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Chemical stem cell signature predicts treatment response for acute myeloid leukemia

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

3-Feb-2014

Contact: Kim Newman sciencenews@einstein.yu.edu 718-430-3101 Albert Einstein College of Medicine

February 3, 2014 (Bronx, NY) Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Montefiore Medical Center have found a chemical "signature" in blood-forming stem cells that predicts whether patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) will respond to chemotherapy.

The findings are based on data from nearly 700 AML patients. If validated in clinical trials, the signature would help physicians better identify which AML patients would benefit from chemotherapy and which patients have a prognosis so grave that they may be candidates for more aggressive treatments such as bone-marrow transplantation. The paper was published today in the online edition of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Sparing Patients from Debilitating Side Effects

According to the American Cancer Society, AML accounts for nearly one-third of all new leukemia cases each year. In 2013, more than 10,000 patients died of AML.

"AML is a disease in which fewer than 30 percent of patients are cured," said co-senior author Ulrich Steidl, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of cell biology and of medicine and the Diane and Arthur B. Belfer Faculty Scholar in Cancer Research at Einstein and associate chair for translational research in oncology at Montefiore. "Ideally, we would like to increase that cure rate. But in the meantime, it would help if we could identify who won't benefit from standard treatment, so we can spare them the debilitating effects of chemotherapy and get them into clinical trials for experimental therapies that might be more effective."

Analyzing Methylation Patterns

The Einstein study focused on so-called epigenetic "marks" chemical changes in DNA that turn genes on or off. The researchers focused on one common epigenetic process known as methylation, in which methyl (CH3) groups attach in various patterns to the genes of human cells. Researchers have known that aberrations in the methylation of hematopoietic, or blood-forming, stem cells (HSCs) can prevent them from differentiating into mature blood cells, leading to AML.

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Chemical stem cell signature predicts treatment response for acute myeloid leukemia

iPSC Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Market 2013 14 Complete Report at ReportsnReports.com

Dallas, Texas (PRWEB) February 02, 2014

Stem cell research and experimentation has been in process for well over five decades, as stem cells have the unique ability to divide and replicate repeatedly. In addition, their unspecialized nature allows them to differentiate into a wide variety of specialized cell types. The possibilities arising from these characteristics have caused great commercial interest, with potential applications ranging from the use of stem cells in reversal or treatment of disease, to targeted cell therapy, tissue regeneration, pharmacological testing on cell-specific tissues, and more. Diseases such as Huntingtons Chorea, Parkinsons Disease, and spinal cord injuries are examples of clinical applications in which stem cells could offer benefits in halting or even reversing damage.

Traditionally, scientists have worked with both embryonic and adult stem cells as research tools. While the appeal of embryonic cells has been their ability to differentiate into any type of cell, there has been significant ethical, moral and spiritual controversy surrounding their use for research purposes. Although some adult stem cells do have differentiation capacity, it is often limited in nature, which creates narrow options for use. Thus, induced pluripotent stem cells sector (http://www.reportsnreports.com/reports/206575-complete-2012-13-induced-pluripotent-stem-cell-industry-report.html) represent a promising combination of adult and embryonic stem cell characteristics.

Continued research and experimentation has resulted in numerous advances over the last few years. In one example, the University of Michigan announced in Circulation Research (2012) that they had developed innovative methods for use of induced pluripotent stem cells derived from skin biopsies to create cardiac muscle cells. This accomplishment quickly fueled other research into the use of iPSCs for the reversal and repair of diseased heart tissue.

Similar advances will continue to be perfected for use of reprogrammed adult cells in the treatment of other diseases and disorders. Original techniques for iPSC production, such as viral induced transcription processes, are being replaced with newer technologies as private industries join with the scientific community to develop safe and efficient methods of iPSC production. With sustained research and experimentation, established guidelines for effective production of iPSCs will be commonplace.

In summary, induced pluripotent stem cells represent a promising tool for use in the reversal and repair of many previously incurable diseases.

Market Metrics - iPSC Research Products: For this reason a large and thriving research products market has grown into existence for the cell type. The number of iPSC research products sold worldwide has been growing at an annual rate of 14.7% for the past five years. In addition, 22% of all stem cell researchers now self-report as having used induced pluripotent stem cells within a research project. It is clear that iPSCs are a vital research trend within the scientific community.

A distinctive feature of this report is an end-user survey of 274 researchers (131 U.S. / 143 International) that identify as having induced pluripotent stem cells as their core research focus. These survey findings reveal iPSC researcher needs, technical preferences, key factors influencing buying decisions, and more. They can be used to make effective product development decisions, create targeted marketing messages, and produce higher prospect-to-client conversion rates.

Remember, to benefit from this lucrative product market, you need to anticipate and serve the needs of your clients, or your competitors will.

