Category Archives: Stem Cells

Jan. 3, 2013 When a young athlete dies unexpectedly on the basketball court or the football field, it's both shocking and tragic. Now Stanford University School of Medicine researchers have, for the first time, identified the molecular basis for a condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that is the most common cause for this type of sudden cardiac death.

To do so, the Stanford scientists created induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, from the skin cells of 10 members of a family with a genetic mutation that causes the condition. The researchers then coaxed the cells to become heart muscle cells so they could closely study the cells' behavior and responsiveness to the chemical and electrical signals that keep a heart beating normally. They also used these bioengineered heart cells to quickly pinpoint the drugs most likely to be effective in human patients and to study their potential as preventive medications.

"For obvious reasons, it's difficult to get primary human heart tissue from living patients for study," said cardiologist and stem cell researcher Joseph Wu, MD, PhD. "Moreover, animal hearts are not ideal substitutes either because they contract differently and have a different composition than human hearts. As a result, it has been difficult to show the specific cause of heart failure, whether it's due to enlargement of the organ or if it's caused by abnormalities at the single-cell level."

The research highlights what many experts consider to be some of the main advantages of iPS cells -- the ability to quickly create patient-specific cells of nearly any tissue type for study, as well as to allow rapid and safe drug screening.

Wu, an associate professor of medicine and the co-director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, is the senior author of the research, published Jan. 3 in Cell Stem Cell. Postdoctoral scholars Feng Lan, PhD, and Ping Liang, PhD, and graduate student Andrew Lee are co-first authors of the work.

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which affects about 0.2 to 0.5 percent of the population, is a condition in which the muscle of the heart is abnormally thickened without any obvious physiological cause. It is also a leading cause of sudden cardiac death in young, seemingly healthy athletes. Clinical symptoms, including arrhythmia and chest pain when exercising, typically emerge in late teenage years or young adulthood, but can occur at nearly any age.

Although clinicians have known for some time that the disorder can be caused by any one of several genetic mutations, until now it has not been clear how these mutations cause the thickening and eventual failure of the heart muscle.

The Stanford team compared cells from family members of a newly diagnosed 53-year-old woman with a mutation in the MYH7 gene, which partially encodes for a protein in the heart called beta myosin. Mutations in this gene have previously been associated with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Four of the woman's eight children had inherited the mutant copy of the gene from their mother; the other four carried two healthy copies of the gene.

The father of the children did not have the mutation.

The two oldest affected children, aged 21 and 18, displayed slightly enlarged hearts; the youngest affected children, aged 14 and 10, displayed a slight increase in blood volume (another symptom of the condition).

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Researchers use stem cells to pinpoint cause of common type of sudden cardiac death

CTVNews.ca Staff Published Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2013 10:05PM EST

Wishing that stubborn ring of belly fat would just disappear?

Think twice about willing it away completely. Physicians at a Toronto clinic now consider it biological insurance that can be stored for a rainy day.

Adisave, a clinic specializing in stem-cell harvesting, has begun offering storage of stem cells from human body fat, claiming the biological material can be used as a medical tool to repair and rejuvenate the body.

Debra Seed opted for liposuction treatment to remove fat from her body and is paying $1,700 to have stem cells extracted, frozen and stored at Adisave-- the first clinic in the country to offer fat stem cell banking.

They can put them back in my body and rejuvenate the bad cells, she said.

Dr. Sammy Sliwin, a plastic surgeon and medical director at Adisave, has been working in fat grafting since 1992. He began doing research on mesenchymal stem cells in 2008.

According to Sliwin, fat, or adipose tissue, contains 500 times more stem cells compared to bone marrow. Studies suggest they may have the power to repair injuries, damaged hearts and treat illness, he said.

Its the most plentiful source of stem cells in the body, he said. And because of its ease of harvesting, for regenerative medicine, its the ideal source of stem cells.

The research is still unproven, so Adisave now wants to launch two studies to see if the stem cells derived from fat can repair scars and heal joints damaged by arthritis.

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Canadian clinic first in country to harvest stem cells derived from body fat

Newswise KANSAS CITY, MOUnlike less versatile muscle or nerve cells, embryonic stem cells are by definition equipped to assume any cellular role. Scientists call this flexibility pluripotency, meaning that as an organism develops, stem cells must be ready at a moments notice to activate highly diverse gene expression programs used to turn them into blood, brain, or kidney cells.

Scientists from the lab of Stowers Investigator Ali Shilatifard, Ph.D., report in the December 27, 2012 online issue of Cell that one way cells stay so plastic is by stationing a protein called Ell3 at stretches of DNA known as enhancers required to activate a neighboring gene. Their findings suggest that Ell3 parked at the enhancer of a developmentally regulated gene, even one that is silent, primes it for future expression. This finding is significant as many of these same genes are abnormally switched on in cancer.

We now know that some enhancer misregulation is involved in the pathogenesis of solid and hematological malignances, says Shilatifard. But a problem in the field has been how to identify inactive or poised enhancer elements. Our discovery that Ell3 interacts with enhancers in ES cells gives us a hand-hold to identify and to study them.

