Category Archives: Stem Cells

Unveilling stem cells

LAWRENCE SERETSE Correspondent

Cryo-Save, the European company that intends to establish the first stem cell bank in Botswana says stem cells do not have just one function. They can themselves become or create other types of cells such as blood cells, brain cells, tissue cells, muscle cells and the like. Stem cells can be found in every person but they are much more numerous in the body of a foetus.

There are three types of stem cell banking namely, the baby stem cell banking which is the preservation and storage of cord blood and umbilical cord tissue. Adult stem cell banking is the preservation and storage of peripheral blood (from blood stream for bone marrow transplants) and fatty tissue stem cells.

The reproductive cell banking deals with the preservation and storage of eggs and sperm for future fertility treatments or artificial insemination purposes. Studying stem cells helped humans understand how they transform into the dazzling array of specialised cells that make us what we are. Some of the most serious medical conditions, such as cancer and birth defects, are caused by problems that occur somewhere in this process. A better understanding of normal cell development has allowed scientists to understand and perhaps correct the errors that cause these medical conditions. Many support stem cell research because it has the potential to provide solutions to a wide variety of medical conditions and diseases.

Stem cell research could even lead to a cure for some of the most traumatic injuries and diseases. Stem cell treatments cure over 70 diseases and disorders like Leukemia, Lymphoma, blood cancers, bone marrow disorders like Aplastic anaemia, sickle cell, Diabetes, Alzheimer's Disease, heart disease, stroke, birth defects, spinal cord injuries, ability to replace or repair organs and cancer.

This is just half of it. If one just looked at the benefits one might wonder why stem cell treatments are not in wide use. The shortcomings of stem cell research are often fears of what could result from such knowledge and the moral implications of using the stem cells. There are worries that humans should not try to play God. "Relating bodies have to pay extra caution and determine if we really need these banks. Again, some researchers may be coming to dig stem cells in Botswana, since there maybe restrictive laws in their countries.

"The unsuspecting citizens may end up giving up their stem cells for money," says Iqbal Chand, the CEO of Diagnofirm Medical Laboratories. He gave a scenario from recent publications that a patient in Berlin was cleared of HIV after stem cell treatment for leukemia.

"We do not even know how true it is and if it was the stem cells that cured his HIV. Even if it is, it is one person in a million so there is no assurance," Chand pointed out.

Another big issue with stem cells research is superstition. In most African communities, the umbilical cord must be buried after birth because it is believed that anyone with access to it could exert some spiritual influence on the child. This has led to uncertainty towards cord tissue and cord blood storage in most African societies. However, with the success of transplants making the headlines, more and more people are willing to donate adult stem cells to save lives.

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Unveilling stem cells

Researchers pull viable cells from bodies that had been dead for more than 2 weeks.

By Bob Grant | June 15, 2012

Wikimedia Commons, Robert Lawton

Stem cells stay alive and in a dormant state for more than 2 weeks after a person passes away, according to researchers in France. A team of scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris have successfully recovered viable stem cells from muscle tissue in dead bodies that had been kept at 4 degrees Celsius for 17 days, later using the cells to generate new, functional muscle cells. They report their findings in this weeks issue of Nature Communications.

Previously, researchers thought that stem cells could only remain viable in corpses for 1 or 2 days. But Pasteur Institute histologist and neuropathologist Fabrice Chrtien, senior author on the paper, said that stem cells may even remain viable for more than 17 days. Maybe they can also resist longer, he told LiveScience.

The stem cells recovered from the human corpses were in a dormant state, characterized by reduced metabolic activity and elevated levels of reactive oxygen species. Chrtien and his collaborators suggested that the low oxygen environment in which the cells sat likely contributed to their quiescence and subsequent retention of viability.

This discovery could form the basis of a new source, and more importantly new methods of conservation, for stem cells used to treat a number of pathologies, according to a statement from the Pasteur Institute announcing the discovery.

By Jef Akst

New research finds that older men have children and grandchildren with longer telomeres, pointing to possible health benefits of delayed reproduction.

By Tia Ghose

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Stem Cells from Corpses

London, June 15 : Scientists have revealed that some stem cells can lay dormant for more than two weeks in a dead person and then be revived to divide into new, functioning cells.

The research unlocks further knowledge about the versatility of these cells, touted as a future source to replenish damaged tissue.

"Remarkably, skeletal muscle stem cells can survive for 17 days in humans and 16 days in mice post-mortem, well beyond the one to two days currently thought," the Daily Mail quoted the statement of scientists.

