and arthritis and other joint diseases in horses, degenerative diseases in dogs and such internal medicine problems as kidney disease in cats.

Horses, like the 12-year-old that underwent the 20-minute procedure Tuesday morning, are treated standing up and dont require general anesthesia.

Theyre big animals and getting up and down can be tough for them, said Richard Wheeler, a veterinarian at Palm Beach Equine Clinic. The procedure is not very invasive.

Wheeler said the clinic has performed the procedure on about 20 horses. Before the boom in stem-cell research, veterinarians collected stem cells from the horses bone marrow. It could take a horse a year or several years to recover from an injury, Wheeler said.

Now some are recovering in three months, he added. But since the procedure is still new, Wheeler remains cautiously optimistic.

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Wellington clinic uses stem cells to help heal horses

TORONTO, Sept. 3, 2012 /CNW/ - New research published today in the Journal of Experimental Medicine may provide a new avenue for the treatment of Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) and a solution to the high rate of disease relapse experienced by patients. The study identified a protein interaction that limits the immune response to AML and provides a method to disrupt it.

The study was led by Drs. Jean Wang, Affiliate Scientist at the Ontario Cancer Institute (OCI), the research arm of the University Health Network's Princess Margaret Hospital, John Dick, leader of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research's (OICR) Cancer Stem Cells Program and Senior Scientist at the OCI, and Jayne Danska, Senior Scientist, The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) Research Institute.

Their study found that a protein on the surface of AML cells called CD47 binds to a protein called SIRP, causing macrophages to develop immune tolerance to AML cells. Macrophages are cells of the immune system capable of phagocytosis, an 'eating' process that removes pathogens, aged and abnormal cells from the body. The researchers generated mice that expressed SIRP variants with differential ability to bind to human CD47 and showed that when SIRP signalling was absent macrophages were able to clear human leukemia stem cells (LSC). This finding is significant, as it is believed that relapse of disease is driven by LSCs that survive conventional chemotherapy.

The researchers then confirmed these results by treating mice that had been engrafted with human AML with a novel protein called SIRP-Fc that can block CD47 on the leukemia cells. They found that treatment with the protein enhanced phagocytosis of AML cells by macrophages and reduced AML growth in the mice. Additionally, treatment with the protein did not cause increased phagocytosis of normal blood stem cells.

The team is working to develop leukemia therapeutics based on the concept of antagonizing SIRP signalling and allowing the patient's own macrophages to remove any LSCs that survive standard therapies.

"This study is an important step forward in our understanding of leukemia stem cells and has opened the door to a new line of therapies that could have a significant clinical impact by preventing relapse of AML. I commend Drs. Wang, Dick and Danska and their colleagues for their outstanding work," says Dr. Tom Hudson, President and Scientific Director of OICR.

"This work provides a new avenue for treating leukemia by remobilizing the body's immune defenses against the leukemia cells. Importantly, this approach could kill the 'roots' of the leukemia with potentially less toxins than traditional anti-leukemia therapies," says Dr. Benjamin Neel, Director and Senior Scientist, OCI.

"This study is an excellent example of translating research into a potential clinical application. This collaboration began several years ago by our discovery that CD47-SIRPa interactions were important to the growth of normal blood and leukemia cells, that translated to the development of a blocking protein that exposes LSC to immune attack," says Danska. "We are optimistic that clinical development of this therapy will contribute to more effective, less toxic treatments for many kinds of leukemia by eliminating LSC."

Ontario Institute for Cancer Research

OICR is an innovative cancer research and development institute dedicated to prevention, early detection, diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The Institute is an independent, not-for-profit corporation, supported by the Government of Ontario. The annual budget for OICR, its research partners and collaborators exceeds $150 million. This supports more than 1,600 investigators, clinician scientists, research staff and trainees located at its headquarters and in research institutes and academia across the Province of Ontario. It has research hubs in Hamilton, Kingston, London, Ottawa, Thunder Bay and Toronto. OICR has key research efforts underway in small molecules, biologics, stem cells, imaging, genomics, informatics and bio-computing, from early stage research to Phase III clinical trials. For more information, please visit the website atwww.oicr.on.ca.

