by KING 5 HealthLink

KING5.com

Posted on September 18, 2013 at 1:47 PM

Updated today at 6:06 PM

One-in-three people in the U.S. suffers from chronic pain. It affects more Americans than diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined. Non-invasive treatments in the past have been limited, but now stem cells could hold the key to the future of pain management.

Eight out of ten of us have back pain at some time in our lives---usually it's not a serious problem. But when it is, you can have a difficult time getting relief. Now researchers say stem cells could hold the key.

Bobby Sydnor has something to sing about. He may have found the answer to his debilitating pain from a motorcycle accident 40 years ago that nearly crushed his spine.

"It's just excruciating; it is, he said. I remember sometimes crawling to the bathroom."

But now thanks to a new therapy, he's finally getting some relief without surgery. Hes taking part in a clinical trial that's using stem cells to regenerate discs in the spine.

"It really has the potential to change the disease state, instead of just treating the symptoms," said Dr. Tory McJunkin, a principal investigator in the study. They have the ability to change and regrow that tissue until its normal tissue.

Originally posted here:
Stem cells used to treat chronic back pain

Amy Norton HealthDay Reporter Posted: Wednesday, September 18, 2013, 2:00 PM

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 18 (HealthDay News) -- Scientists have figured out a way to more readily turn adult skin cells into primitive stem cells that could potentially be used to treat a variety of chronic diseases.

In a study published Sept. 18 in Nature, Israeli researchers reported that they identified the key molecule that stops adult cells from transforming into so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Those stem cells are similar to the primitive cells found in embryos, and have the potential to generate any type of body tissue, scientists believe.

Ultimately, the hope is to use iPS cells to treat damaged tissue in a range of chronic ills -- from heart disease and diabetes, to arthritis, and spinal cord injuries and Alzheimer's disease.

That's still some years away, according to the experts, but the new findings are a step forward.

"We've already known how to create these cells, but it's an inefficient process," said Konrad Hochedlinger, a stem cell researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who was not involved in the study.

Right now, it could take weeks to months to coax human skin cells to transform into iPS cells. And even then, only a fraction of the cells are actually successfully "reprogrammed," Hochedlinger added.

In the new study, researchers reprogrammed in the space of one week nearly all of the mouse and human skin cells they studied.

They did it by identifying a molecule that normally acts as a "roadblock" to keep adult cells from reverting back to infancy.

See the rest here:
Advance Seen in Turning Adult Cells Into Stem Cells

Cancer patients or those suffering from Parkinson's disease may not have to wait for donors in future following a "huge leap" forward in stem cell production, scientists have said.

Researchers have simplified and improved the laborious three-week process so that it can now be completed within days and with 100% efficiency.

This means doctors could eventually treat patients much more quickly using their own cells rather than performing a risky transplant.

Jacob Hanna, one of the team behind the discovery, said the procedure would remove the possibility of a transplant patient's body rejecting an organ.

"We now know how to control a cell's fate and really understand exactly how to make a stem cell from a skin cell, safely and robustly," he said.

"A major goal in the future, the great promise of our research, is that a patient in need of a liver transplant, for example, could go to a clinic and have a biopsy taken. Doctors could then, very quickly and efficiently, make stem cells.

"They would then be able to give a patient back the liver cells he needs from his own stem cells and there would be no need to look for donors."

Dr Hanna, assistant professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, added: "Because the transplant is with the patient's own cells, his body cannot reject these cells.

"There would be no need to wait for a donor or a match. This would also eliminate the risk of rejections."

Scientists said their advances could be used to treat any number of diseases - including cancer and Parkinson's - within the next 10 years.

More here:
Scientists hail stem cells 'leap'

Cells can now be made pluripotent on a tight schedule and with high efficiency.

Hanna Lab

Researchers have for the first time converted cultured skin cells into stem cells with near-perfect efficiency.

By removing a single protein, called Mbd3, a team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, was able to increase the conversion rate to almost 100% ten times that normally achieved. The discovery could clear the way for scientists to produce large volumes of stem cells on demand, hastening the development of new treatments

In 2006, scientists first showed that mature cells could be reprogrammed to act like embryonic stem cells capable of growing indefinitely and of becoming any type of cell in the body, a property known as pluripotency. But the production of these induced pluripotent stem cells remained mysteriously inefficient. Low cell-conversion rates have thwarted efforts to study how the process, called reprogramming, happens. It has also discouraged the development of techniques to produce stem cells under the stringent conditions required for therapeutic applications.

But in work described today in Nature1, Weizmann stem-cell researcher Jacob Hanna and his team have reprogrammed cells with nearly 100% efficiency. Moreover, the researchers show that the cells all transition to pluripotency on a synchronized schedule.

"This is the first report showing that you can make reprogramming as efficient as anyone was hoping for, says Konrad Hochedlinger, a stem-cell scientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. "It is really surprising that manipulating a single molecule is sufficient to make this switch, and make essentially every single cell pluripotent within a week."

Scientists typically reprogram cells to become pluripotent using a set of four genes. These are integrated into cells' DNA, where they switch on cells' own pluripotency program, turning them into induced pluripotent stem cells. But even established techniques convert less than 1% of cultured cells many get stuck in a partially reprogrammed state. And some become pluripotent faster than others, making the reprogramming process difficult to monitor.

Hanna and his team investigated the potential roadblocks to reprogramming by working with a line of specially engineered mouse cells, in which the reprogramming genes were already inserted and could be activated with a small molecule. Such cells normally reprogram at rates below 10%. But when a gene responsible for producing the protein Mbd3 was repressed, rates soared to nearly 100%.

Hanna says that the precise timing of embryonic development led him to wonder whether it might be possible to reprogram the reprogramming process. Cells in an embryo are not supposed to remain pluripotent indefinitely, he explains. Usually, Mbd3 represses the pluripotency program as an embryo develops, and then remains in mature cells. During reprogramming, proteins from the inserted pluripotency genes prompt Mbd3 to repress the cells own pluripotency genes.

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Stem cells made with near-perfect efficiency