The researchers led by Fabrice Chretien of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, found that the stem cells retained their ability to differentiate into perfectly functioning muscle cells.

"This discovery could form the basis of a new source, and more importantly new methods of conservation, for stem cells used to treat a number of pathologies," the researchers said.

Stem cells are infant cells that develop into the specialised tissues of the body.

The latest findings have sparked great excitement as they offer hopes of rebuilding organs damaged by disease or accident.

The Pasteur Institute team found that to survive in adverse conditions, skeletal muscle stem cells lower their metabolism to enter a dormant state, using less energy.

The team then also looked at stem cells taken from bone marrow, where blood cells are produced.

These remained viable for four days after death in lab mice and retained their ability to reconstitute tissue after a bone marrow transplant.

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Stem cells stay alive for 17 days in dead bodies

By Denise Mann HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, June 14 (HealthDay News) -- In what is being reported as a scientific first, Swedish doctors were able pair the groin vein of a dead donor with stem cells from a young girl and implant the healthy vein into the girl, improving both blood flow in her lower body and her quality of life.

The 10-year-old had a rare condition where her portal vein, which is located in the abdomen and tasked with carrying blood from the bowels and other abdominal organs to the liver, was blocked. If this vein is blocked, liver disease, heart failure and certain cancers may develop. The relatively rare condition may also cause weight loss, nausea and pain.

Details of the feat are published online June 14 in The Lancet.

U.S experts were quick to caution that the procedure has only been accomplished in one patient, but they agreed that it could be a game-changer with applications that go far beyond this particular condition.

In the procedure, the transplant team from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden first took a segment of the groin vein from a dead donor, and stripped it of all living cells. They then injected stem cells taken from the girl's own bone marrow into the remaining vein. Two weeks after this seeding, the newly grown graft was implanted in the girl.

There were no complications, and the procedure immediately restored normal blood flow. In the year following the operation, the girl grew taller and gained weight. Her blood flow later decreased, and she underwent a second vein replacement surgery a year after the first. Her quality of life has improved since the procedures, and she is now able to take increasingly long walks and participate in light gymnastics. Importantly, she is showing no sign of rejecting the new vein even though she is not taking any immunosuppressive drugs.

"The new stem cells-derived graft resulted not only in good blood flow rates and normal laboratory test values but also, in strikingly improved quality of life for the patient," wrote the team led by Dr. Michael Olausson, of Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg. "The work also establishes the feasibility and safety of a novel paradigm for treatment, in cases of venous insufficiency, obstructed veins or inadequate autologous [from the patient] veins."

Today, surgeons may approach such cases by harvesting veins from a patient's neck or leg to re-route around a blockage elsewhere. This can be traumatic and is associated with its own set of risks and complications. In addition, not everyone has healthy veins that can be used in this manner. This is where the new stem cell vein grafting procedure could play an important role.

"This is an interesting article and an exciting first step," said Dr. Scott Pilgrim, an attending pediatric cardiologist at Steven and Alexandra Cohen Children's Medical Center of New York, in New Hyde Park. "If this outcome turns out to be reproducible and is studied in a larger, defined population with a well-designed, controlled trial, I feel this advance could be a watershed moment in developing new, novel strategies for vascular and cardiothoracic surgeons."

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First stem cell vein implant helps young girl

June 14, 2012

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com

A successful transplant operation in Sweden points to a medical future where your doctor can grow a transplant organ from your own cells, making organ donation a thing of the past.

Doctors have now successfully transplanted a vein grown with a patients own stem cells without complications or the need for immunosuppressants, according to a report published this week in The Lancet. The patient was a 10-year-old girl in Sweden who was suffering from a potentially fatal blockage in the vein which drains blood from the intestines and spleen to the liver.

Last March, a team of doctors at the University of Gothenburg decided to grow the new blood vessel used to bypass the blocked vein instead of using an invasive neck or leg surgery to extract one of her own.

The young girl in this report was spared the trauma of having veins harvested from the deep neck or leg with the associated risk of lower limb disorders, and avoided the need for a liver or multivisceral transplantation, Martin Birchall and George Hamilton of University College London wrote in The Lancet.

To start the procedure, doctors took a three-inch section of a cadaver groin vein and stripped it of all living cells, leaving only an inert protein structure. The team then injected it with blood-forming stem cells taken from the girls bone marrow. After growing the vein for two weeks in an incubator, the stem cells had multiplied and converted into vein wall cells, to create a biologically-engineered replacement. The new vein was then implanted into the patient a year ago.

The new stem-cells derived graft resulted not only in good blood flow rates and normal laboratory test values but also, in strikingly improved quality of life for the patient, the report said.