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Study reveals possible method of removing leukemia stem cells, preventing relapse of Acute Myeloid Leukemia

3 September 2012

Scientists in Glasgow are using stem cells to develop orthopaedic implants that could be considerably stronger and more durable than current products.

The team from Glasgow University and Southern General Hospital has designed a plastic surface that encourages bone cells to grow around it and so could be used to strengthen the bond between an implant and a patients bone.

Mesenchymal stem cells found in bone marrow can divide into other types of cells such as skin, muscle or bone when they receive the correct messages from the body. Glasgows surface would replace these messages to encourage bone growth.

The surface, created at Glasgow Universitys James Watt Nanofabrication Centre, is covered in tiny pits 120 nanometres across, said researcher Dr Matthew Dalby in a statement.

When stem cells are placed onto the surface, they grow and spread across the pits in a way that ensures they differentiate into therapeutically useful cells.

This will help the implant site repair itself much more effectively than has ever been possible before and could well mean that implants will last for the rest of a patients life.

Conventional implants made from polyethylene, stainless steel, titanium or ceramic dont have this kind of surface and so the stem cells around them typically divide into soft tissue which, combined with the natural loss of bone density that occurs as people age, can weaken the bond between the implant and the body.

The researchers want to manufacture the implants from an advanced polymer known as PEEK-OPTIMA, made by UK firm Invibio Biomaterial Solutions, to ensure they are as strong as possible.

One of the main selling points of PEEK is that it is very strong, has excellent stability and is very resistant to wear, said researcher Dr Nikolaj Gadegaard.

Read more here:
Stem cells could mean stronger orthopaedic implants

ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2012) UCLA researchers have discovered a type of cell that is the "missing link" between bone marrow stem cells and all the cells of the human immune system, a finding that will lead to a greater understanding of how a healthy immune system is produced and how disease can lead to poor immune function.

The studies were done using human bone marrow, which contains all the stem cells that produce blood during postnatal life.

"We felt it was especially important to do these studies using human bone marrow as most research into the development of the immune system has used mouse bone marrow," said study senior author Dr. Gay Crooks, co-director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and a co-director of the Cancer and Stem Cell Biology program at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. "The few studies with human tissue have mostly used umbilical cord blood, which does not reflect the immune system of postnatal life."

The research team was "intrigued to find this particular bone marrow cell because it opens up a lot of new possibilities in terms of understanding how human immunity is produced from stem cells throughout life," said Crooks, a professor of pathology and pediatrics.

Understanding the process of normal blood formation in human adults is a crucial step in shedding light on what goes wrong during the process that results in leukemias, or cancers of the blood.

The study appears Sept. 2 in the early online edition of Nature Immunology.

Before this study, researchers had a fairly good idea of how to find and study the blood stem cells of the bone marrow. The stem cells live forever, reproduce themselves and give rise to all the cells of the blood. In the process, the stem cells divide and produce intermediate stages of development called progenitors, which make various blood lineages like red blood cells or platelets. Crooks was most interested in the creation of the progenitors that form the entire immune system, which consists of many different cells called lymphocytes, each with a specialized function to fight infection.

"Like the stem cells, the progenitor cells are also very rare, so before we can study them we needed to find the needle in the haystack." said Lisa Kohn, a member of the UCLA Medical Scientist Training Program and first author in the paper.

Previous work had found a fairly mature type of lymphocyte progenitor with a limited ability to differentiate, but the new work describes a more primitive type of progenitor primed to produce the entire immune system, Kohn said

Once the lymphoid primed progenitor had been identified, Crooks and her team studied how gene expression changed during the earliest stages of its production from stem cells.

