Human embryonic stem cells the bodys powerful master cells might be useful for treating multiple sclerosis, researchers reported Thursday.

A team has used cells taken from frozen human embryos and transformed them into a type of cell that scientists have hoped might help treat patients with MS, a debilitating nerve disease.

Mice with an induced version of MS that paralyzed them were able to walk freely after the treatment, the teams at Advanced Cell Technology and ImStem Biotechnology in Farmington, Connecticut, reported.

The cells appeared to travel to the damaged tissues in the mice, toning down the mistaken immune system response that strips the fatty protective layer off of nerve calls. Its that damage that causes symptoms ranging from tremors and loss of balance to blurry vision and paralysis.

These embryonic stem cells were carefully nurtured to make them form a type of immature cell called a mesenchymal stem cell. These cells worked better to treat the mice than naturally developed mesenchymal stem cells taken directly from bone marrow, the team wrote in the journal Stem Cell Reports, published by the International Society for Stem Cell Research.

The top mouse is paralyzed, while the mouse on the bottom was treated with human embryonic stem cells and is able to run around.

The company released a video to show the benefits. Untreated mice were suffering. They are paralyzed. They on their backs. They are dragging their limbs. They are in really sad shape, ACTs chief scientific officer, Dr. Bob Lanza, told NBC News.

Treated animals, they are walking and jumping around just like normal mice.

Lanza says human trials are many months away, but he thinks it will not be necessary to use controversial cloning technology to make perfectly matched human embryonic stem cells to treat patients.

We can use an off-the-shelf source and itll work for everyone, he said. So you can use them and not worry about rejection.

Continue reading here:
Stem cells work on MS in mice

Home > News > health-news

New York, June 7 : Liver is known to regenerate itself, but can liver cells be reverted to a stem-cell like state? Yes, researchers say.

The finding can pave the way for liver cells transplant to cure genetic liver disorders.

Researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, led by Fernando Camargo, stumbled upon this fact while investigating whether a biochemical cascade called "Hippo", which controls how big the liver grows, also affects the cell's fate.

"I think this study highlights the tremendous plasticity of mature liver cells," said Camargo, an associate professor at Harvard University's department of stem cell and regenerative biology.

The researchers found that switching off the Hippo-signalling pathway in mature liver cells generates very high rates of dedifferentiation.

This means the cells turn back the clock to become stem-cell like again, thus allowing them to give rise to functional progenitor cells that can regenerate a diseased liver.

Even if three-quarters of a liver is surgically removed, duplication alone could return the organ to its normal functioning mass.

This new research indicates that there is a second mode of regeneration that may be repairing constant liver damage.

"It is not that you have a very small population of cells that can be recruited to an injury. Almost 80 percent of liver cells can undergo this cell fate change," Camargo added.

View original post here:
Mature liver cells can turn into stem cells!

Contact Information

Available for logged-in reporters only

Newswise When stem cells are used to regenerate bone tissue, many wind up migrating away from the repair site, which disrupts the healing process. But a technique employed by a University of Rochester research team keeps the stem cells in place, resulting in faster and better tissue regeneration. The key, as explained in a paper published in Acta Biomaterialia, is encasing the stem cells in polymers that attract water and disappear when their work is done.

The technique is similar to what has already been used to repair other types of tissue, including cartilage, but had never been tried on bone.

Our success opens the door for manyand more complicatedtypes of bone repair, said Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering Danielle Benoit. For example, we should now be able to pinpoint repairs within the periosteumor outer membrane of bone material.

The polymers used by Benoit and her teams are called hydrogels because they hold water, which is necessary to keep the stem cells alive. The hydrogels, which mimic the natural tissues of the body, are specially designed to have an additional feature thats vital to the repair process; they degrade and disappear before the body interprets them as foreign bodies and begins a defense response that could compromise the healing process.

Because stem cells have the unique ability to develop into many different types of cells, they are an important part of the mechanism for repairing body tissue. At present, unadulterated therapeutic stem cells are injected into the bone tissue that needs to be repaired. Benoit believed hydrogels would allow the stem cells to finish the job of initiating repairs, then leave before overstaying their welcome.

The research team tested the hypothesis by transplanting cells onto the surface of mouse bone grafts and studying the cell behavior both in vivoinside the animaland in vitrooutside the body. They started by removing all living cells from donor bone fragments, so that the tissue regeneration could be accomplished only by the stem cells.

In order to track the progress of the research, the stem cells were genetically modified to include genes that give off fluorescence signals. The bone material was then coated with the hydrogels, which contained the fluorescently labeled stem cells, and implanted into the defect of the damaged mouse bone. At that point, the researchers began monitoring the repair process with longitudinal fluorescence to determine if there would be an appreciable loss of stem cells in the in vivo samples, as compared to the static, in vitro, environments. They found that there was no measurable difference between the concentrations of stem cells in the various samples, despite the fact that the in vivo sample was part of a dynamic environmentwhich included enzymes and blood flowmaking it easier for the stem cells to migrate away from the target site. That means virtually all the stem cells stayed in place to complete their work in generating new bone tissue.

Some types of tissue repair take more time to heal than do others, said Benoit. What we needed was a way to control how long the hydrogels remained at the site.

See the article here:
Better Tissue Healing with Disappearing Hydrogels