Purchase Report @ http://www.reportsnreports.com/purchase.aspx?name=206575.

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iPSC Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Market 2013 14 Complete Report at ReportsnReports.com

Parkinsons sufferer has vital treatment

Parkinson's Disease sufferer James DeLittle has vital treatment in Kiev

9:57am Monday 3rd February 2014 in News By Mike Laycock, Chief reporter

A PARKINSONS Disease sufferer has returned home to York after pioneering stem cell treatment in Kiev and he already appears to be feeling the benefits.

James DeLittle, 49, of Broadway West in Fulford, is enjoying improved balance, which reduces the risks of falling over, said his mother Rosemary.

But she said the clinic that provided the two-day treatment had said it could be up to five months before the full effects were known.

The Press reported earlier this month that James condition had worsened significantly in recent months, affecting his balance and causing him to fall several times, suffering injuries including a broken nose, ribs and thumb joint.

He decided to travel to a clinic in the Ukrainian capital Kiev for foetal stem cells to be injected into him in a bid to tackle the illness.

The clinic told him it had treated more than 100 patients with Parkinsons in recent years, with improvements reported in 75 per cent of cases, including reduction of tremor and rigidity, and cognitive and gait improvements.

The former St Peters School pupil said he believed he was the first person from the UK to go to the clinic, but it was costing 7,000 to pay for the treatment, travel and accommodation.

After the article appeared, his family received donations from well-wishers who wanted to help with the costs.

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Parkinsons sufferer has vital treatment

Health Beat: Pros and cons of banking your baby's stem cells

CHICAGO -

Umbilical cord stem cell banking can be expensive and controversial, but Jamie and Ben Page decided to bank their daughter Harlow's stem cells, just in case. Then, "just in case" became a reality.

"We had heard about cord blood banking and talked about it a lot and thought let's just go for it and have it just as a backup," said Jamie Page.

It turns out, they did need it. Harlow had cancer in her uterus.

"On the ultrasound, they immediately saw that there was a mass in her abdomen about the size of a grapefruit," Page said.

After a year of chemotherapy, the tumor was gone. Doctors wanted to keep it that way.

"So, when the doctors found out we actually had her own stem cells, they were very excited," Page said.

"I think that her umbilical cord cells were used as a boost to her own cells when we harvested her to have adequate cells for reconstitution," said Dr. Elaine Morgan, oncologist, Lurie Children's Memorial Hospital.

Morgan does not advocate private cord stem cell banking at birth to be saved for a healthy baby's later use because it's not clinically useful and it's expensive.

The Pages paid almost $2,000 for the initial banking fee, plus an extra $125 per year.

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Health Beat: Pros and cons of banking your baby's stem cells

Stem cell researchers heralding major scientific discovery

January 29, 2014 - 17:55 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - Stem cell researchers are heralding a "major scientific discovery", with the potential to start a new age of personalized medicine, BBC News reports.

Scientists in Japan showed stem cells can now be made quickly just by dipping blood cells into acid.

Stem cells can transform into any tissue and are already being trialled for healing the eye, heart and brain.

The latest development, published in the journal Nature, could make the technology cheaper, faster and safer, according to the BBC.

The human body is built of cells with a specific role - nerve cells, liver cells, muscle cells - and that role is fixed. However, stem cells can become any other type of cell, and they have become a major field of research in medicine for their potential to regenerate the body.

Embryos are one, ethically charged, source of stem cells. Nobel prize winning research also showed that skin cells could be "genetically reprogrammed" to become stem cells (termed induced pluripotent stem cells).

Now a study shows that shocking blood cells with acid could also trigger the transformation into stem cells - this time termed STAP (stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency) cells.

Dr Haruko Obokata, from the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology in Japan, said she was "really surprised" that cells could respond to their environment in this way.

She added: "It's exciting to think about the new possibilities these findings offer us, not only in regenerative medicine, but cancer as well."

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Stem cell researchers heralding major scientific discovery

Adult stem-cell tech company signs on with Mayo Clinic

Posted: Friday, January 31, 2014 8:30 pm

Adult stem-cell tech company signs on with Mayo Clinic

An adult stem-cell technology company called BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics has signed an agreement with Mayo Clinic in Rochester to conduct its Phase II clinical trial of NurOwn in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients, pending approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The company announced this week that Mayo's Human Cell Therapy Laboratory "will manufacture the NurOwn cells for their clinical-trial participants."

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Adult stem-cell tech company signs on with Mayo Clinic

Cell therapy – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cell therapy (or Cellular therapy) is therapy in which cellular material is injected into a patient.[1]

Cell therapy originated in the nineteenth century when scientists experimented by injecting animal material in an attempt to prevent and treat illness.[2] Although such attempts produced no positive benefit, further research found in the mid twentieth century that human cells could be used to help prevent the human body rejecting transplanted organs, leading in time to successful bone marrow transplantation.[3]

Today two distinct categories of cell therapy are recognized.[1]

The first category is cell therapy in mainstream medicine. This is the subject of intense research and the basis of potential therapeutic benefit.[4] Such research, especially when it involves human embryonic material, is controversial.

