Washington, April 7 (ANI): Researchers at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry and New York-based NeoStem Inc. are all set for the first known human trial to use embryonic-like stem cells collected from adult cells to grow bone.

The cells technology, called VSEL stem cells, or very small embryonic-like stem cells, are derived from adults-not fetuses. This eliminates ethical arguments and potential side effects associated with using actual embryonic stem cells derived from a fetus, according to researchers at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry and New York-based NeoStem Inc.

The research partners hypothesize that the VSEL stem cells, which mimic properties of embryonic stem cells, can provide a minimally invasive way to speed painful bone regeneration for dental patients and others with bone trauma.

U-M's role in the study involves design, patient care and data analysis, while NeoStem provides the cells and patented technology to purify the special stem cells.

Study leaders include Russell Taichman, U-M professor of dentistry; Laurie McCauley, professor and newly named dean of the U-M Dental School; and Denis Rodgerson, director of grants and academic liaisons for NeoStem. U-M's work will take place at the Michigan Center for Oral Health Research and the U-M Health System.

"Within a year, researchers hope to begin recruiting roughly 50 patients who need a tooth extraction and a dental implant," Taichman said.

Before extracting the tooth, U-M researchers harvest the patient's cells, and then NeoStem's VSEL technology is used to purify and isolate those VSEL stem cells from the patient's other cells.

This allows U-M researchers to implant pure populations of the VSEL stem cells back into test patients. Control patients receive their own cells, not the VSELs. After the new bone grows, researchers remove a small portion of it to analyze, and replace it with an implant.

"We're taking advantage of the time between extraction and implant to see if these cells will expedite healing time and produce better quality bone," Taichman said.

"They are natural cells that are already in your body, but NeoStem's technology concentrates them so that we can place a higher quantity of them onto the wound site," he added.

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Embryonic-like stem cells collected from adults to grow bone

Image shows adult human fibroblast cells with intracellular proteins involved in adhesion of these cells to an extracellular matrix. These fibroblasts are converted to human induced pluripotent stem cells through a reprogramming process during which restructuring of the adhesion proteins takes place. Credit: Ankur Singh

A new separation process that depends on an easily-distinguished physical difference in adhesive forces among cells could help expand production of stem cells generated through cell reprogramming. By facilitating new research, the separation process could also lead to improvements in the reprogramming technique itself and help scientists model certain disease processes.

The reprogramming technique allows a small percentage of cells often taken from the skin or blood to become human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) capable of producing a wide range of other cell types. Using cells taken from a patient's own body, the reprogramming technique might one day enable regenerative therapies that could, for example, provide new heart cells for treating cardiovascular disorders or new neurons for treating Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease.

But the cell reprogramming technique is inefficient, generating mixtures in which the cells of interest make up just a small percentage of the total volume. Separating out the pluripotent stem cells is now time-consuming and requires a level of skill that could limit use of the technique and hold back the potential therapies.

To address the problem, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated a tunable process that separates cells according to the degree to which they adhere to a substrate inside a tiny microfluidic device. The adhesion properties of the hiPSCs differ significantly from those of the cells with which they are mixed, allowing the potentially-therapeutic cells to be separated to as much as 99 percent purity.

The high-throughput separation process, which takes less than 10 minutes to perform, does not rely on labeling technologies such as antibodies. Because it allows separation of intact cell colonies, it avoids damaging the cells, allowing a cell survival rate greater than 80 percent. The resulting cells retain normal transcriptional profiles, differentiation potential and karyotype.

"The principle of the separation is based on the physical phenomenon of adhesion strength, which is controlled by the underlying biology," said Andrs Garca, the study's principal investigator and a professor in Georgia Tech's Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. "This is a very powerful platform technology because it is easy to implement and easy to scale up."

The separation process will be described April 7 in the advance online publication of the journal Nature Methods. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), supplemented by funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

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Image shows a close-up view of a microfluidic device that exploits the differences in adhesion strength between derived stem cells and contaminating cell types in a heterogeneous culture to selectively isolate cells of interest using fluid shear forces. Credit: Gary Meek

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Adhesive force differences enable separation of stem cells to advance therapies

Apr. 4, 2013 For many patients the removal of several centimetres of bone from the lower leg following a serious injury or a tumour extraction is only the beginning of a long-lasting ordeal. Autologous stem cells have been found to accelerate and boost the healing process. Surgeons at the RUB clinic Bergmannsheil have achieved promising results: without stem cells, it takes on average 49 days for one centimetre of bone to regrow; with stem cells, that period has been reduced to 37 days.

