Missouri House approves conscience rights bill for third time

JEFFERSON CITY Medical workers would be protected if they refused to participate in procedures such as abortions, fertility treatments or stem-cell research under a bill given initial approval by the Missouri House.

House Speaker Tim Jones, R-Eureka, said his bill protected the conscience rights of workers who did not want to provide specific, limited procedures that violated their religious beliefs. He said it also protected patients from having someone distracted while treating them.

This is good for workers in giving them more rights. This is good for patients, Jones said. Do you want that person taking care of you who is not 110 percent invested in what theyre doing and is sitting there wondering if theyre violating their religious beliefs?

The bill would prohibit retaliation from employers if an employee gave reasonable notice that they didnt want to participate in specific procedures. Jones said he had revised the bill from previous years to include exceptions for emergency situations.

The procedures listed in the bill include abortion, abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, reproductive assistance, human stem-cell research, human cloning, non-medically necessary sterilization and fetal tissue research.

Besides employees, the bill also protects institutions from being required to provide any procedure that violates its conscience, which would be determined from its guidelines and mission statement. The definitions in the bill include protections for refusing to refer patients for the specific procedures listed.

Opponents of the bill said it would interfere with womens access to medical services and was government intrusion into health care. Rep. Stacey Newman, D-St. Louis, said the bill specifically targeted procedures women have come to expect and rely on.

This is this body trying to put themselves in our gynecology offices telling our doctors exactly what they can and cant do, Newman said. "This is one more vagina-specific bill in an election year."

Jones said that the intent of the bill was solely to protect workers and their religious freedom under the First Amendment. He said Newman had brought political vitriol into the debate and said that if the other side really thought the government shouldnt be involved in health care, then they should help dismantle the presidents health care law.

This is simply codifying and giving greater freedom and more rights to institutions that do not want to provide certain services, Jones said.

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Missouri House approves conscience rights bill for third time

Stem cells from baby's umbilical cord save life of granddad given months to live

Patients with leukaemia need stem cells to replace damaged ones - the blood in the umbilical cord is so immature the recipient can accept the cells more easily

A grandad given just months to live has beaten leukaemia after getting stem cells from two babies umbilical cords.

The move was the only option to save David Pyne, 60, after all other treatments failed. He was one of the first to have the procedure.

He said of the stem cell transplant: To think two newborns saved an old mans life is just marvellous and its given me more time with my own grandchildren.

The dad-of-four was diagnosed with cancer in August 2012 and had chemotherapy and blood transfusions.

He desperately needed a stem cell donor but a match could not be found and he was given just 12 to 18 months to live.

But then he was offered cells from the umbilical cords of one baby in America and another in France.

He said: Things were looking pretty grim until I got the news about the possibility of an umbilical cord stem cell transplant.

The team found two separate umbilical cord donors that were a good match.

"I felt elated.

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Stem cells from baby's umbilical cord save life of granddad given months to live

The Daley Gator | Doctor: Adult Stem Cell Breakthrough …

Adult Stem Cell Breakthrough Will Transform Medicine, Doctor Predicts CNS

A scientific breakthrough that enables researchers to create adult stem cells much faster and easier will radically transform the way medicine is practiced, predicts Dr. Marc Darrow, assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California/Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Medicine.

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. It will be the standard of care, said Darrow, who teaches regenerative techniques utilizing platelets and adult stem cells to medical residents at UCLA, and who has been using the same techniques to treat patients with joint, tendon, ligament and muscle injuries in his own LA clinic.

Darrow explained that in the past, creating stem cell lines was a very tedious procedure which required using a pipette to take nuclear material from one cell to put into another.

But an article published January 29th in the peer-reviewed journal Nature describes a new technique for creating undifferentiated adult stem cells by immersing blood cells in an acid bath for half an hour.

Biologist Haruko Obokata, a stem cell researcher from Japans RIKEN Center of Developmental Biology, then injected the acid-stressed, florescently-tagged blood cells into a mouse embryo, where they created entire organs including a beating heart.