See the article here:
'Missing link' between stem cells and the immune system

Public release date: 2-Sep-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Kim Irwin kirwin@mednet.ucla.edu 310-206-2805 University of California - Los Angeles Health Sciences

UCLA researchers have discovered a type of cell that is the "missing link" between bone marrow stem cells and all the cells of the human immune system, a finding that will lead to a greater understanding of how a healthy immune system is produced and how disease can lead to poor immune function.

The studies were done using human bone marrow, which contains all the stem cells that produce blood during postnatal life.

"We felt it was especially important to do these studies using human bone marrow as most research into the development of the immune system has used mouse bone marrow," said study senior author Dr. Gay Crooks, co-director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and a co-director of the Cancer and Stem Cell Biology program at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. "The few studies with human tissue have mostly used umbilical cord blood, which does not reflect the immune system of postnatal life."

The research team was "intrigued to find this particular bone marrow cell because it opens up a lot of new possibilities in terms of understanding how human immunity is produced from stem cells throughout life," said Crooks, a professor of pathology and pediatrics.

Understanding the process of normal blood formation in human adults is a crucial step in shedding light on what goes wrong during the process that results in leukemias, or cancers of the blood.

The study appears Sept. 2 in the early online edition of Nature Immunology.

Before this study, researchers had a fairly good idea of how to find and study the blood stem cells of the bone marrow. The stem cells live forever, reproduce themselves and give rise to all the cells of the blood. In the process, the stem cells divide and produce intermediate stages of development called progenitors, which make various blood lineages like red blood cells or platelets. Crooks was most interested in the creation of the progenitors that form the entire immune system, which consists of many different cells called lymphocytes, each with a specialized function to fight infection.

"Like the stem cells, the progenitor cells are also very rare, so before we can study them we needed to find the needle in the haystack." said Lisa Kohn, a member of the UCLA Medical Scientist Training Program and first author in the paper.

See the rest here:
UCLA researchers discover missing link between stem cells and immune system

The molecular circuitry controlling asymmetric cell division in roots resembles a flip-flop switch.

(Phys.org)For organisms to grow and develop, they must produce tissues with distinct functions, each one made up of similar cells. These different tissues are derived from stem cells. How stem cells divide to create new cell types is known as asymmetric cell division, and is obviously crucial to the overall development of the organism. In plants, whose cells cannot migrate, the location where a stem cell undergoes asymmetric cell division must also be crucial to ensuring tissues develop in the correct place.

In research published in the journal Cell, a collaboration between theoretical biologists and experimentalists, headed by Stan Mare of the John Innes Centre, and Ben Scheres, of the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, uncovered a molecular switch that integrates signals to ensure these asymmetric cell divisions happen in the right place and at the right time, to produce layers of specialised tissue in the root.

"Through an experimental-modelling cycle, we have unravelled how stem cells in the Arabidopsis root regulate asymmetric cell divisions that give rise to two new cell identities at the correct position," said Dr Stan Mare of the John Innes Centre, which is strategically funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. "We dissected the underlying molecular circuit which operates in each cell, and found that it presented a highly robust bistable behaviour, due to two positive feedback loops involving the proteins SHR, SCR and the cell-cycle related players RBR and CYCLD6;1. In other words, we showed that the circuit behaves like a switch."

Bistable systems, which can only exist in one of two states, are found in nature where tight control is needed. Positive feedback loops are common features of them as they help make the rapid switch from one state to another.

Having identified this switch, the next step was to work out how the plant turns it on and off, so that only the correct stem cells perform asymmetric division, and in the right location for the overall development of the plant.

To do this, Dr Stan Mare together with Dr Vernica Grieneisen constructed a mathematical model, an in silico version of the root and the molecular circuitry behind the switch.

The physical location of an asymmetric cell division relies on the interaction of the plant hormone auxin and the protein SHR. Previous work by Dr Grieneisen had shown how auxin accumulates in the root tip through a reflux-loop mechanism established by polarly localized auxin efflux carriers in cells, and that the concentration of auxin declines the further from the root tip, forming a gradient with its highest peak at the stem cells.SHR protein sets up a similar gradient, but perpendicular to the auxin gradient, radiating out.

