Posted: October 10, 2014 at 9:40 am
Public Knowledge of Stem Cells in the UK Remains Low
For patients with leukaemia - and other blood conditions stem cell transplants can mean the difference between life and death. But 18 years since the first cord blood transplants were...
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Public Knowledge of Stem Cells in the UK Remains Low - Video
Posted: October 10, 2014 at 9:40 am
More Data Shows Tumeric Is AMAZING For You
A major compound in the commonly used spice turmeric boosts the growth of brain stem cells in both cell culture and rodents, a new study has found. While it is currently far too early to tell...
By: The Richard Fowler Show
Posted: October 10, 2014 at 9:40 am
Center for Adult Stem Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine
Our goal for the newly established Center for Adult Stem Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine is to shape and lead in the research, ethics, and societal implications for the field of adult...
By: Notre Dame Science
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Center for Adult Stem Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine - Video
Posted: October 9, 2014 at 9:49 pm
Harvard University researchers have pioneered a technique to grow by the billions the insulin-producing cells people with diabetes lack, a breakthrough that may create new ways to treat the disease.
The breakthrough comes after 15 years of seeking a bulk recipe for making beta cells, which sense the level of sugar in the blood and keep it in a healthy range by making precise amounts of insulin, according to Harvard scientists led by Douglas Melton, who published their work today in the journal Cell. The process begins with human stem cells, which have the ability to become any type of tissue or organ.
The technique is an important step toward understanding and treating diabetes, a condition in which the pancreass beta cells are insufficient or dead. Diabetes affects 347 million people worldwide, and its chronic high blood sugar levels can injure hearts, eyes, kidneys, the nervous system and other tissues.
This is part of the holy grail of regenerative medicine or tissue engineering, trying to make an unlimited source of cells or tissues or organs that you can use in a patient to correct a disease, said Albert Hwa, director of discovery science at JDRF, a New York-based diabetes advocacy group that funded Meltons work.
Human stem cell derived beta cells that have formed islet-like clusters in a mouse. Cells were transplanted to the kidney capsule and photo was taken two weeks later by which time the beta cells were making insulin and had cured the diabetes in the mouse. Close
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Human stem cell derived beta cells that have formed islet-like clusters in a mouse. Cells were transplanted to the kidney capsule and photo was taken two weeks later by which time the beta cells were making insulin and had cured the diabetes in the mouse.
The procedure for making mature, insulin-secreting beta cells has taken years of painstaking research that led to a 30-day, six-step recipe, Melton said. Laboratories will be able to use the cells to test drugs and learn more about how diabetes occurs, he said.
They had to go through an awful lot of trial and error to get to this, said Jeanne Loring, director of the Scripps Research Institutess Center for Regenerative Medicine in La Jolla, California. The proof will be in how well this protocol works for people in other laboratories.
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Harvard Breakthrough Grows Insulin-Control Cells in Bulk
Posted: October 9, 2014 at 9:45 pm
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
9-Oct-2014
Contact: Mary Beth O'Leary moleary@cell.com 617-397-2802 Cell Press @CellPressNews
Neurodevelopmental disorders such as Down syndrome and autism-spectrum disorder can have profound, lifelong effects on learning and memory, but relatively little is known about the molecular pathways affected by these diseases. A study published by Cell Press October 9th in the American Journal of Human Genetics shows that neurodevelopmental disorders caused by distinct genetic mutations produce similar molecular effects in cells, suggesting that a one-size-fits-all therapeutic approach could be effective for conditions ranging from seizures to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
"Neurodevelopmental disorders are rare, meaning trying to treat them is not efficient," says senior study author Carl Ernst of McGill University. "Once we fully define the major common pathways involved, targeting these pathways for treatment becomes a viable option that can affect the largest number of people."
A large fraction of neurodevelopmental disorders are associated with variation in specific genes, but the genetic factors responsible for these diseases are very complex. For example, whereas common variants in the same gene have been associated with two or more different disorders, mutations in many different genes can lead to similar diseases. As a result, it has not been clear whether genetic mutations that cause neurodevelopmental disorders affect distinct molecular pathways or converge on similar cellular functions.
