Category Archives: Stem Cells

Washington, April 11 : Researchers have found that therapy with cardiopoietic (cardiogenically-instructed) or "smart" stem cells can improve heart health for people suffering from heart failure.

This is the first application in patients of lineage-guided stem cells for targeted regeneration of a failing organ, paving the way to development of next generation regenerative medicine solutions.

The multi-center, randomized Cardiopoietic stem cell therapy in heart failure (C-CURE) trial involved heart failure patients from Belgium, Switzerland and Serbia.

Patients in the control group received standard care for heart failure in accordance with established guidelines. Patients in the cell therapy arm received, in addition to standard care, cardiopoietic stem cells - a first-in-class biotherapeutic. In this process, bone marrow was harvested from the top of the patient's hip, and isolated stem cells were treated with a protein cocktail to replicate natural cues of heart development.

Derived cardiopoietic stem cells were then injected into the patient's heart.

"The cells underwent an innovative treatment to optimize their repair capacity," said Andre Terzic, M.D., Ph.D., study senior author and director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Regenerative Medicine.

"This study helps us move beyond the science fiction notion of stem cell research, providing clinical evidence for a new approach in cardiovascular regenerative medicine," the researcher stated.

Every patient in the stem cell treatment group improved. Heart pumping function improved in each patient within six months following cardiopoietic stem cell treatment. In addition, patients experienced improved fitness and were able to walk longer distances than before stem cell therapy.

"The benefit to patients who received cardiopoietic stem cell therapy was significant," Dr. Terzic said.

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'Smart' stem cells repair damage from heart failure

by Elizabeth Dunbar, Minnesota Public Radio

April 11, 2013

ST. PAUL, Minn. Treating heart failure patients with a special type of stem cell can improve their condition, according to a new Mayo Clinic study published this week.

The researchers used proteins to instruct the stem cells to behave like heart cells. All of the 45 patients in the clinical trial who received the "smart" stem cells saw more improvements in heart health than another group of patients who were given the standard treatments for heart failure.

The stem cell group's hearts were able to pump more robustly and the patients showed improvements in physical fitness, such as being able to walk longer distances than the patients who didn't receive the cells.

Dr. Andre Terzic, who led the research and is director of Mayo's Center for Regenerative Medicine, said it is the first published study in which smart stem cells were tested on humans.

"I think it's an exciting time where regenerative medicine is no longer science fiction but it's increasingly becoming considered as a viable option for our patients, in particular the patients [who] have many unmet needs that current therapies cannot address," Terzic said.

Terzic said the treatment will be tested on a group of 300 patients before researchers ask federal regulators to approve it, but he said he is hopeful because there were no patients in the current study who saw negative results. The study is published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Terzic said he also thinks the concept can be applied to other conditions.

"It will be, for example, fantastic to see cells instructed to be more neuron-like, to maybe go after some of the neurological disorders, or to be more bone-like to help an orthopedic surgery and so on," he said.

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Mayo: 'Smart' stem cells for heart failure patients

A horse is given an injection of stem cells in a bid to promote healing in a tendon injury.

Lauren Schnabel/Jessica Cross/Cornell Univ.

Patients seeking unproven stem-cell therapies in the United States often run up against government restrictions. But Vintage Vinty Mark of Lovettsville, Virginia, had no difficulty getting such injections to treat an injured tendon in his leg. The leg improved dramatically, and Vinty went back to training to be a racehorse.

New guidance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could, however, soon rein in veterinary uses of stem cells, a practice that has exploded in the United States over the past decade, even though most therapies are unproven. Many researchers and veterinarians say that the guidance, a draft of which the agency plans to issue by the end of the year, is overdue. But others worry that FDA interference could hamper research that could benefit animals and their human companions.

In the absence of clear regulations, the industry has burgeoned. Vet-Stem, a company based in Poway, California, has provided stem-cell treatments to more than 5,000 horses, 4,300 dogs and 120 cats since treating its first patient in 2004. Kits provided by MediVet America, based in Nicholasville, Kentucky, have been used to produce stem-cell injections for more than 10,000 horses since 2010. University veterinary departments, independently or through spin-off companies, have offered such services to thousands more animals. Veterinarians send patients tissue samples to the centres to have cells extracted or, increasingly, turn to kits that allow them to extract the cells in-house.

Stem cells are most often used to treat horses, dogs and cats, but clinicians have also sought to use them to repair a lumbar fracture in a Bengal tiger and arthritis in pigs. Researchers have also found stem cells in the fat of bottlenose dolphins, raising hopes for treating the marine-mammal versions of liver disease and type 2 diabetes. Theres not a large vet practice thats not using them, says Wesley Sutter, a veterinarian at Lexington Equine Surgery and Sports Medicine in Kentucky. Some claim [the treatment] cures everything.

Many veterinarians offer unproven stem-cell therapies to satisfy demanding customers, says Dori Borjesson, who specializes in veterinary medicine at the University of California, Davis. Clinicians are sucked into giving treatment even when theres not research to back up uses, she says.

