Category Archives: Stem Cells

Newswise LOS ANGELES (March 10, 2013) Cedars-Sinai Medical Center will commemorate Brain Awareness Week, March 11-17, with educational programs featuring robotic technology that enables doctors to check on their patients from home, stem cell research that may revolutionize many medical therapies, and some of the top experts in nanotechnology including Roger Tsien, PhD, who received the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Brainworks, 10 a.m. to 1:10 p.m., March 11, Harvey Morse Auditorium

A robotic assistant will be a special guest at the Brainworks program for 130 seventh- and eighth-graders. Dependable, focused and able to perform tasks at any time, 24 hours a day, Robot-Doc has become a key member of the Neuroscience Critical Care Unit.

The InTouch Health RP-7i robot enables several doctors to teleconference, bringing them together by remote presence to collaborate in the Critical Care Unit. Students attending Brainworks part of Cedars-Sinais commemoration of Brain Awareness Week March 11 to 17 will be able to drive and interact with the RP-7i and learn more about these devices from neurointensive care experts and a representative of InTouch Health.

Brainworks came about because we wanted to expose as many young minds as possible to how exciting science is and especially how fascinating the brain is, said Keith L. Black, MD, professor and chair of the Department of Neurosurgery, who started the program in 1998.

Patrick D. Lyden, MD, chair of the Department of Neurology, will be the keynote speaker. Lyden, director of the Stroke Program and the Carmen and Louis Warschaw Chair in Neurology, is widely known for his leadership in stroke research and treatment.

Brainworks attendees will get hands-on experience as they visit interactive areas such as: a virtual surgery station with 3-D imaging and microscope with phantom skull; a surgical instrumentation station with tools used in the operating room; a neuropathology station with real sheep brains and microscope slides of various tumor types; a rehabilitation and healing station where students learn what its like to apply and receive therapy; a suture station that gives students the chance to mend wounds; a brain and spine instrumentation station showing some of the hardware used in treatment; and a research station where students can see and participate in DNA, tumor and laser experiments.

Introduction to the World of Stem Cells, 5 to 7 p.m., March 14, Harvey Morse Auditorium

As many as 130 high school students, parents and teachers will learn from research scientists and clinicians the basics of stem cells, which may revolutionize many medical therapies in coming years. Sessions will include: An introduction to stem cells and issues related to different types; differing scientific opinions, ethical issues and how scientists are working to resolve conflicts; adult stem cells versus embryonic stem cells for therapy; careers related to stem cells; and a stem cell Jeopardy! game.

The program will be led by John S. Yu, MD, vice chair of the Department of Neurosurgery and director of surgical neuro-oncology, and Dwain Morris-Irvin, PhD, neural stem cell research scientist and principal investigator with the Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute at Cedars-Sinai. Ahmed Ibrahim, who has a masters degree in public health and is in Cedars-Sinais Graduate Program in Biomedical Science and Translational Medicine, also will speak. As a high school student, Ibrahim participated in a summer research project at Cedars-Sinai. He now conducts stem cell research at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute.

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Robotic Assistants, Stem Cells , Nanotechnology: Cedars-Sinai Programs for Students and Professionals During Brain ...

Skin cells can be reprogrammed into the type of stem cells that can grow into any tissue, bone or body part in a process that doesnt involve human eggs or embryos, a UCLA researcher told scientists and students Friday at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.

William Lowry, a professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology, was part of the first research team in California that reprogrammed adult stem cells into the pluripotent cells that are naturally found in embryos. Because they can grow into any kind of human cell and can also replicate themselves, pluripotent stem cells may one day be used to replaced injured or diseased cells or to create new medicines.

In theory you should be able to make them from anybody, at any time of life, from any tissue, he said of reprogramming at a CLU symposium Friday on new stem cell research.

Reprogramming avoids the controversies triggered by using stored embryos for stem cells, although embryonic cells are still part of the ongoing research at UCLA. It also opens the possibility of allowing researchers to use a persons own skin cells to create embryonic-like stem cells that could be used to treat that same persons injury or illness.

The tailor-made cells should eliminate the risk of the body identifying the new cells as foreign entities and rejecting them, Lowry said.

His research is aimed at using reprogrammed stem cells to recreate a disease in a petri dish, allowing researchers to better understand why certain illnesses kill specific kinds of cells. The studies could lead to new medicines and better ways to assess the effectiveness of new drugs.

But there are barriers. Scientists are still figuring out how to make a disease created in a laboratory that acts the same way as, say, how Lou Gehrigs disease affects nerve cells in the brain. Theyre trying to understand how the reprogrammed cells march through development. Early efforts have produced the kind of cells that would come from fetuses but not from adults.

Were not able to make cells that were born 60 years ago, he said.

The symposium focused on research at UCLA. Professor Hanna Mikkola leads a team studying how to turn pluripotent stem cells that are reprogrammed or come from early-stage embryos into blood stem cells.

The goal is to create cells tailored for a specific person in a process that could potentially help find cures to inherited diseases like sickle cell anemia. The scientists have had the most success in figuring out how to disrupt the process of making a blood stem cell.

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UCLA researchers explore cutting edge of stem cells

Mar. 8, 2013 A signaling molecule that helps stem cells survive in the naturally low-oxygen environment inside the bone marrow may hold clues to helping the cells survive when the going gets worse with age and disease, researchers report.