To address this question, Ernst and his team used human fetal brain cells to study the molecular effects of reducing the activity of genes that are mutated in two distinct autism-spectrum disorders. Changes in transcription factor 4 (TCF4) cause 18q21 deletion syndrome, which is characterized by intellectual disability and psychiatric problems, and mutations in euchromatic histone methyltransferase 1 (EHMT1) cause similar symptoms in a disease known as 9q34 deletion syndrome.
Interfering with the activity of TCF4 or EHMT1 produced similar molecular effects in the cells. Strikingly, both of these genetic modifications resulted in molecular patterns that resemble those of cells that are differentiating, or converting from immature cells to more specialized cells. "Our study suggests that one fundamental cause of disease is that neural stem cells choose to become full brain cells too early," Ernst says. "This could affect how they incorporate into cellular networks, for example, leading to the clinical symptoms that we see in kids with these diseases."
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The American Journal of Human Genetics, Chen et al.: "Molecular convergence of neurodevelopmental disorders."
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Multiple neurodevelopmental disorders have a common molecular cause
Posted: October 9, 2014 at 2:48 pm
Harvard scientists made insulin-producing beta cells from human stem cells. After transplantation into mice with diabetes, the lab-made beta cells produced enough insulin to cure the animals. Harvard University hide caption
Harvard scientists made insulin-producing beta cells from human stem cells. After transplantation into mice with diabetes, the lab-made beta cells produced enough insulin to cure the animals.
A team of Harvard scientists said Thursday that they had finally found a way to turn human embryonic stem cells into cells that produce insulin. The long-sought advance could eventually lead to new ways to help millions of people with diabetes.
Right now, many people with diabetes have to regularly check the level of sugar in their blood and inject themselves with insulin to keep the sugar in their blood in check. It's an imperfect treatment.
"This is kind of a life-support for diabetics," says Doug Melton, a stem-cell researcher at Harvard Medical School. "It doesn't cure the disease and leads to devastating complications of the disease."
People with poorly controlled diabetes can suffer complications such as blindness, amputations and heart attacks.
Researchers have had some success transplanting insulin-producing cells from cadavers into people with diabetes. But it's been difficult to procure enough cells to treat large numbers of patients. So scientists have been trying to figure out how they could get more cells more easily.
For Melton, who led the work at Harvard, this has been a personal quest. His son, Sam, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when he was 6 months old, and his daughter, Emma, was diagnosed with the disease when she was 14.
"I do what any parent would do, which is to say, 'I'm not going to put up with this, and I want to find a better way,' " he says.
And now Melton and his colleagues are reporting in a paper being published in this week's issue of the journal Cell that they think they have finally found that better way.
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Scientists Coax Human Embryonic Stem Cells Into Making Insulin
Posted: October 9, 2014 at 2:48 pm
October 8, 2014
Image Caption: New genetic barcoding technology allows scientists to identify differences in origin between individual blood cells. Credit: Camargo Lab
Provided by Joseph Caputo, Harvard University
New technology that tracks the origin of blood cells challenges scientific dogma
A 7-year-project to develop a barcoding and tracking system for tissue stem cells has revealed previously unrecognized features of normal blood production: New data from Harvard Stem Cell Institute scientists at Boston Childrens Hospital suggests, surprisingly, that the billions of blood cells that we produce each day are made not by blood stem cells, but rather their less pluripotent descendants, called progenitor cells. The researchers hypothesize that blood comes from stable populations of different long-lived progenitor cells that are responsible for giving rise to specific blood cell types, while blood stem cells likely act as essential reserves.
The work, supported by a National Institutes of Health Directors New Innovator Award and published in Nature, suggests that progenitor cells could potentially be just as valuable as blood stem cells for blood regeneration therapies.