Its amazing. I would have never thought external stress could have this effect, said study co-author Yoshiki Sasai. (See STAP cells.pdf)

The generation of these cells is essentially Mother Natures way of responding to injury, added co-author Charles Vacanti, director of the Laboratory for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham Womens Hospital.

Our bodies make stem cells all day long and thats probably whats keeping us alive, by regenerating tissue. The whole field of medicine is moving into regenerative medicine, Darrow told CNSNews.com.

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The Daley Gator | Doctor: Adult Stem Cell Breakthrough ...

Breakthrough development in stem cell research

Scientists have recently discovered an innovative method that changes how stem cells will be produced.

Stem cell technology has been around for quite a while, but many patients are wary to participate, and doctors are hesitant to perform procedures involving stem cells because of the controversy over how they are obtained.

Generally, the embryonic stem cell is the easiest type to obtain. This is where the controversy lies because human embryos are destroyed in the harvesting process. Now, scientists and researchers at the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Japan have found a way to transform cells into stem cells a method that does not cause harm to embryos.

It was recently discovered that stem cells could be produced by using the patients own blood. The procedure is relatively fast, causing a vast number of cells to be produced in a short period of time.

The following procedure has been tested only on mice thus far but has proven to be successful. The procedure involves soaking blood cells in acid for a half an hour, causing a severe shock to the cells. They are then taken out of the acid, set out and stimulated for several days in order to erase the memory of the cells, thus allowing the cells to completely reprogram themselves.

(The discovery) was shocking because it was so easy that scientists didnt know why they hadnt done this before, says Shihuan Kuang, associate professor of animal sciences.

Through extensive research, a scientist by the name of Shinya Yamanaka discovered that when put into extreme conditions, the cells could express different genes, causing them to be able to turn into whatever cell is needed.

This near-fatal shock to the system is proving to be worth the risk since the chemical shocks result in a change in cellular fate, said Kuang.

Although not yet tested on adults, the great potential of this new method to produce stem cells outweighs the risks because it is able to heal ailments that were previously thought incurable.

Since the cells are able to become any cell necessary, this new method has endless applications of healing in areas including diabetes, paralysis, blindness, Parkinsons disease and stroke.

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Breakthrough development in stem cell research

Adult Stem Cell Breakthrough Will Transform Medicine …

Dr. Marc Darrow, M.D., J.D.

(CNSNews.com) A scientific breakthrough that enables researchers to create adult stem cells much faster and easier will radically transform the way medicine is practiced, predicts Dr. Marc Darrow,assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California/Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Medicine.

It will be the standard of care, said Darrow, who teaches regenerative techniques utilizing platelets and adult stem cells to medical residents at UCLA, and who has been using the same techniques to treat patients with joint, tendon, ligament and muscle injuries in his own LAclinic.

Darrow explained that in the past, creating stem cell lines was a very tedious procedure which required using a pipette to take nuclear material from one cell to put into another.

But an article published January 29th in the peer-reviewed journalNature describes a new technique for creating undifferentiatedadult stem cells by immersing blood cells in an acid bath for half an hour.

BiologistHaruko Obokata, a stem cell researcher from Japans RIKEN Center of Developmental Biology, then injected the acid-stressed, florescently-tagged blood cells into a mouse embryo, where they created entire organs including a beatingheart.

Haruko Obokata (RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology)

Its amazing. I would have never thought external stress could have this effect, said study co-author YoshikiSasai. (See STAP cells.pdf)

The generation of these cells is essentially Mother Natures way of responding to injury, added co-author Charles Vacanti, director of the Laboratory for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham Womens Hospital.

Read more:
Adult Stem Cell Breakthrough Will Transform Medicine ...

