Category Archives: Stem Cells

Washington, July 16 (ANI): Embryonic stem cells of mice have been transformed into key structures of the inner ear in a breakthrough study.

The discovery provides new insights into the sensory organ's developmental process and sets the stage for laboratory models of disease, drug discovery and potential treatments for hearing loss and balance disorders.

A research team led by Eri Hashino, Ph.D., Ruth C. Holton Professor of Otolaryngology at Indiana University School of Medicine, reported that by using a three-dimensional cell culture method, they were able to coax stem cells to develop into inner-ear sensory epithelia-containing hair cells, supporting cells and neurons-that detect sound, head movements and gravity.

Dr. Hashino said that the team determined that the cells needed to be suspended as aggregates in a specialized culture medium, which provided an environment more like that found in the body during early development.

The team mimicked the early development process with a precisely timed use of several small molecules that prompted the stem cells to differentiate, from one stage to the next, into precursors of the inner ear.

Karl R. Koehler, B.A., the paper's first author and a graduate student in the medical neuroscience graduate program at the IU School of Medicine, said that the three-dimensional suspension also provided important mechanical cues, such as the tension from the pull of cells on each other.

Koehler said that the 3-D culture allows the cells to self-organize into complex tissues using mechanical cues that are found during embryonic development.

Hashino said that the team was surprised to see that once stem cells are guided to become inner-ear precursors and placed in 3-D culture, these cells behave as if they knew not only how to become different cell types in the inner ear, but also how to self-organize into a pattern remarkably similar to the native inner ear.

He said that the team's initial goal was to make inner-ear precursors in culture, but when we did testing we found thousands of hair cells in a culture dish.

Electrophysiology testing further proved that those hair cells generated from stem cells were functional, and were the type that sense gravity and motion.

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Inner ear structure created from mouse stem cells

Stem cell therapy results in dramatic decrease in blood sugar, improved sleep, increased energy levels and shoulder mobility, and improved libido. But StemGenics says patients must be tested first if theyre up to it By Marge C. Enriquez Philippine Daily Inquirer

OPERATION room maintains hospital standards.

Sam Fernandez (not his real name), a businessman in his late 50s, who underwent stem cell treatment, excitedly called his doctor, about its immediate effects. Although the benefits were supposed to be visible six to eight weeks after the procedure, the patient felt like a young man again in six days.

His doctor gave him intravenous therapy, directly injecting stem cell on the shoulder to address the chronic pains and the penis for erectile dysfunction. Aside from the dramatic decrease in blood sugar, improved sleep, increased energy levels and shoulder mobility, the patient reported increased libido. He claimed he was getting woody (slang for erection) every day that his wife couldnt keep up with him.

As the age management medicine trend, there are many hospitals and aesthetic centers offering stem cell treatment at the average price of P1.2 to P1.4 million. Accredited by the Department of Health, StemGenics not only offers medical technology that is unique to the clinic but also procedures at a reasonable price range of P500,000.

Repairing tissues

Dr. Eduardo Santos, president of StemGenics, said that stem cell therapy is just one of the three aims of a health program: There is repair, maintain and defend, he said.

He explained: Maintenance is a function of exercise, nutritional supplement and hormone support. Defense is a function of guarding the body against cancer and infection. You boost the immune system. The repair is the stem cell procedure, our anchor service. The stem cell regenerates the tissues. You reintegrate the organs which need to be repaired.

Stem cells used for repair are found in the bone marrow, blood, fat or adipose tissues and in other parts of the body. These cells are stimulated upon getting alerts on injury or inflammation. Their task is to precipitate the healing process when the body is injured. They send proteins to control the inflammation and refresh new cells, and engage new growth proteins. These cells are exchanging regenerative signals within the environment.

After birth, we have 80 to 100 million stem cells, said Santos. Over time, they decrease. By mid-30s, the count is down to 25 million. You wont have enough to heal as fast as you were younger. That is when aging happens. That is why disease associated with aging comes inheart conditions, dementia, decreased function of kidney and liver.

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How stem cells increase libido and enhance looks

ANN ARBOR A major reason that breast cancer returns after treatment and spreads to other parts of the body is that current chemotherapy and radiation treatments do not kill the cancer stem cells.

That premise provides the basis for a clinical trial open at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center and two other sites testing a drug that has been found in laboratory studies to attack cancer stem cells. The drug, reparixin, will be used in combination with standard chemotherapy.

This is one of only a few trials testing stem cell directed therapies in combination with chemotherapy in breast cancer, says principal investigator Dr. Anne Schott, associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan. Combining chemotherapy with stem cell therapy has the potential to lengthen remissions for women with advanced breast cancer.

Cancer stem cells are the small number of cells within a tumor that fuel its growth and spread.