In noting the success of the transplant, the doctors reported that the patient grew 2 inches and gained 11 pounds over the following year. In addition, her parents said that she was more physically active, had improved articulated speech, and had concentrated better on her studies.

The only major complication was the slight constriction of the vein nine months after the operation, which was corrected in a follow-up procedure. During the course of following up on the operation, scientists found no antibodies for the donor vein in the girls blood. This meant her body was not rejecting the transplant because it was recognized as being made of her own cells.

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Doctors Use Stem Cells To Grow Vein For Young Patient

LONDON (AP) For the first time doctors have successfully transplanted a vein grown with a patient's own stem cells, another example of scientists producing human body parts in the lab.

In this case, the patient was a 10-year-old girl in Sweden who was suffering from a severe vein blockage to her liver. Last March, the girl's doctors decided to make her a new blood vessel to bypass the blocked vein instead of using one of her own or considering a liver transplant.

They took a 9-centimeter (3 -inch) section of vein from a deceased donor, which was stripped of all its cells, leaving just a hollow tube. Using stem cells from the girl's bone marrow, scientists grew millions of cells to cover the vein, a process that took about two weeks. The new blood vessel was then transplanted into the patient.

Because the procedure used her own cells, the girl did not have to take any drugs to stop her immune system from attacking the new vein, as is usually the case in transplants involving donor tissue.

"This is the future for tissue engineering, where we can make tailor-made organs for patients," said Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson of the University of Gothenburg, one of the study's authors.

She and colleagues published the results of their work online Thursday in the British medical journal Lancet. The work was paid for by the Swedish government.

The science is still preliminary and one year after the vein was transplanted, it needed to be replaced with another lab-grown vein when doctors noticed the blood flow had dropped. Experts from University College London raised questions in an accompanying commentary about how cost-effective the procedure might be, citing "acute pressures" on health systems that might make these treatments impractical for many patients.

Sumitran-Holgersson estimated the cost at between $6,000 and $10,000.

Similar methods have already been used to make new windpipes and urethras for patients. Doctors in Poland have also made blood vessels grown from donated skin cells for dialysis patients.

Patients with the girl's condition are usually treated with a vein transplant from their own leg, a donated vein, or a liver transplant. Those options can be complicated in children and using a donated vein or liver also requires taking anti-rejection medicines.

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Doctors make new vein with girl's own stem cells

Researchers have found a way to delay the aging of stem cells a discovery that could pave the way for new strategies to treat age-related diseases.

Experts at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies discovered that the stem cells surroundings, known as niches, are linked to age-related loss of stem cells. These cells are essential to all life, both human and not, because they divide and renew themselves throughout life, helping cells of both young and old. The niche signals to the cells when help is needed to renew tissue. But as the stem cells age, they lose effectiveness.

This latest discovery could help aging stem cells retain their effectiveness. Researchers focused on the niches and found that restoring the signals helped reverse the cells aging. A protein in the niche, known as lmp, could play a part in the cells age-reversal process. Treatments in the future could be aimed at upping the production of lmp.

This research opens new avenues for drug development aimed at stimulating a patient's own stem cells to overcome the consequences of aging," said Hila Toledano, a lead author of the study and a former Salk researcher now at the University of Haifa in Israel.

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Major Stem-Cell Discovery

Scientists from the University of California have discovered a way to eliminate painful bone grafts by using purified fat stem cells to grow a bone. They claim that adipose, or fat, tissue is thought to be an ideal source of mesenchymal stem cells that can be developed into bone, cartilage, muscle and other tissues. These cells are plentiful and an easily be obtained through procedures like liposuction.

Traditionally, cells taken from fat had to be cultured for weeks to isolate the stem cells which could become bone. This method had lot of risk of developing infection and genetic instability. Another way to grow a bone was through stromal vascular fraction (SVF) method.

Now scientists have used a cell-sorting machine to isolate and purify human perivascular stem cells (hPSC) from adipose tissue and showed that the cells worked far better than traditional methods in creating bone.

"The purified human hPSCs formed significantly more bone in comparison to the SVF by all parameters," said Dr Chia Soo, researcher at the University of California. "And these cells are plentiful enough that patients with not much excess body fat can donate their own fat tissue."

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Scientists' claim that fat stem cells are ideal for developing bone much faster and the bone cultivated from the stem cells are likely to have much better quality than bone grown using traditional methods.