Like the treatments sought by humans, most of those used in animals involve mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), which can mature into a wide variety of cell types, including bone and cartilage, and have been shown to have anti-inflammatory and other beneficial effects. MSCs are extracted from fat or bone marrow and can be cultured or prepared for injection in concentrated form.

The FDAs position on the use of MSCs in humans is clear. It says that the cells are drugs and therefore must be proved safe and effective before they can be used in treatment, except under certain conditions. No MSC treatments have been approved. But the FDA has different regulations for veterinary medicine, and these do not clearly address MSCs. The agency has not approved any veterinary stem-cell therapies, but neither has it cracked down on any. This is in stark contrast to its high-profile actions against purveyors of unproven human stem-cell treatments, such as Celltex Therapeutics of Sugar Land, Texas,which treated patients with MSCs until the FDA stepped in last September.

That doesnt mean that the agency is not concerned, says Lynne Boxer, a veterinary medical officer in the FDAs Office of New Animal Drug Evaluation in Rockville, Maryland. As with any type of drug product, there are risks and benefits, she says. With stem cells, there is the potential for disease transmission and tumour formation. She declines, however, to say whether current practices are against FDA rules, or to elaborate on what the new draft guidance is likely to contain.

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Stem cells boom in vet clinics

Washington, April 7 (ANI): Researchers from the University of Michigan (UM) have reportedly discovered a new way to overcome one of the major obstacles to growing new organs-replacement hearts, lungs and kidneys.

Those replacement organs often fail because of the difficulties associated with building blood vessels in order to keep their tissues alive.

Andrew Putnam, U-M associate professor of biomedical engineering, and his colleagues have revealed why one of the leading approaches to building blood vessels isn't consistently working: It's making leaky tubes. They also demonstrated how adult stem cells could solve this problem.

Today, biomedical researchers are taking two main approaches to growing new capillaries, the smallest blood vessels and those responsible for exchanging oxygen, carbon dioxide and nutrients between blood and muscles or organs.

One group of researchers is developing drug compounds that would signal existing vessels to branch into new tributaries. These compounds-generally protein growth factors-mimic how cancerous tumor cells recruit blood vessels.

The other group, which includes the U-M team, is using a cell-based method. This technique involves injecting cells within a scaffolding carrier near the spot where you want new capillaries to materialize. In Putnam's approach, they deliver endothelial cells, which make up the vessel lining and supporting cells. Their scaffolding carrier is fibrin, a protein in the human body that helps blood clot.

"The cells know what to do. You can take these things and mix them and put them in an animal. Literally, it's as easy as a simple injection and over a few days, they spontaneously form new vessels and the animals' own vasculature connects to them," Putnam said.

But it turns out these vessels don't always thrive. The U-M team aimed to figure out why. In reading previously published findings, Putnam noticed that researchers used "a mishmash of support cells," and the field had paid little attention to which ones work best. So that's where he and his colleagues focused.

In their experiments, they mixed three recipes of blood vessel starter solutions, each with a different commonly used supporting cell type: lung fibroblasts, adult stem cells from fat and adult stem cells from bone marrow. They also made a version with no supporting cells at all. They injected each solution under the skin of mice, and allowed the new blood vessels to form over a period of two weeks.

At various points in time, they injected a tracer dye into the animals' circulation to help them see how well the engineered capillaries held blood, and whether they were connected to the animals' existing vessel networks.

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Patients' own stem cells could build better blood vessels, improve tissue engineering

Washington, April 7 (ANI): Researchers at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry and New York-based NeoStem Inc. are all set for the first known human trial to use embryonic-like stem cells collected from adult cells to grow bone.

The cells technology, called VSEL stem cells, or very small embryonic-like stem cells, are derived from adults-not fetuses. This eliminates ethical arguments and potential side effects associated with using actual embryonic stem cells derived from a fetus, according to researchers at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry and New York-based NeoStem Inc.

The research partners hypothesize that the VSEL stem cells, which mimic properties of embryonic stem cells, can provide a minimally invasive way to speed painful bone regeneration for dental patients and others with bone trauma.

U-M's role in the study involves design, patient care and data analysis, while NeoStem provides the cells and patented technology to purify the special stem cells.

Study leaders include Russell Taichman, U-M professor of dentistry; Laurie McCauley, professor and newly named dean of the U-M Dental School; and Denis Rodgerson, director of grants and academic liaisons for NeoStem. U-M's work will take place at the Michigan Center for Oral Health Research and the U-M Health System.

"Within a year, researchers hope to begin recruiting roughly 50 patients who need a tooth extraction and a dental implant," Taichman said.

Before extracting the tooth, U-M researchers harvest the patient's cells, and then NeoStem's VSEL technology is used to purify and isolate those VSEL stem cells from the patient's other cells.

This allows U-M researchers to implant pure populations of the VSEL stem cells back into test patients. Control patients receive their own cells, not the VSELs. After the new bone grows, researchers remove a small portion of it to analyze, and replace it with an implant.