They hope the findings, reported in PLOS ONE, will result in better therapies to prevent bone loss in aging and enhance success of stem cell transplants for a wide variety of conditions from heart disease to cerebral palsy and cancer.

They've found that inside the usual, oxygen-poor niche of mesenchymal stem cells, stromal cell-derived factor-1, or SDF-1, turns on a survival pathway called autophagy that helps the cells stay in place and focused on making bone, said Dr. William D. Hill, stem cell researcher at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University and the study's corresponding author.

Unfortunately with age or disease, SDF-1 appears to change its tune, instead reducing stem cells' ability to survive and stay in the bone marrow, said Samuel Herberg, GRU graduate student and the study's first author. Additionally cells that do stay put may be less likely to make bone and more likely to turn into fat cells in the marrow.

The researchers believe it's the changes in the normal environment that come with age or illness, including diminished nutrition, that prompt SDF-1's shifting role.

"You put new cells in there and, all of the sudden, you put them in a neighborhood where they are being attacked," Hill said. "If we can somehow precondition the transplanted cells or modify the environment they are going into so they have higher levels of autophagy, they will survive that stress."

Autophagy is the consummate green, survival pathway, where the cell perpetuates itself by essentially eating itself over and over again, in the face of low food sources, other stress or needing to eliminate damaged or toxic product buildup. The researchers believe autophagy slows with age, so deadly trash starts piling up in and around cells, Hill said.

"Your cells normally have a reminder to take out the trash," said Dr. Carlos Isales, MCG endocrinologist and Clinical Director of the GRU Institute of Regenerative and Reparative Medicine. "That reminder, SDF-1, becomes inconsistent as you get older, so rather than being an activator of the trash signal, it becomes an inhibitor."

Herberg led efforts to genetically modify stem cells from mice to overexpress SDF-1 -- in fact the researchers were in the enviable position of being able to adjust expression up or down -- and control autophagy in their novel cells. They found that while SDF-1 didn't increase stem cell numbers, it protected stem cells hazards related to low oxygen and more by increasing autophagy while decreasing its antithesis, programmed cell death, or apoptosis.

"They get away with lower oxygen needs and lower nutrient needs and stem cells are able to survive in a hostile environment as they are attacked by damaging molecules like free radicals," Hill said. In fact, the cells can thrive.

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Signaling molecule may help stem cells focus on making bone despite age, disease

London, March 6 (ANI): Combining genetic repair with cellular reprogramming, researchers at the University of Minnesota's Lillehei Heart Institute have generated stem cells capable of muscle regeneration in a mouse model for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD).

The research, which provides proof-of-principle for the feasibility of combining induced pluripotent stem cell technology and genetic correction to treat muscular dystrophy, could present a major step forward in autologous cell-based therapies for DMD and similar conditions and should pave the way for testing the approach in reprogrammed human pluripotent cells from muscular dystrophy patients.

To achieve a meaningful, effective muscular dystrophy therapy in the mouse model, University of Minnesota researchers combined three groundbreaking technologies.

First, researchers reprogrammed skin cells into "pluripotent" cells - cells capable of differentiation into any of the mature cell types within an organism. The researchers generated pluripotent cells from the skin of mice that carry mutations in the dystrophin and utrophin genes, causing the mice to develop a severe case of muscular dystrophy, much like the type seen in human DMD patients. This provided a platform that would mimic what would theoretically occur in human models.

The second technology employed is a genetic correction tool developed at the University of Minnesota: the Sleeping Beauty Transposon, a piece of DNA that can jump into the human genome, carrying useful genes with it. Lillehei Heart Institute researchers used Sleeping Beauty to deliver a gene called "micro-utrophin" to the pluripotent cells they were attempting to differentiate.

Much like dystrophin, human micro-utrophin can support muscle fiber strength and prevent muscle fiber injury throughout the body. But one key difference between the two is in how each is perceived by the immune system. Because dystrophin is absent in muscular dystrophy patients, its presence can prompt a devastating immune system response. But in those same patients, utrophin is active and functional, making it essentially "invisible" to the immune system. This invisibility allows the micro-utrophin to replace the dystrophin and progress the process of building and repairing muscle fiber within the body.

The third technology utilized is a method to produce skeletal muscle stem cells from pluripotent cells - a process developed in the laboratory of Rita Perlingeiro, Ph.D., the principal investigator of the latest study.

Perlingeiro's technology involves giving pluripotent cells a short pulse of a muscle stem cell protein called Pax3. The Pax3 protein pushes the pluripotent cells to become muscle stem cells, and allows them to be expanded exponentially in number. The Pax3-induced muscle stem cells were then transplanted back into the same strain of muscular dystrophy mice from which the pluripotent stem cells were originally derived.

Combined, the platforms created muscle-generating stem cells that would not be rejected by the body's immune system. According to Perlingeiro, the transplanted cells performed well in the dystrophic mice, generating functional muscle and responding to muscle fiber injury.

"We were pleased to find the newly formed myofibers expressed the markers of the correction, including utrophin," said Perlingeiro, a Lillehei endowed scholar within the Lillehei Heart Institute and an associate professor in the University of Minnesota Medical School.

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Genetically corrected stem cells promote muscle regeneration in dystrophic mice