In 2006, Linden Mayor David Lossing stopped at a Be the Match national bone marrow registry booth on the University of Michigan campus and had his cheek swabbed to be a potential donor.

Id been giving blood for years, said Lossing, now 49. When I saw the Be the Match booth, it seemed like the next logical thing to do.

It turned out to be a life-changing experience. However, he didnt know that until six and a half years later, when he received a call last October that he was a potential match for international patient with acute leukemia. I had totally forgotten about it until I got the phone call, said Lossing.

The next step was for him to return blood vials to Be the Match, to narrow down the profile. When he found out that he was a good potential donor, he went to Michigan Blood in Grand Rapids for a more extensive physical and testing. I was the best match, he said.

There are two types of extraction processes for obtaining stem cells for a transplant. One is the non-surgical donation of peripheral blood stem cells (PBSC) and the other is a marrow donation through a surgical outpatient procedure in a hospital under anesthesia, which one is used is determined by the recipients physician.

Lossings procedure was the PBSC, a five-day process leading up to the donation. His extraction was set up for Dec. 14-17 and the actual donation day was Dec. 18. I was given shots of filgrastim every day at home to increase the number of blood-forming cells in my bloodstream, said Lossing. Then Suzanne and I went to Grand Rapids for the actual donation process.

The blood was removed through a needle in one arm and passed through a machine that separates the blood-forming cells. The remaining blood was then returned to Lossings system through the other arm. The blood-forming cells are back within four to six weeks, according to Be the Match.

I felt achy and fatigued, but thats all, said Lossing. Every day of the shots, it was a different part of my body that hurt, and finally on day 3, I took Motrin. I was still working at my job throughout the process.

As soon as the bone marrow was extracted, it was immediately taken to Detroit Metro Airport for an international flight to an unknown destination. The patient was expected to receive the parcel on Dec. 19. Lossing had also sent along a birthday card for the patient getting his bone marrow.

The transplant actually resets the clock to a persons birth, said Lossing. He now has a brand new immune system. Hell end up with my blood type and my DNA. Now I have an evil twin. Happy Second Birthday!

Continued here:
Mayor’s blood stem cells save leukemia patient

Public release date: 9-Jan-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Rachel Seroka rseroka@aan.com 612-928-6129 American Academy of Neurology

SAN DIEGO Apparent stem cell transplant success in mice may hold promise for people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease. The results of the study were released today and will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 65th Annual Meeting in San Diego, March 16 to 23, 2013.

"There have been remarkable strides in stem cell transplantation when it comes to other diseases, such as cancer and heart failure," said study author Stefania Corti, MD, PhD, with the University of Milan in Italy and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. "ALS is a fatal, progressive, degenerative disease that currently has no cure. Stem cell transplants may represent a promising avenue for effective cell-based treatment for ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases."

For the study, mice with an animal model of ALS were injected with human neural stem cells taken from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). iPSC are adult cells such as skin cells that have been genetically reprogrammed to an embryonic stem cell-like state. Neurons are a basic building block of the nervous system, which is affected by ALS. After injection, the stem cells migrated to the spinal cord of the mice, matured and multiplied.

The study found that stem cell transplantation significantly extended the lifespan of the mice by 20 days and improved their neuromuscular function by 15 percent.

"Our study shows promise for testing stem cell transplantation in human clinical trials," said Corti.

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The study was supported by AriSLA - The Italian Foundation for Research on Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

Learn more about ALS at http://www.aan.com/patients.

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Stem cells may hold promise for Lou Gehrig's disease

Washington, January 11 (ANI): Researchers have come up with an innovative method for creating a stretched polymer scaffold that can support complex tissue architectures.

Stem cells can be grown on biocompatible scaffolds to form complex tissues like bone, cartilage, and muscle for repair and regeneration of damaged or diseased tissue.

However, to function properly, the cells must often grow in a specific pattern or alignment.

Zu-yong Wang and a team of researchers from National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, KK Women's and Children's Hospital, and Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, in Singapore, developed a reproducible method that involves stretching a polymer thin film to produce scaffolds that can support the growth of human mesenchymal stem cells.

The stretching process creates orientated 3-dimensional micro-grooves on the surface of the films, and these formations promote consistent alignment and elongation of stem cells as they grow and develop into tissues on and around the resorbable scaffold.