The second category is in alternative medicine, and perpetuates the practice of injecting animal materials in an attempt to cure disease. This practice, according to the American Cancer Society, is not backed by any medical evidence of effectiveness, and can have deadly consequences.[1]

Cell therapy can be defined as therapy in which cellular material is injected into a patient.[1]

There are two branches of cell therapy: one is legitimate and established, whereby human cells are transplanted from a donor to a patient; the other is dangerous alternative medicine, whereby injected animal cells are used to attempt to treat illness.[1]

The origins of cell therapy can perhaps be traced to the nineteenth century, when Charles-douard Brown-Squard (18171894) injected animal testicle extracts in an attempt to stop the effects of aging.[2] In 1931 Paul Niehans (18821971) who has been called the inventor of cell therapy attempted to cure a patient by injecting material from calf embryos.[1] Niehans claimed to have treated many people for cancer using this technique, though his claims have never been validated by research.[1]

In 1953 researchers found that laboratory animals could be helped not to reject organ transplants by pre-innoculating them with cells from donor animals; in 1968, in Minnesota, the first successful successful human bone marrow took place.[3]

Bone marrow transplants have been found to be effective, along with some other kinds of human cell therapy for example in treating damaged knee cartilage.[1] In recent times, cell therapy using human material has been recognized as an important field in the treatment of human disease.[4] The experimental field of Stem cell therapy has shown promise for new types of treatment.[1]

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Cell therapy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stem cell therapy – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the medical therapy. For the cell type, see Stem cell.

Stem cell therapy is an intervention strategy that introduces new adult stem cells into damaged tissue in order to treat disease or injury. Many medical researchers believe that stem cell treatments have the potential to change the face of human disease and alleviate suffering.[1] The ability of stem cells to self-renew and give rise to subsequent generations with variable degrees of differentiation capacities,[2] offers significant potential for generation of tissues that can potentially replace diseased and damaged areas in the body, with minimal risk of rejection and side effects.

A number of stem cell therapies exist, but most are at experimental stages, costly or controversial,[3] with the notable exception of bone-marrow transplantation.[4] Medical researchers anticipate that adult and embryonic stem cells will soon be able to treat cancer, Type 1 diabetes mellitus, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, Celiac disease, cardiac failure, muscle damage and neurological disorders, and many others.[5] Nevertheless, before stem cell therapeutics can be applied in the clinical setting, more research is necessary to understand stem cell behavior upon transplantation as well as the mechanisms of stem cell interaction with the diseased/injured microenvironment.[5]

For over 30 years, bone-marrow, and more recently, umbilical-cord blood stem cells, have been used to treat cancer patients with conditions such as leukaemia and lymphoma.[6][7] During chemotherapy, most growing cells are killed by the cytotoxic agents. These agents, however, cannot discriminate between the leukaemia or neoplastic cells, and the hematopoietic stem cells within the bone marrow. It is this side effect of conventional chemotherapy strategies that the stem cell transplant attempts to reverse; a donor's healthy bone marrow reintroduces functional stem cells to replace the cells lost in the host's body during treatment.

Stroke and traumatic brain injury lead to cell death, characterized by a loss of neurons and oligodendrocytes within the brain. Healthy adult brains contain neural stem cells which divide to maintain general stem cell numbers, or become progenitor cells. In healthy adult animals, progenitor cells migrate within the brain and function primarily to maintain neuron populations for olfaction (the sense of smell). In pregnancy and after injury, this system appears to be regulated by growth factors and can increase the rate at which new brain matter is formed.[citation needed] Although the reparative process appears to initiate following trauma to the brain, substantial recovery is rarely observed in adults, suggesting a lack of robustness.[8]

Stem cells may also be used to treat brain degeneration, such as in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.[9][10]

Pharmacological activation of an endogenous population of neural stem cells / neural precursor cells by soluble factors has been reported to induce powerful neuroprotection and behavioral recovery in adult rat models of neurological disorder through a signal transduction pathway involving the phosphorylation of STAT3 on the serine residue and subsequent Hes3 expression increase (STAT3-Ser/Hes3 Signaling Axis).[11][12][13]

