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Stem cell therapy shows promise for stroke

By Stem Cell Medical Center

By Maureen Salamon
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 1 (HealthDay News) -- Treating stroke patients with stem cells taken from their own bone marrow appears to safely help them regain some of their lost abilities, two small new studies suggest.

Indian researchers observed mixed results in the extent of stroke patients' improvements, with one study showing marked gains in daily activities, such as feeding, dressing and movement, and the other study noting these improvements to be statistically insignificant. But patients seemed to safely tolerate the treatments in both experiments with no ill effects, study authors said.

"The results are encouraging to know but we need a larger, randomized study for more definitive conclusions," said Dr. Rohit Bhatia, a professor of neurology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, and author of one of the studies. "Many questions -- like timing of transplantation, type of cells, mode of transplantation, dosage [and] long-term safety -- need answers before it can be taken from bench to bedside."

The studies are scheduled to be presented Wednesday and Thursday at the American Stroke Association's annual meeting in New Orleans.

Stem cells -- unspecialized cells from bone marrow, umbilical cord blood or human embryos that can change into cells with specific functions -- have been explored as potential therapies for a host of diseases and conditions, including cancer and strokes.

In one of the current studies, 120 moderately affected stroke patients ranging from 18 to 75 years old were split into two groups, with half infused intravenously with stem cells harvested from their hip bones and half serving as controls. About 73 percent of the stem cell group achieved "assisted independence" after six months, compared with 61 percent of the control group, but the difference wasn't considered statistically significant.

In the other study, presented by Bhatia, 40 patients whose stroke occurred between three and 12 months prior were also split into two groups, with half receiving stem cells, which were dissolved in saline and infused over several hours. When compared to controls, stroke patients receiving stem cell therapy showed statistically significant improvements in feeding, dressing and mobility, according to the study. On functional MRI scans, the stem cell recipients also demonstrated an increase in brain activity in regions that control movement planning and motor function.

Neither study yielded adverse effects on patients, which could include tumor development.

But Dr. Matthew Fink, chief of the division of stroke and critical care neurology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, said that the therapy's safety is the only thing the two studies seemed to demonstrate.

"The thing to keep in mind is that these are really phase one trials," said Fink, also a professor of neurology at Weill Cornell Medical College. "I'm concerned that people get the idea that now stem cell treatment is available for stroke, and that's not the case."

Fink noted that the cells taken from study participants' hip bones can only be characterized as "bone marrow aspirates" since the authors didn't prove that actual stem cells were extracted.

"They haven't really analyzed if they're stem cells and what they turn into when they go into circulation," he added. "The best way to look at this is, it's very preliminary . . . when patients come to me to talk about it, I'm going to tell them it's years away before we know if this is going to work."

Studies presented at scientific conferences should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

More information

The U.S. National Institutes of Health has more information on stem cells.

Copyright © 2012 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

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Stem cell therapy shows promise for stroke

Researchers turn skin cells into neural precusors, bypassing stem-cell stage

By Stem Cell Medical Center

The multiple successes of the direct conversion method could refute the idea that pluripotency (a term that describes the ability of stem cells to become nearly any cell in the body) is necessary for a cell to transform from one cell type to another. Together, the results raise the possibility that embryonic stem cell research and another technique called "induced pluripotency" could be supplanted by a more direct way of generating specific types of cells for therapy or research.

This new study, which will be published online Jan. 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a substantial advance over the previous paper in that it transforms the skin cells into neural precursor cells, as opposed to neurons. While neural precursor cells can differentiate into neurons, they can also become the two other main cell types in the nervous system: astrocytes and oligodendrocytes. In addition to their greater versatility, the newly derived neural precursor cells offer another advantage over neurons because they can be cultivated to large numbers in the laboratory — a feature critical for their long-term usefulness in transplantation or drug screening.

In the study, the switch from skin to neural precursor cells occurred with high efficiency over a period of about three weeks after the addition of just three transcription factors. (In the previous study, a different combination of three transcription factors was used to generate mature neurons.) The finding implies that it may one day be possible to generate a variety of neural-system cells for transplantation that would perfectly match a human patient.

"We are thrilled about the prospects for potential medical use of these cells," said Marius Wernig, MD, assistant professor of pathology and a member of Stanford's Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. "We've shown the cells can integrate into a mouse brain and produce a missing protein important for the conduction of electrical signal by the neurons. This is important because the mouse model we used mimics that of a human genetic brain disease. However, more work needs to be done to generate similar cells from human skin cells and assess their safety and efficacy."

Wernig is the senior author of the research. Graduate student Ernesto Lujan is the first author.

While much research has been devoted to harnessing the pluripotency of embryonic stem cells, taking those cells from an embryo and then implanting them in a patient could prove difficult because they would not match genetically. An alternative technique involves a concept called induced pluripotency, first described in 2006. In this approach, transcription factors are added to specialized cells like those found in skin to first drive them back along the developmental timeline to an undifferentiated stem-cell-like state. These "iPS cells" are then grown under a variety of conditions to induce them to re-specialize into many different cell types.

Scientists had thought that it was necessary for a cell to first enter an induced pluripotent state or for researchers to start with an embryonic stem cell, which is pluripotent by nature, before it could go on to become a new cell type. However, research from Wernig's laboratory in early 2010 showed that it was possible to directly convert one "adult" cell type to another with the application of specialized transcription factors, a process known as transdifferentiation.

Wernig and his colleagues first converted skin cells from an adult mouse to functional neurons (which they termed induced neuronal, or iN, cells), and then replicated the feat with human cells. In 2011 they showed that they could also directly convert liver cells into iN cells.