In 2000, Shilatifard identified Ell3 as the third member of the Ell (for Eleven-nineteen lysine-rich leukemia gene) family of elongation factors, proteins that increase the rate at which genes are expressed. At the time, we didnt think much of Ell3 because it was highly expressed in testes, says Shilatifard, noting that then people thought that sperm were merely vessels used to carry paternal DNA to an egg and that associated factors would have little relevance to the regulation of future gene expression in the resulting embryo.

But a few years back, a curious Open University graduate student working in the Shilatifard lab, Chengqi Lin, started exploring a potential function for the neglected gene by initiating a global search for regions occupied by Ell3 in the genome of mouse embryonic stem cells. His search in collaboration with a bioinformatician in the Shilatifard lab, Alexander S. Garruss, revealed that Ell3 sits on more than 5,000 enhancers, including many that regulate genes governing stem cell maturation into spinal cord, kidney, and blood cells.

What was interesting was that Ell3 marked enhancers that are active and inactive, as well as enhancers that are known as poised, says Lin, referring to a transition state from inactive to active. That indicated that Ell3s major function might be to prime activation of genes that are just about to be expressed during development.

The fact that silent genes can be primed for expression was no surprise: researchers knew that the enzymatic machine that copies DNA into the RNA blueprint for proteinsa protein called Pol IIoften pauses at the start of a gene, presumably revving its engine in preparation to jump across the genetic start gate in response to a developmental signal. However, Shilatifard and colleagues showed several years ago that paused Pol II is not a prerequisite for rapid transcriptional induction.

The surprise came when researchers used a molecular trick to deplete mouse ES cells of Ell3 and then did a genomic survey. They found that paused Pol II vanished from the start sites of many genes in Ell3-deficient cells. This means that not only does Ell3 preferentially mark stem enhancers, but also that its presence there is necessary to keep an idling Pol II ready for action.

Most of the current study defines how, when the developmental time is right, enhancer-bound Ell3 cooperates with components of a big-boss elongation factor called the Super Elongation Complex to release Pol II from the start gate, allowing the expression of genes required for stem cell differentiation. Critical among those findings is their observation that mouse stem cells depleted of Ell3 failed to activate genes expressed in mature cell types.

These results alone are cause for any lab to start chilling the champagne, yet a surprising coda to the study, leaves readers with yet another revelation. Collaborating with Fengli Guo, Ph.D., head of the Stowers electron microscopy core, the team prepared highly magnified images of mouse sperm and observed that both Ell3 and Pol II were present, in sperm nuclei.

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Investigators' Study Hints That Stem Cells Prepare for Maturity Much Earlier Than Anticipated

Hemp, Inc. is proud to announce the naming of BioSwan, Inc., a new spin-off of Hemp, Inc., dedicated to improving the quality of life via its proprietary all natural formulations and modalities designed to increase the bodys production of pluripotent adult stem cells, according to the Kimble Group.

Las Vegas, NV (PRWEB) December 21, 2012

Bruce Perlowin, CEO of Hemp, Inc., stated, "This could be an enormous benefit to Hemp, Inc. shareholders. While our research uncovered the valuable herbal blends that increase the specific stem cells, it is outside of Hemps core business and detracts from the management teams ability to focus. By spinning it off, the shareholders receive stock in BioSwan, Inc. This spinoff will have a dedicated and focused management team completely separate from Hemp, Inc. thereby allowing Hemp, Inc. improved focus. Everyone wins."

The National Institute of Health resource for stem cell research defines Pluripotent as, The state of a single cell that is capable of differentiating into all tissues of an organism. Pluripotent adult stem cells are rare and generally small in number but can be found in a number of tissues.

Current adult stem cell research targets the capacity of the cells to divide or self-renew indefinitely. Bone marrow stem cell, whose quantity declines with age, has been found to be one of the rich sources of adult stem cells, and has been used in treating Spinal cord injury, Liver Cirrhosis, Chronic Limb Ischemia, and Endstage heart failure. Adult stem cell treatments have been successfully used for many years to treat leukemia and related bone/blood cancers through bone marrow transplants. Adult stem cells are also used in veterinary medicine to treat tendon and ligament injuries in horses.

The National Institute of Health website states: Imagine if doctors were able to reverse age-related, chronic degeneration and bring the body back to its original health and vigor. The website continues, A study in mice found that function could be restored to injured muscle tissue by reactivating existing stem cells rather than transplanting new ones and that, The ability to reactivate dormant adult stem cells continues to be investigated.

Hemp, Inc. President David Tobias continued, "Aging is an issue that effects everyone, and it is gratifying to be able to participate and assist in a venture to improve health and the quality of life."

Lynita Kimble The Kimble Group, LLC (202) 695-2077 Email Information

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Hemp, Inc. Announces BioSwan, Inc. -- An Update on One of its Spinoffs