Genome editing goes hi-fi: Technique in stem cells to …

13 hours ago Beating-heart cells derived from iPS cells are shown. A single DNA base-pair of the PRKAG2 gene was edited using the method developed by Drs. Miyaoka and Conklin. Credit: Luke Judge/Gladstone Institutes

Sometimes biology is cruel. Sometimes simply a one-letter change in the human genetic code is the difference between health and a deadly disease. But even though doctors and scientists have long studied disorders caused by these tiny changes, replicating them to study in human stem cells has proven challenging. But now, scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have found a way to efficiently edit the human genome one letter at a timenot only boosting researchers' ability to model human disease, but also paving the way for therapies that cure disease by fixing these so-called 'bugs' in a patient's genetic code.

Led by Gladstone Investigator Bruce Conklin, MD, the research team describes in the latest issue of Nature Methods how they have solved one of science and medicine's most pressing problems: how to efficiently and accurately capture rare genetic mutations that cause diseaseas well as how to fix them. This pioneering technique highlights the type of out-of-the-box thinking that is often critical for scientific success.

"Advances in human genetics have led to the discovery of hundreds of genetic changes linked to disease, but until now we've lacked an efficient means of studying them," explained Dr. Conklin. "To meet this challenge, we must have the capability to engineer the human genome, one letter at a time, with tools that are efficient, robust and accurate. And the method that we outline in our study does just that."

One of the major challenges preventing researchers from efficiently generating and studying these genetic diseases is that they can exist at frequencies as low as 1%, making the task of finding and studying them labor-intensive.

"For our method to work, we needed to find a way to efficiently identify a single mutation among hundreds of normal, healthy cells," explained Gladstone Research Scientist Yuichiro Miyaoka, PhD, the paper's lead author. "So we designed a special fluorescent probe that would distinguish the mutated sequence from the original sequences. We were then able to sort through both sets of sequences and detect mutant cellseven when they made up as little one in every thousand cells. This is a level of sensitivity more than one hundred times greater than traditional methods."

The team then applied these new methods to induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells. These cells, derived from the skin cells of human patients, have the same genetic makeupincluding any potential disease-causing mutationsas the patient. In this case, the research team first used a highly advanced gene-editing technique called TALENs to introduce a specific mutation into the genome. Some gene-editing techniques, while effective at modifying the genetic code, involve the use of genetic markers that then leave a 'scar' on the newly edited genome. These scars can then affect subsequent generations of cells, complicating future analysis. Athough TALENs, and other similarly advanced tools, are able to make a clean, scarless single letter edits, these edits are very rare, so that new technique from the Conklin lab is needed.

"Our method provides a novel way to capture and amplify specific mutations that are normally exceedingly rare," said Dr. Conklin. "Our high-efficiency, high-fidelity method could very well be the basis for the next phase of human genetics research."

"Now that powerful gene-editing tools, such as TALENs, are readily available, the next step is to streamline their implementation into stem cell research," said Dirk Hockemeyer, PhD, assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in this study. "This process will be greatly facilitated by the method described by Dr. Conklin and colleagues."

"Some of the most devastating diseases we face are caused by the tiniest of genetic changes," added Dr. Conklin. "But we are hopeful that our technique, by treating the human genome like lines of computer code, could one day be used to reverse these harmful mutations, and essentially repair the damaged code."

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Genome editing goes hi-fi: Technique in stem cells to ...

Genome editing goes hi-fi: Technique in stem cells to boost scientists' ability to study genetic disease

13 hours ago Beating-heart cells derived from iPS cells are shown. A single DNA base-pair of the PRKAG2 gene was edited using the method developed by Drs. Miyaoka and Conklin. Credit: Luke Judge/Gladstone Institutes

Sometimes biology is cruel. Sometimes simply a one-letter change in the human genetic code is the difference between health and a deadly disease. But even though doctors and scientists have long studied disorders caused by these tiny changes, replicating them to study in human stem cells has proven challenging. But now, scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have found a way to efficiently edit the human genome one letter at a timenot only boosting researchers' ability to model human disease, but also paving the way for therapies that cure disease by fixing these so-called 'bugs' in a patient's genetic code.