In the past, large bone defect inevitably led to an amputation. Today, the arm or leg is stabilised in an external support, and a transport wire is pulled through the marrow of the intact part of the injured bone. Once the soft tissue surrounding the injury is healed, the surgeons cut the healthy part of the bone into two. The transport wire is affixed to the winches of a ring fixator that is attached around the leg. Using a sophisticated cable-pull system, the previously detached part of the bone is slowly pulled either downwards or upwards along the gap in the bone until it arrives and docks at the other end. During the pulling stage, the periosteum of the bone that had been pulled apart had been continuously stretched. Thus, a periosteum tube is created in the gap behind the relocated portion of the bone. Inside that tube, the new bone can regenerate. This process, however, is extremely tedious and the treatment fails in every firth case.

Processing autologous stem cells in the operating theatre

Surgeons at the RUB clinic Bergmannsheil attempt to optimise the healing process by applying autologous stem cells therapy. Depending on the requirements, stem cells are capable of evolving into different types of tissue cells, including so-called osteoblasts -- cells that are responsible for bone formation. Adult stem cells such as are deployed in the process can be found in the bone marrow of adults. "We harvest them by inserting a hollow needle into the iliac crest," explains PD Dr Dominik Seybold, managing consultant at the clinic.

The stem cells are prepared for application directly on location. Under x-ray control, the surgeons inject six to eight millilitres of the concentrated fluid into the centre of the periosteum tube. X-ray controls are routinely performed to monitor the recovery progress. To date, the RUB physicians have applied this therapy in 20 cases. "This is not enough to be statistically relevant," admits Dr Seybold. Nevertheless, the researchers find the results very encouraging: whilst the bone regeneration process without stem cells used to take 49 days on average, it has been reduced to 37 days on average thanks to the new therapy method. So far, RUB scientists have been treating bone defects with an average length of eight centimetres -- consequently, the patients thus recovered, on average, three months sooner.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum, via AlphaGalileo.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Stem cells fill gaps in bones

Former MNC employee Karthik Shankaran was diagnosed with leukaemia in January 2011.

By December that year, it seemed as if timely treatment had gotten rid of it, but a couple of weeks ago, he found his cancer had relapsed.

Forty-five-year-old Karthik now has two months to undergo a stem cell transplant, his most viable shot at recovery. But, quite a few hurdles lie ahead. For one, Karthik is yet to find a donor.

There is a 25 per cent chance of finding a match within the family, but there was nobody in mine. So I have to look for unrelated donors, says Karthik. This is where stem cell registries come in.

If the registry is large enough, finding a match is quite probable. In India however, there is no central registry. All the individual registries in the country put together probably have just about 50,000 samples, says Karthik.

In an ethnically diverse country like India, this is a very small number. As it turns out, Karthik was not able to find a match in the registries either.

This prompted Karthik and his wife Divya Mohan, a technical writer, to start Swab4Karthik.

Swab4Karthik is a website that emphasises the role of potential stem cell donors in helping patients of leukaemia.

Stem cells can be extracted from several parts of our body bone marrow, blood and cord blood. However, most of the stem cell transplants carried out today use peripheral blood, according to Raghu Rajagopal, co-founder and CEO of Datri, a stem cell registry.

(Peripheral blood is the circulating blood of the body. It is different from the blood that flows within the liver, bone marrow or the lymphatic system.)

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45-year-old leukaemia patient awaits stem cells

Featured Article Academic Journal Main Category: Stem Cell Research Also Included In: Bones / Orthopedics Article Date: 05 Apr 2013 - 12:00 PDT

Current ratings for: "Nanokicking" Stem Cells Offers Cheaper And Easier Way To Grow New Bone

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Matt Dalby from the Centre for Cell Engineering at the University of Glasgow, and colleagues, write about their work in a study that was published recently in the journal ACS Nano.

In a statement released this week, Dalby says their new method offers a simple way of "converting adult stem cells from the bone marrow into bone-making cells on a large scale without the use of cocktails of chemicals or recourse to challenging and complex engineering".

Scientists have found it is possible to grow these tissue types in the lab by isolating MSCs and culturing them in an environment that simulates that which occurs naturally in the human body.

But current methods of coaxing the stem cells to differentiate are notoriously problematic and require expensive and highly engineered materials or complex chemical cocktails.

Nanokicking replicates a vibration that occurs in the membranes of bone cells when they stick together to form new bone naturally in the body.

The vibration, which has a frequency of 1,000 times per second, is thought to promote bone formation by encouraging signals between bone cells.

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"Nanokicking" Stem Cells Offers Cheaper And Easier Way To Grow New Bone