"We found that the cells that undergo these special cell divisions are located right at the crossroads of these two gradients," said Dr Grieneisen.

The cell divisions also trigger protein degradation, which turns the switch off again. This is needed to prevent uncontrolled development.

Read this article:
'Flip-flop' switch discovered behind key cellular process

Stem Cells Inc, (STEM), developer of stem cell-based treatments for spinal injury, is up for the second day in a row Friday in pre-market trading, after it closed Thursday at $1.96, a 19% gain on the day. The gains came after the company announced that it will be presenting data from its Phase I/II clinical trial on Monday, Sept. 3 at the International Spinal Cord Society and will hold a conference call the following day. Trading volume Thursday was three times its 3-month average. The presentation will include interim data from the study`s first cohort, which has three partially paralyzed patients being treated with STEM`s proprietary HuCNS-SC cells. Researchers are looking for efficacy - measured by improvement in motor function, sensation, and bladder control - and safety in the first of three planned cohorts, each with more mild paralysis than the previous. Share price is likely to remain strong on Friday and into the meeting, as most analysts expect some positive results from the trial. If Monday`s data looks good for STEM, shares may climb higher on momentum, however, negative results will have disastrous effects on the stock. STEM is up 140% in 2012.

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PropThink: STEM Gains on Anticipation of Interim Trial Data to be Presented Monday

Newswise UCLA researchers have discovered a type of cell that is the missing link between bone marrow stem cells and all the cells of the human immune system, a finding that will lead to a greater understanding of how a healthy immune system is produced and how disease can lead to poor immune function.

The studies were done using human bone marrow, which contains all the stem cells that produce blood during postnatal life.

We felt it was especially important to do these studies using human bone marrow as most research into the development of the immune system has used mouse bone marrow, said study senior author Dr. Gay Crooks, co-director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and a co-director of the Cancer and Stem Cell Biology program at UCLAs Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. The few studies with human tissue have mostly used umbilical cord blood, which does not reflect the immune system of postnatal life.

The research team was intrigued to find this particular bone marrow cell because it opens up a lot of new possibilities in terms of understanding how human immunity is produced from stem cells throughout life, said Crooks, a professor of pathology and pediatrics.

Understanding the process of normal blood formation in human adults is a crucial step in shedding light on what goes wrong during the process that results in leukemias, or cancers of the blood.

The study appears Sept. 2 in the early online edition of Nature Immunology.

Before this study, researchers had a fairly good idea of how to find and study the blood stem cells of the bone marrow. The stem cells live forever, reproduce themselves and give rise to all the cells of the blood. In the process, the stem cells divide and produce intermediate stages of development called progenitors, which make various blood lineages like red blood cells or platelets. Crooks was most interested in the creation of the progenitors that form the entire immune system, which consists of many different cells called lymphocytes, each with a specialized function to fight infection.

Like the stem cells, the progenitor cells are also very rare, so before we can study them we needed to find the needle in the haystack. said Lisa Kohn, a member of the UCLA Medical Scientist Training Program and first author in the paper.

Previous work had found a fairly mature type of lymphocyte progenitor with a limited ability to differentiate, but the new work describes a more primitive type of progenitor primed to produce the entire immune system, Kohn said

Once the lymphoid primed progenitor had been identified, Crooks and her team studied how gene expression changed during the earliest stages of its production from stem cells.

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UCLA Researchers Discover "Missing Link" Between Stem Cells and the Immune System

SEOUL, South Korea, Aug. 31, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- In a landmark clinical study, scientists of the RNL Stem Cell Technology Institute have demonstrated that the transplant of patients' own ("autologous") stem cells can dramatically improve the ability of plastic surgeons to repair diseases. In the September 2012 issue of the prestigious international plastic surgery journal Annals of Plastic Surgery (69:3), researchers published their controlled study of the power of stem cells, describing a breakthrough with patients who have Parry-Romberg Syndrome. More than 200,000 have this tragic and debilitating disease in the U.S. alone. Their prognosis without treatment is the slow loss of control, then paralysis of the face and in some cases the mouth and even eyes. Most patients with Parry-Romberg begin to experience these symptoms between the age of five (5) and fifteen (15) years of age. There is, says the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, "no cure." To date, treatments have involved waiting until the disease slows and then transplanting fat into patients' faces, strengthening bones in their faces, and using microvascular surgery to "install" a free flap of skin.