Stem cell technology gives hope of effective treatment for a variety of malignant and non-malignant diseases through the rapid developing field that combines the efforts of cell biologists, geneticists and clinicians. Stem cells are defined as totipotent progenitor cells capable of self-renewal and multi-lineage differentiation. Stem cells survive well and show steady division in culture which then causes them the ideal targets for vitro manipulation. Research into solid tissue stem cells has not made the same progress as haematopoietic stem cells because of the difficulty of reproducing the necessary and precise 3D arrangements and tight cell-cell and cell-extracellular matrix interactions that exist in solid organs. Yet, the ability of tissue stem cells to assimilate into the tissue cytoarchitecture under the control of the host microenvironment and developmental cues, makes them ideal for cell replacement therapy. [3] [14]

The development of gene therapy strategies for treatment of intra-cranial tumours offers much promise, and has shown to be successful in the treatment of some dogs;[15] although research in this area is still at an early stage. Using conventional techniques, brain cancer is difficult to treat because it spreads so rapidly. Researchers at the Harvard Medical School transplanted human neural stem cells into the brain of rodents that received intracranial tumours. Within days, the cells migrated into the cancerous area and produced cytosine deaminase, an enzyme that converts a non-toxic pro-drug into a chemotheraputic agent. As a result, the injected substance was able to reduce the tumor mass by 81 percent. The stem cells neither differentiated nor turned tumorigenic.[16]

Some researchers believe that the key to finding a cure for cancer is to inhibit proliferation of cancer stem cells. Accordingly, current cancer treatments are designed to kill cancer cells. However, conventional chemotherapy treatments cannot discriminate between cancerous cells and others. Stem cell therapies may serve as potential treatments for cancer.[17] Research on treating lymphoma using adult stem cells is underway and has had human trials. Essentially, chemotherapy is used to completely destroy the patients own lymphocytes, and stem cells injected, eventually replacing the immune system of the patient with that of the healthy donor.

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Stem cell therapy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cell Therapy – American Cancer Society

Other common name(s): cellular therapy, fresh cell therapy, live cell therapy, glandular therapy, xenotransplant therapy

Scientific/medical name(s): none

In cell therapy, processed tissue from the organs, embryos, or fetuses of animals such as sheep or cows is injected into patients. Cell therapy is promoted as an alternative form of cancer treatment.

Available scientific evidence does not support claims that cell therapy is effective in treating cancer or any other disease. Serious side effects can result from cell therapy. It may in fact be lethalseveral deaths have been reported. It is important to distinguish between this alternative method involving animal cells and mainstream cancer treatments that use human cells, such as bone marrow transplantation.

In cell therapy, live or freeze-dried cells or pieces of cells from the healthy organs, fetuses, or embryos of animals such as sheep or cows are injected into patients. This is supposed to repair cellular damage and heal sick or failing organs. Cell therapy is promoted as an alternative therapy for cancer, arthritis, heart disease, Down syndrome, and Parkinson disease.

Cell therapy is also marketed to counter the effects of aging, reverse degenerative diseases, improve general health, increase vitality and stamina, and enhance sexual function. Some practitioners have proposed using cell therapy to treat AIDS patients.

The theory behind cell therapy is that the healthy animal cells injected into the body can find their way to weak or damaged organs of the same type and stimulate the body's own healing process. The choice of the type of cells to use depends on which organ is having the problem. For instance, a patient with a diseased liver may receive injections of animal liver cells. Most cell therapists today use cells taken from taken from the tissue of animal embryos.

Supporters assert that after the cells are injected into the body, they are transported directly to where they are most needed. They claim that embryonic and fetal animal tissue contains therapeutic agents that can repair damage and stimulate the immune system, thereby helping cells in the body heal.

The alternative treatment cell therapy is very different from some forms of proven therapy that use live human cells. Bone marrow transplants infuse blood stem cellsfrom the patient or a carefully matched donorafter the patients own bone marrow cells have been destroyed. Studies have shown that bone marrow transplants are effective in helping to treat several types of cancer. In another accepted procedure, damaged knee cartilage can be repaired by taking cartilage cells from the patient's knee, carefully growing them in the laboratory, and then injecting them back into the joint. Approaches involving transplants of other types of human stem cells are being studied as a possible way to replace damaged nerve or heart muscle cells, but these approaches are still experimental.

First, healthy live cells are harvested from the organs of juvenile or adult live animals, animal embryos, or animal fetuses. These cells may be taken from the brain, pituitary gland, thyroid gland, thymus gland, liver, kidney, pancreas, spleen, heart, ovaries, testicles, or even from whole embryos. Patients might receive one or several types of animal cells. Some cell therapists inject fresh cells into their patients. Others freeze them first, which kills the cells, and they may filter out some of the cell components. Frozen cell extracts have a longer "shelf life" and can be screened for disease. Fresh cells cannot be screened. A course of cell therapy to address a specific disease might require several injections over a short period of time, whereas cell therapy designed to treat the effects of aging and "increase vitality" may involve injections received over many months.

Link:
Cell Therapy - American Cancer Society