"People have shown that culture-derived cells could grow bone, but ours are a fresh cell population, and we didn't have to go through the culture process, which can take weeks," Soo said. "The best bone graft is still your own bone, but that is in limited supply and sometimes not of good quality. What we show here is a faster and better way to create bone that could have clinical applications."

Scientists believe that in future this method will be used to harness a healthy bone. Doctors would take stem cells from the patient's fat tissue, purify that into hPSCs, and replace the patient's own stem cells with hPSCs and NELL-1 in the area where bone is required.

The hPSCs with NELL-1 could grow into bone inside the patient, eliminating the need for painful bone-graft harvestings. The goal is for the process to isolate the hPSCs and add the NELL-1 with a matrix or scaffold to aid cell adhesion in less than an hour, according to the scientists.

"Excitingly, recent studies have already demonstrated the utility of perivascular stem cells for regeneration of disparate tissue types, including skeletal muscle, lung and even myocardium," said Bruno Pault, a professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Purified Fat Stem Cells Can Grow Bone Faster, Say Scientists

Salk researcher's findings suggest a potentially favorable time to harvest stem cells for therapy and may reveal genes crucial to tissue production

LA JOLLA, CA----With their potential to treat a wide range of diseases and uncover fundamental processes that lead to those diseases, embryonic stem (ES) cells hold great promise for biomedical science. A number of hurdles, both scientific and non-scientific, however, have precluded scientists from reaching the holy grail of using these special cells to treat heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's and other diseases.

In a paper published June 13 in Nature, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies report discovering that ES cells cycle in and out of a "magical state" in the early stages of embryo development, during which a battery of genes essential for cell potency (the ability of a generic cell to differentiate, or develop, into a cell with specialized functions) is activated. This unique condition, called totipotency, gives ES cells their unique ability to turn into any cell type in the body, thus making them attractive therapeutic targets.

"These findings," says senior author Samuel L. Pfaff, a professor in Salk's Gene Expression Laboratory, "give new insight into the network of genes important to the developmental potential of cells. We've identified a mechanism that resets embryonic stem cells to a more youthful state, where they are more plastic and therefore potentially more useful in therapeutics against disease, injury and aging."

ES cells are like silly putty that can be induced, under the right circumstances, to become specialized cells-for example, skin cells or pancreatic cells-in the body. In the initial stages of development, when an embryo contains as few as five to eight cells, the stem cells are totipotent and can develop into any cell type. After three to five days, the embryo develops into a ball of cells called a blastocyst. At this stage, the stem cells are pluripotent, meaning they can develop into almost any cell type. In order for cells to differentiate, specific genes within the cells must be turned on.

Pfaff and his colleagues performed RNA sequencing (a new technology derived from genome-sequencing to monitor what genes are active) on immature mouse egg cells, called oocytes, and two-cell-stage embryos to identify genes that are turned on just prior to and immediately following fertilization. Pfaff's team discovered a sequence of genes tied to this privileged state of totipotency and noticed that the genes were activated by retroviruses adjacent to the stem cells.

Nearly 8 percent of the human genome is made up of ancient relics of viral infections that occurred in our ancestors, which have been passed from generation to generation but are unable to produce infections. Pfaff and his collaborators found that cells have used some of these viruses as a tool to regulate the on-off switches for their own genes. "Evolution has said, 'We'll make lemonade out of lemons, and use these viruses to our advantage,'" Pfaff says. Using the remains of ancient viruses to turn on hundreds of genes at a specific moment of time in early embryo development gives cells the ability to turn into any type of tissue in the body.

From their observations, the Salk scientists say these viruses are very tightly controlled-they don't know why-and active only during a short window during embryonic development. The researchers identified ES cells in early embryogenesis and then further developed the embryos and cultured them in a laboratory dish. They found that a rare group of special ES cells activated the viral genes, distinguishing them from other ES cells in the dish. By using the retroviruses to their advantage, Pfaff says, these rare cells reverted to a more plastic, youthful state and thus had greater developmental potential.

Pfaff's team also discovered that nearly all ES cells cycle in and out of this privileged form, a feature of ES cells that has been underappreciated by the scientific community, says first author Todd S. Macfarlan, a former postdoctoral researcher in Pfaff's lab who recently accepted a faculty position at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. "If this cycle is prevented from happening," he says, "the full range of cell potential seems to be limited."

It is too early to tell if this "magical state" is an opportune time to harvest ES cells for therapeutic purposes. But, Pfaff adds, by forcing cells into this privileged status, scientists might be able to identify genes to assist in expanding the types of tissue that can be produced.

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"Magical State" of Embryonic Stem Cells May Help Overcome Hurdles to Therapeutics