The phase Ib study will test reparixin, which is taken orally, along with the chemotherapy drug paclitaxel in women with HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer. The study is primarily intended to test how patients tolerate this drug combination, but researchers will also look at how reparixin appears to be impacting markers for cancer stem cells and signs of inflammation. The study will also look at how effective this treatment combination is at controlling the cancer and impacting survival.

The clinical trial stems from laboratory research at U-M that identified a receptor called CXCR1 on the cancer stem cells that triggers growth of stem cells in response to inflammation and tissue damage. Adding reparixin to chemotherapy in laboratory studies specifically targeted and killed breast cancer stem cells by blocking CXCR1.

Mice treated with reparixin or the combination of reparixin and chemotherapy had dramatically fewer cancer stem cells than those treated with chemotherapy alone. In addition, reparixin-treated mice developed significantly fewer metastases than mice treated with chemotherapy alone.

FYI

According to the American Cancer Society, 234,580 Americans will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year and 40,030 will die from the disease.

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ANN ARBOR: University of Michigan breast cancer clinical trial looks at targeting cancer stem cells

July 12, 2013 A new, noninvasive technique for tracking stem cells after transplantation -- developed by a cross-disciplinary team of radiologists, chemists, statisticians and materials scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine -- could help surgeons determine whether a procedure to repair injured or worn-out knees is successful.

The technique, described in a study to be published online July 12 in Radiology, relies on an imaging agent already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for an entirely different purpose: anemia treatment. Although this study used rodents, the approach is likely to be adapted for use in humans this fall as part of a clinical trial in which mesenchymal stem cells will be delivered to the site of patients' knee injuries. Mesenchymal stem cells are capable of differentiating into bone and cartilage, as well as muscle, fat and tendon, but not into the other cell types that populate the body.

Every year, arthritis accounts for 44 million outpatient visits and 700,000 knee-replacement procedures. But the early repair of cartilage defects in young patients may prevent further deterioration of the joint and the need for knee replacement later in life, said the study's senior author, Heike Daldrup-Link, MD, PhD, an associate professor of radiology and clinician who splits her time between research and treating pediatric patients.

Mesenchymal stem cells have been used with some success in cartilage-repair procedures. "These cells can be easily derived from bone marrow of patients who are going to undergo the knee-repair procedure," said Daldrup-Link, a member of the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford. "And they can differentiate into the real-life tissues that compose our joints. But here, too, things can go wrong. The newly transferred cells might fail to engraft, or die. They might migrate away. They could develop into tissues other than cartilage, most commonly fibrous scar tissue."

Relatively few transplanted cells go the distance. The ability to monitor the cells' engraftment after they are deposited at a patient's knee-injury site is therefore essential. With the new technique, magnetic resonance imaging can visualize stem cells for several weeks after they have been implanted, giving orthopaedic surgeons a better sense of whether the transplantation was successful.

Until now, the only ways of labeling mesenchymal stem cells so that they could be noninvasively imaged have required their manipulation in the laboratory. Upon extraction, the delicate cells have to be given to lab personnel, incubated with contrast agents, spun in a centrifuge and washed and returned to the surgeons, who then transplant the cells into a patient.

The new technique involves labeling the cells before extraction, while they reside in the donor's bone marrow. For the study, lead authors Aman Khurana, MD, a postdoctoral scholar, and Fanny Chapelin, a research associate, injected ferumoxytol, an FDA-licensed anemia treatment composed of iron-oxide nanoparticles, into rats prior to extracting bone marrow from them. Then, after enriching the mixture for mesenchymal stem cells, the investigators injected it into the sites of knee injuries in recipient rats. They followed the implanted cells' progress for up to four weeks, comparing the results with those obtained both from cells labeled in laboratory dishes and from unlabeled cells.

Daldrup-Link and others previously have used ferumoxytol for stem-cell labeling in a dish. However, mesenchymal stem cells in a laboratory dish take up very little of this substance. Interestingly, the researchers showed in a series of experiments that, ensconced in donor rats' bone marrow, the same cells are avid ferumoxytol absorbers. Even several weeks after transplantation into the recipient rats' knees, the mesenchymal stem cells retain enough iron to provide a strong MRI signal.

The new labeling technique alleviates the risks of contamination introduced when cells are labeled via manipulations in a laboratory dish -- a major regulatory concern, said Daldrup-Link -- as well as of a substantial loss of the delicate cells due to their extensive manipulation. It also allows for the immediate transfer of cells from a patient's bone marrow to the site of that patient's own knee injury.

That makes the technique useful in an autologous transplantation procedure, in which cells are extracted from a patient for the purpose of being delivered to another site during the same surgery. Jason Dragoo, MD, associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at the medical school and head team physician for the Stanford football program, plans to initiate a clinical trial this autumn whereby patients in need of knee repair will be treated with mesenchymal stem cells taken from their own bone marrow.

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Injecting iron supplement lets scientists track transplanted stem cells