Led by Gladstone Investigator Bruce Conklin, MD, the research team describes in the latest issue of Nature Methods how they have solved one of science and medicine's most pressing problems: how to efficiently and accurately capture rare genetic mutations that cause diseaseas well as how to fix them. This pioneering technique highlights the type of out-of-the-box thinking that is often critical for scientific success.

"Advances in human genetics have led to the discovery of hundreds of genetic changes linked to disease, but until now we've lacked an efficient means of studying them," explained Dr. Conklin. "To meet this challenge, we must have the capability to engineer the human genome, one letter at a time, with tools that are efficient, robust and accurate. And the method that we outline in our study does just that."

One of the major challenges preventing researchers from efficiently generating and studying these genetic diseases is that they can exist at frequencies as low as 1%, making the task of finding and studying them labor-intensive.

"For our method to work, we needed to find a way to efficiently identify a single mutation among hundreds of normal, healthy cells," explained Gladstone Research Scientist Yuichiro Miyaoka, PhD, the paper's lead author. "So we designed a special fluorescent probe that would distinguish the mutated sequence from the original sequences. We were then able to sort through both sets of sequences and detect mutant cellseven when they made up as little one in every thousand cells. This is a level of sensitivity more than one hundred times greater than traditional methods."

The team then applied these new methods to induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells. These cells, derived from the skin cells of human patients, have the same genetic makeupincluding any potential disease-causing mutationsas the patient. In this case, the research team first used a highly advanced gene-editing technique called TALENs to introduce a specific mutation into the genome. Some gene-editing techniques, while effective at modifying the genetic code, involve the use of genetic markers that then leave a 'scar' on the newly edited genome. These scars can then affect subsequent generations of cells, complicating future analysis. Athough TALENs, and other similarly advanced tools, are able to make a clean, scarless single letter edits, these edits are very rare, so that new technique from the Conklin lab is needed.

"Our method provides a novel way to capture and amplify specific mutations that are normally exceedingly rare," said Dr. Conklin. "Our high-efficiency, high-fidelity method could very well be the basis for the next phase of human genetics research."

"Now that powerful gene-editing tools, such as TALENs, are readily available, the next step is to streamline their implementation into stem cell research," said Dirk Hockemeyer, PhD, assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in this study. "This process will be greatly facilitated by the method described by Dr. Conklin and colleagues."

"Some of the most devastating diseases we face are caused by the tiniest of genetic changes," added Dr. Conklin. "But we are hopeful that our technique, by treating the human genome like lines of computer code, could one day be used to reverse these harmful mutations, and essentially repair the damaged code."

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Genome editing goes hi-fi: Technique in stem cells to boost scientists' ability to study genetic disease

Local mom bounces back after life-threatening illness

Published: Sunday, February 9, 2014 at 4:30 a.m. Last Modified: Saturday, February 8, 2014 at 10:56 p.m.

An avid runner, tennis player and rollerblader, Massagee's journey began nearly 10 years ago, when she began to notice her body slowly change, and included an endless parade of doctors, chemptherapy and a risky stem cell transplant.

Over time, Massagee's muscles grew larger. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing for an athletic woman in her early 50s, but as people age they tend to lose, not gain, muscle mass. Then her muscles began to harden and tighten, causing her significant pain.

Her husband, Buddy, a Hendersonville attorney, declared one day that something just wasn't right. Massagee had become so muscular that some in her social circle silently wondered if she was taking steroids to bulk up. She looked more like a professional body builder than an active mother of five.

As her muscles continued to harden and tighten, physical activity became more and more difficult. Massagee sought medical treatment from at least a dozen doctors, including the best of the best at Duke University Medical Center in Durham. After batteries of tests over several years, not a single doctor could tell Massagee what was wrong. Some doctors later confided to her that they thought I was secretly taking steroids and lying about it.