"The researchers developed a very elegant method to promote cell behaviour," John Jansen, Methods Co-Editor-in-Chief and Professor and Chairman, Department of Biomaterials, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center, The Netherlands, said.

The study has been published in the journal Tissue Engineering. (ANI)

Read more:
3D scaffolds 'support regeneration of complex tissues from stem cells'

Jan. 10, 2013 Stem cells can be grown on biocompatible scaffolds to form complex tissues such as bone, cartilage, and muscle for repair and regeneration of damaged or diseased tissue. However, to function properly, the cells must often grow in a specific pattern or alignment. An innovative method for creating a stretched polymer scaffold that can support complex tissue architectures is described in an article in Tissue Engineering, Part C, Methods.

Zu-yong Wang and a team of researchers from National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, KK Women's and Children's Hospital, and Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, in Singapore, developed a reproducible method that involves stretching a polymer thin film to produce scaffolds that can support the growth of human mesenchymal stem cells. The stretching process creates orientated 3-dimensional micro-grooves on the surface of the films, and these formations promote consistent alignment and elongation of stem cells as they grow and develop into tissues on and around the resorbable scaffold.

The authors present their work in the article, "Biomimetic 3D anisotropic geometries by uniaxial stretch of poly(?-caprolactone) films for mesenchymal stem cell proliferation, alignment and myogenic differentiation."

"The researchers developed a very elegant method to promote cell behavior," says John Jansen, DDS, PhD, Methods Co-Editor-in-Chief and Professor and Chairman, Department of Biomaterials, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center, The Netherlands.

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3-D biomimetic scaffolds support regeneration of complex tissues from stem cells

Fears of an immune response to replacement tissues have been overestimated, new research suggests, rejecting previous findings about possible side effects

By Monya Baker and Nature magazine

Induced stem cells have been used to grow and graft skin cells (glowing green) onto a mouse. Image: Masahiro Uda

A paper published in Nature today could dispel a cloud over the hopes of turning a patients own cells into perfectly matched replacement tissues.

Scientists first reported in 2007 that a persons cells could be reprogramed to an embryo-like state, and so could form any type of cell in the body. Medical researchers immediately imagined using these induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to create an endless supply of genetically matched replacement tissues to treat a range of diseases: fresh pancreatic tissue for diabetics, for example, or new nerve cells for people with Parkinsons.

The strategy also seemed to offer a way around the ethical complexities of using stem cells derived from human embryos. But then came the worries about possible side effects. Particularly bad news came from a 2011 study showing that iPS cells provoked immune responses when injected into the mice from which they had been derived, casting doubt over one of the key advantages of the cells.

The latest Nature study rejects that conclusion. Masumi Abe, a geneticist at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, Japan, and his team took iPS cells derived from mice and injected them back into the animals. For comparison, they injected other mice with embryonic stem (ES) cells. Yet unlike the 2011 study, which saw iPS cells perform worse than ES cells, the team found no differences between the immune responses of each group. The researchers also transplanted skin and bone-marrow cells derived from iPS or ES cells into mice and achieved similar success rates between the groups. The immune response of both sets of tissues is indistinguishable, says Abe.

Konrad Hochedlinger, a stem-cell scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, says that the result will probably calm people down about iPS cells. It is definitely reassuring, he says.

The findings follow another positive study on iPS cells, published late last year, which found that the reprogramming process causes fewer mutations than previously thought. Flora Vaccarino, a neuroscientist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and her colleagues used high-resolution DNA analysis to compare the genomes of iPS cells and the adult cells from which they were derived. They found that most of the DNA mutations in the iPS cells did not arise during reprogramming but had been present in the parent cells.Yang Xu, a stem-cell scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and co-author of the 2011 study, says that the new work does not dispel all concerns about the immune response provoked by iPS cells.

Xu points out that the skin and bone-marrow cells used in the latest study were not grown from iPS cells in culture, as they would be for clinical use. Instead, the researchers mixed iPS cells into early mouse embryos to make chimaeric embryos. They then used skin and bone-marrow tissues that arose from iPS cells after the embryos grew into adult mice for their transplantation experiments. It is possible, says Xu, that the most immunogenic cells were rejected as the mice developed, which would explain why Abe and his colleagues observed a limited immune response. Transplanting tissues from chimaeric mice is flawed, he says.

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Safety of Induced Stem Cells Gets a Boost