However the only solution for patients with this disorder, and those with similar disorders, the grafting of fat, is at best a temporary solution, which alleviates none of the pain felt by these patients, and can in fact result in an increase in pain when fat grafts fail. So, plastic surgeons, engineers and others have searched for years for a solution with longer term effects, or even a way to fight the disease's symptoms in a sustained way.

Dr. Kyeung-Suk Ko and Dr. Jong-Woo Choi led a research team under Dr. Jeong-chan Ra of RNL Stem Cell Technology Institute that may have uncovered, for the first time, just such a tool for plastic surgeons: patients' own stem cells. In their controlled study, the team painlessly removed a few ounces of fat from one group Parry-Romberg Syndrome patients, harvesting stem cells from these patients' fat, cells that are genetically identical to the patient's cells throughout their body and that have well documented abilities to "home in" on inflammation and disease and have dramatic effects on patients' symptoms and even disease itself. In this study, those patients in the "treated" group received stem cells magnified into the millions (using the team's patented technology whose safety has been well published). These patients' outcomes, adding stem cells to standard-of-care therapies, were measured against traditional microfat grafts in the control group receiving no stem cells.

In what many have described as a revolutionary finding, the team found that those patients who received their own "adult" mesenchymal stem cells saw unprecedented improvement in the effectiveness of therapies. Fat grafts that are often "resorbed" into patients' skin shortly after they are placed were 50% less likely to disappear when provided alongside stem cells (20.59% vs 46.81%).

This study was approved by the Korea Food and Drug Administration, the institutional IRB of the Asan Medical Center, and peer-reviewed prior to acceptance in the renowned plastic surgery publication under the title: "Clinical application of human adipose tissue-derived mesenchymal stem cells in progressive hemifacial atrophy (Parry-Romberg Disease) with microfat grafting techniques using three-dimensional computed tomography and three-dimensional camera." Authors and investigators included: Koh KS, Oh TS, Kim H, Chung IW, Lee KW, Lee HB, Park EJ, Chung JS, Shin IS, Ra JC, Choi JW. Media and others may access the article at http://journals.lww.com/annalsplasticsurgery/Abstract/2012/09000/Clinical_Application_of_Human_Adipose.22.aspx. Its National Library of Medicine ID is PMID:22878516.

Dr. Ra, senior author, said, "We believe that this is a big step for Parry-Romberg Syndrome patients and expect to see autologous stem cell transplantation as standard of care for their treatment. The next step is to test the efficacy of the many ways in which stem cells from adults' own bodies will expand the quality of life and even identify cures for many rare diseases."

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Stem Cells Bring New Hope for Parry-Romberg Syndrome Patients

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Verastem, Inc., (VSTM) a biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering and developing drugs to treat breast and other cancers by targeting cancer stem cells, announced presentations at several upcoming investment conferences. The presentation details are as follows:

A webcast of each presentation can be accessed by visiting the investors section of the Companys website at http://www.verastem.com. A replay of the webcast will be archived on the Verastem website for two weeks following the presentation date.

About Verastem, Inc.

Verastem, Inc. (VSTM) is a biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering and developing drugs to treat breast and other cancers by targeting cancer stem cells. Cancer stem cells are an underlying cause of tumor recurrence and metastasis. For more information please visit http://www.verastem.com.

Forward-looking statements:

Any statements in this press release about future expectations, plans and prospects for the Company constitute forward-looking statements.Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements. The Company anticipates that subsequent events and developments will cause the Companys views to change.However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so.

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Verastem to Present at Upcoming Investor Conferences