This new research challenges what textbooks have long read: That blood stem cells maintain the day-to-day renewal of blood, a conclusion drawn from their importance in re-establishing blood cell populations after bone marrow transplantsa fact that still remains true. But because of a lack of tools to study how blood forms in a normal context, nobody had been able to track the origin of blood cells without doing a transplant.
Boston Childrens Hospital scientist Fernando Camargo, PhD, and his postdoctoral fellow Jianlong Sun, PhD, addressed this problem with a tool that generates a unique barcode in the DNA of all blood stem cells and their progenitor cells in a mouse. When a tagged cell divides, all of its descendant cells possess the same barcode. This biological inventory system makes it possible to determine the number of stem cells/progenitors being used to make blood and how long they live, as well as answer fundamental questions about where individual blood cells come from.
Theres never been such a robust experimental method that could allow people to look at lineage relationships between mature cell types in the body without doing transplantation, Sun said. One of the major directions we can now go is to revisit the entire blood cell hierarchy and see how the current knowledge holds true when we use this internal labeling system.
People have tried using viruses to tag blood cells in the past, but the cells needed to be taken out of the body, infected, and re-transplanted, which raised a number of issues, said Camargo, who is a member of Childrens Stem Cell Program and an associate professor in Harvard Universitys Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. I wanted to figure out a way to label blood cells inside of the body, and the best idea I had was to use mobile genetic elements called transposons.
Posted: October 9, 2014 at 2:48 pm
TIME Health medicine Type 1 Diabetes Treatment Gets Boost from Stem Cells Insulin-making cells grown from stem cells glow green two weeks after they are transplanted into mice (c) Douglas Melton 2014 Scientists started with stem cells and created the first insulin-making cells that respond to changes in glucose
Scientists are closer to a potential stem cell treatment for type 1 diabetes.
In a new article in the journal Cell, Douglas Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (and one of the 2009 TIME 100) and his colleagues describe how they made the first set of pancreatic cells that can sense and respond to changing levels of sugar in the blood and churn out the proper amounts of insulin.
Its a critical first step toward a more permanent therapy for type 1 diabetics, who currently have to rely on insulin pumps that infuse insulin when needed or repeated injections of the hormone in order to keep their blood sugar levels under control. Because these patients have pancreatic beta cells that dont make enough insulin, they need outside sources of the hormone to break down the sugars they eat.
MORE: Stem-Cell Research: The Quest Resumes
Melton started with two types of stem cells: those that come from excess embryos from IVF procedures, and those that can be made from skin or other cells of adults. The latter cells, known as iPS cells, have to be manipulated to erase their developmental history and returned back to an embryonic state. They then can turn into any cell in the body, including the pancreatic beta cells that produce insulin. While the embryonic stem cells from IVF dont require this step, they arent genetically matched to patients, so any beta cells made from them may cause immune reactions when they are transplanted into diabetic patients.
Both techniques, however, produced similar amounts of insulin-making beta cellssomething that would have surprised Melton a few years ago. But advances in stem cell technology have made even the iPS cells pretty amenable to reprogramming into beta cells. Meltons group tested more than 150 different combinations of more than 70 different compounds, including growth factors, hormones and other signaling proteins that direct cells to develop into specific cell types, and narrowed the field down to 11 factors that efficiently turned the stem cells into functioning beta cells.
MORE: Woman Receives First Stem Cell Therapy Using Her Own Skin Cells
The two populations of stem cells churned out hundreds of millions of insulin-making cells, which is the volume of cells that a patient with type 1 diabetes would need to cure them and free them from their dependence on insulin. An average patient, says Melton, would need one or two large coffee cups worth of cells, each containing about 300 million cells. Melton and his team then conducted a series of tests in a lab dish to confirm that the cells were functioning just like normal beta cells by producing more insulin when they were doused with glucose, and less when glucose levels dropped. That was a huge advance over previous efforts to make beta cells from stem cellsthose cells could produce insulin, but they didnt respond to changing levels of glucose and continuously pumped out insulin at will.