When a brain scan showed that the muscles behind her eyes were much larger than they should have been, doctors realized she wasn't on steroids, but they still weren't any closer to figuring out what was wrong. Bouncing from doctor to doctor, test to test, began to take its toll on Massagee physically and emotionally.

What broke my heart the most was looking at the pain it was causing Buddy and the children, she recalled. The couple's children, Sarah, 32, Rachel, 28, Kelly, 26, Lucy, 24 and Ty, 22, weren't very open about it we didn't talk about it a lot, Massagee said. But I knew it was very, very difficult for them.

Eventually, she found it impossible to undertake the most rudimentary physical activity, let alone work as a CPA.

I couldn't stand to make dinner, she said. I'd stand to chop something and then I'd need to sit down on a stool. I couldn't walk two blocks without having to stop.

One day, Massagee found it impossible to lift her arms enough to put on a pair of earrings.

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Local mom bounces back after life-threatening illness

Experimental procedure uses stem cells made from body fat

CLEVELAND, OH Whod have ever thought something as unappealing as body fat could be useful much less lifesaving, right?

I think this will revolutionize medicine if it works, says Dr. Mark Foglietti of the Stem Cell Center of Ohio.

It turns out, fat is highly regenerative and rich in stem cells, Warren Buffett rich, having 2,500 times more stem cells than bone marrow.

And these are Mesenchymal stem cells. Mesenchymal meaning theyre able to change into whatever type of tissue theyre attracted to.

So doctors in Cleveland are trying an experimental procedure on Multiple Sclerosis patient Kym Sellers, She was saying Dad, if I could only just get the use of my hands. If I can just use my hands, I can comb my hair. I can feed myself.

Doctors liposuction fat from Sellers, take the stem cells and mix in a biological potpourri called Stromal Vascular Fraction or SVF. The cells are supposed to act like a rescue squad responding to an emergency (they find damage to the body and repair it).

Dr. Foglietti happily tells his patient, We have 7ccs. We have 39 million stem cells! The SVF is then reintroduced into Kyms body intravenously.

You just want to pray that this is something that will improve your quality of life, says Kym Sellers.

Although the procedure only takes a few hours, itll be months until Kym or the doctors can determine if it was successful. If it is, itll be used to treat everything from asthma to A.L.S. For now though, Kym waits and prays.

Just praying for the best, she says.

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Experimental procedure uses stem cells made from body fat

Despite perfect match, doctors say little Hannah Day is too weak for transplant

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Hannah Day needs a life saving stem-cell transplant. Her family is not a match.

A sad update to the story of four-year-old Hannah Day.

Hannah lives in Victoria and has been in and out of hospital for most of her short life. She has leukemia andandits the second timein as many years that she is battling cancer.

The Day family went public just after Christmas to try and find a stem-cell donor for Hannah. Thousands of people from around the province rallied behind the Day family who finally got their wish, a perfect match.

But doctors say the little girl has gone through too much radiation to successfully have a stem-cell transplant, leaving her family with the choice of palliative care or a risky transplant next month that has a 60 per cent chance of success.

Canada currently has 326,000 people who are already registered as potential stem-cell donors. Hannah is one of 750 Canadians who are currently awaiting a stem-cell transplant.

To become a stem-cell donoryou can fill out a questionnaire onlineif youre between the ages of 17 and 35, and youll be sent a kit in the mail. A swab of your cheeks will reveal if youre a suitable donor. Once identified as a match, donors will undergo one of two procedures. Stem cells can be harvested from bone marrow under general anesthetic, or throughperipheral blood stem cell donation.

Shaw Media, 2014

Amy started with Global BC in June 2011, and loves being part of such an exciting newsroom. She loves social media and is always looking for a good story! You can also catch her on Trending on and BC1.

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Despite perfect match, doctors say little Hannah Day is too weak for transplant