"We're taking advantage of the time between extraction and implant to see if these cells will expedite healing time and produce better quality bone," Taichman said.

"They are natural cells that are already in your body, but NeoStem's technology concentrates them so that we can place a higher quantity of them onto the wound site," he added.

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Embryonic-like stem cells collected from adults to grow bone

Image shows adult human fibroblast cells with intracellular proteins involved in adhesion of these cells to an extracellular matrix. These fibroblasts are converted to human induced pluripotent stem cells through a reprogramming process during which restructuring of the adhesion proteins takes place. Credit: Ankur Singh

A new separation process that depends on an easily-distinguished physical difference in adhesive forces among cells could help expand production of stem cells generated through cell reprogramming. By facilitating new research, the separation process could also lead to improvements in the reprogramming technique itself and help scientists model certain disease processes.

The reprogramming technique allows a small percentage of cells often taken from the skin or blood to become human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) capable of producing a wide range of other cell types. Using cells taken from a patient's own body, the reprogramming technique might one day enable regenerative therapies that could, for example, provide new heart cells for treating cardiovascular disorders or new neurons for treating Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease.

But the cell reprogramming technique is inefficient, generating mixtures in which the cells of interest make up just a small percentage of the total volume. Separating out the pluripotent stem cells is now time-consuming and requires a level of skill that could limit use of the technique and hold back the potential therapies.

To address the problem, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated a tunable process that separates cells according to the degree to which they adhere to a substrate inside a tiny microfluidic device. The adhesion properties of the hiPSCs differ significantly from those of the cells with which they are mixed, allowing the potentially-therapeutic cells to be separated to as much as 99 percent purity.

The high-throughput separation process, which takes less than 10 minutes to perform, does not rely on labeling technologies such as antibodies. Because it allows separation of intact cell colonies, it avoids damaging the cells, allowing a cell survival rate greater than 80 percent. The resulting cells retain normal transcriptional profiles, differentiation potential and karyotype.

"The principle of the separation is based on the physical phenomenon of adhesion strength, which is controlled by the underlying biology," said Andrs Garca, the study's principal investigator and a professor in Georgia Tech's Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. "This is a very powerful platform technology because it is easy to implement and easy to scale up."

The separation process will be described April 7 in the advance online publication of the journal Nature Methods. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), supplemented by funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

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Image shows a close-up view of a microfluidic device that exploits the differences in adhesion strength between derived stem cells and contaminating cell types in a heterogeneous culture to selectively isolate cells of interest using fluid shear forces. Credit: Gary Meek

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Adhesive force differences enable separation of stem cells to advance therapies

Apr. 4, 2013 For many patients the removal of several centimetres of bone from the lower leg following a serious injury or a tumour extraction is only the beginning of a long-lasting ordeal. Autologous stem cells have been found to accelerate and boost the healing process. Surgeons at the RUB clinic Bergmannsheil have achieved promising results: without stem cells, it takes on average 49 days for one centimetre of bone to regrow; with stem cells, that period has been reduced to 37 days.

In the past, large bone defect inevitably led to an amputation. Today, the arm or leg is stabilised in an external support, and a transport wire is pulled through the marrow of the intact part of the injured bone. Once the soft tissue surrounding the injury is healed, the surgeons cut the healthy part of the bone into two. The transport wire is affixed to the winches of a ring fixator that is attached around the leg. Using a sophisticated cable-pull system, the previously detached part of the bone is slowly pulled either downwards or upwards along the gap in the bone until it arrives and docks at the other end. During the pulling stage, the periosteum of the bone that had been pulled apart had been continuously stretched. Thus, a periosteum tube is created in the gap behind the relocated portion of the bone. Inside that tube, the new bone can regenerate. This process, however, is extremely tedious and the treatment fails in every firth case.

Processing autologous stem cells in the operating theatre

Surgeons at the RUB clinic Bergmannsheil attempt to optimise the healing process by applying autologous stem cells therapy. Depending on the requirements, stem cells are capable of evolving into different types of tissue cells, including so-called osteoblasts -- cells that are responsible for bone formation. Adult stem cells such as are deployed in the process can be found in the bone marrow of adults. "We harvest them by inserting a hollow needle into the iliac crest," explains PD Dr Dominik Seybold, managing consultant at the clinic.

The stem cells are prepared for application directly on location. Under x-ray control, the surgeons inject six to eight millilitres of the concentrated fluid into the centre of the periosteum tube. X-ray controls are routinely performed to monitor the recovery progress. To date, the RUB physicians have applied this therapy in 20 cases. "This is not enough to be statistically relevant," admits Dr Seybold. Nevertheless, the researchers find the results very encouraging: whilst the bone regeneration process without stem cells used to take 49 days on average, it has been reduced to 37 days on average thanks to the new therapy method. So far, RUB scientists have been treating bone defects with an average length of eight centimetres -- consequently, the patients thus recovered, on average, three months sooner.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum, via AlphaGalileo.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Stem cells fill gaps in bones