Next, the scientists transplanted about five million of the stem cell derived beta cells into healthy mice, and two weeks later, gave them an injection of glucose. About 73% of the mice produced enough insulin to successfully break down the sugar. Whats more, that was similar to the proportion of mice responding to glucose after getting a transplant of beta cells from human cadavers. That was especially encouraging since some type 1 diabetics currently receive such transplants to keep their diabetes under control. Weve now shown that we can produce an inexhaustible source of beta cells without having to do to cadavers, he says.
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Type 1 Diabetes Treatment Gets Boost from Stem Cells
Posted: October 9, 2014 at 2:48 pm
When his infant son Sam was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes two decades ago, Doug Melton made himself a promise: He would cure it. When his daughter Emma was diagnosed with the same autoimmune disease at 14, he redoubled his efforts.
Finally he can see the finish line. In a paper published Thursday in the journal Cell, Melton announces that he has created a virtually unlimited supply of the cells that are missing in people with type 1 diabetes.
By replacing these cellsand then protecting them from attack by the body's immune systemMelton, now a professor and stem cell researcher at Harvard, says someday he'll have his cure.
"I think we've shown the problem can be solved," he said.
In type 1 diabetes, which usually starts in childhood and affects as many as three million Americans, the person's immune system attacks and destroys beta cells in the pancreas. Melton used stem cellswhich can turn into a wide variety of other cell typesto manufacture a new supply of these beta cells, which provide exquisitely fine-tuned responses to sugar levels in the blood.
When you eat, beta cells increase levels of insulin in your blood to process the extra sugar; when you're running on empty, the cells dial down insulin levels.
Since the 1920s, people with type 1 diabetes have been kept alive with insulin injections, though many still face nerve damage, slow wound healing, and even blindness because even the best pumps and monitors are not as effective as the body's beta cells.
The only known cure for type 1 diabetes is a beta cell transplant, which takes the cells from someone who has recently died. But the procedure is complicated, and the patient must remain on drugs forever to prevent the immune system from destroying the cells.
Fewer than 1,000 beta cell transplants have ever been done, said Albert Hwa, senior scientific program manager for beta cell therapies at the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, which has helped fund Melton's work for more than a decade.
Hope From Stem Cells
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New Stem Cell Treatment, Successful in Mice, May Someday Cure Type 1 D
Posted: October 9, 2014 at 2:45 pm
TIME Health Genetics Gene-Therapy Trial Shows Promise Fighting Bubble Boy Syndrome The immune system-related disease affects about 1 in 100,000 babies each year
A new gene-therapy treatment is showing promise in treating a rare and severe congenital condition that involves extreme immune-system deficiencies.
Bubble boy syndrome, an X-linked condition, takes its name from a famous case in which an affected boy, vulnerable to infection, lived inside a plastic bubble that protected him from the worlds germs. Outside of such sterile environments, babies with the syndrome seldom live longer than a year, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The condition has for decades bested medical researchers, despite occasional bouts of optimism hope for one previous gene-therapy treatment was felled when some recipients developed leukemia.
Gene-therapy treatment works, essentially, by replacing unperforming genes with functional ones. Dysfunctional cells are removed from the childs immune system and exposed to a genetically engineered virus that can reprogram the cells to function properly, explains Reuters. Those cells are then reinserted back into the patient.
In the earlier treatment, the virus to which the cells were exposed apparently activated a part of their genetic code that leads to leukemia, Reuters says.
But initial results reported in the New England Journal of Medicine show that none of the nine babies from the U.S. and Europe who received the latest treatment are exhibiting any signs of cancer.
Of the nine infant participants in the research who were between 4 and 10 months old when they began receiving the therapy eight were still alive 16 to 43 months later, without living in a protective bubble. (The ninth child died four months after treatment began from an earlier infection he had been fighting.)
Out of the eight boys still living, the treatment upped blood T-cell levels, rebuilding the immune system, of seven. In the case of the eighth child, the treatment did not rebuild his immune system, but a successful stem-cell transplant has kept him in improved health, Reuters reports.
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Gene-Therapy Trial Shows Promise Fighting Bubble Boy Syndrome