"Dr. Wernig's demonstration that fibroblasts can be converted into functional nerve cells opens the door to consider new ways to regenerate damaged neurons using cells surrounding the area of injury," said pediatric cardiologist Deepak Srivastava, MD, who was not involved in these studies. "It also suggests that we may be able to transdifferentiate cells into other cell types." Srivastava is the director of cardiovascular research at the Gladstone Institutes at the University of California-San Francisco. In 2010, Srivastava transdifferentiated mouse heart fibroblasts into beating heart muscle cells.

"Direct conversion has a number of advantages," said Lujan. "It occurs with relatively high efficiency and it generates a fairly homogenous population of cells. In contrast, cells derived from iPS cells must be carefully screened to eliminate any remaining pluripotent cells or cells that can differentiate into different lineages." Pluripotent cells can cause cancers when transplanted into animals or humans.

The lab's previous success converting skin cells into neurons spurred Wernig and Lujan to see if they could also generate the more-versatile neural precursor cells, or NPCs. To do so, they infected embryonic mouse skin cells — a commonly used laboratory cell line — with a virus encoding 11 transcription factors known to be expressed at high levels in NPCs. A little more than three weeks later, they saw that about 10 percent of the cells had begun to look and act like NPCs.

Repeated experiments allowed them to winnow the original panel of 11 transcription factors to just three: Brn2, Sox2 and FoxG1. (In contrast, the conversion of skin cells directly to functional neurons requires the transcription factors Brn2, Ascl1 and Myt1l.) Skin cells expressing these three transcription factors became neural precursor cells that were able to differentiate into not just neurons and astrocytes, but also oligodendrocytes, which make the myelin that insulates nerve fibers and allows them to transmit signals. The scientists dubbed the newly converted population "induced neural precursor cells," or iNPCs.

In addition to confirming that the astrocytes, neurons and oligodendrocytes were expressing the appropriate genes and that they resembled their naturally derived peers in both shape and function when grown in the laboratory, the researchers wanted to know how the iNPCs would react when transplanted into an animal. They injected them into the brains of newborn laboratory mice bred to lack the ability to myelinate neurons. After 10 weeks, Lujan found that the cells had differentiated into oligodendroytes and had begun to coat the animals' neurons with myelin.

"Not only do these cells appear functional in the laboratory, they also seem to be able to integrate appropriately in an in vivo animal model," said Lujan.

The scientists are now working to replicate the work with skin cells from adult mice and humans, but Lujan emphasized that much more research is needed before any human transplantation experiments could be conducted. In the meantime, however, the ability to quickly and efficiently generate neural precursor cells that can be grown in the laboratory to mass quantities and maintained over time will be valuable in disease and drug-targeting studies.

"In addition to direct therapeutic application, these cells may be very useful to study human diseases in a laboratory dish or even following transplantation into a developing rodent brain," said Wernig.

Provided by Stanford University Medical Center (news : web)

Originally posted here:
Researchers turn skin cells into neural precusors, bypassing stem-cell stage

Frank Young Joins Bioheart as Financial Consultant

By Stem Cell Medical Center

SUNRISE, Fla., Jan. 30, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --
Bioheart (OTCBB:BHRT.OB
-
News), a leader in developing stem cell therapies to treat
cardiovascular diseases, today announced that Frank Young will join
Bioheart
to be a financial consultant. Young will provide financial
oversight of the company's capital fundraising efforts and
cultivate relationships within the financial and health care
communities to support Bioheart's business goals.

Young previously served as chief financial officer (CFO) with
Bioheart from 2003 to 2005. He has more than 30 years'
experience launching and managing venture-backed companies in
the technology and health care industries.

"Frank's entrepreneurial spirit and successful fundraising
strategies, combined with his previous accomplishments at
Bioheart, make him an ideal fit for Bioheart," said Mike Tomas,
Bioheart's president and CEO. "Frank has a proven track record
launching, managing and financially advising numerous companies
across the healthcare industry."

Previously Young worked as CFO with CURNA,a health care company
known for its discovery of new therapeutic compounds. He
engineered the sale of the company in fewer than two years for
more than five times the invested capital. He also worked as
CFO with Mitral Solutions and Hyperion. As CFO with Bioheart,
Young assisted in raising more than $9.5 million from investors
in addition to negotiating international manufacturing
arrangements and joint ventures.

"I have always been impressed with Bioheart and its success
with stem cell research," Young said. "I look forward to
becoming an integral part of Bioheart's financial future as it
continues to develop life-saving technologies for victims of
heart
disease."

About Bioheart

Bioheart (OTCBB:BHRT.OB
-
News) is committed to developing stem cell therapies to
treat congestive heart failure, lower limb ischemia, chronic
heart ischemia, acute myocardial infarctions and other medical
problems. The company focuses on the discovery and development
of therapies that will improve patients' quality of life and
reduce health care costs and hospitalizations. Bioheart's
leading product, MyoCell, is a muscle-derived cell therapy
designed to populate regions of scar tissue within a patient's
heart to improve cardiac function. For more information, visit

http://www.bioheartinc.com.

For more information on Bioheart, visit
http://www.bioheartinc.com.

Forward-Looking Statements: Except for historical matters
contained herein, statements made in this press release are
forward-looking statements. Without limiting the generality of
the foregoing, words such as "may," "will," "to," "plan,"
"expect," "believe," "anticipate," "intend," "could," "would,"
"estimate," or "continue" or the negative other variations
thereof or comparable terminology are intended to identify
forward-looking statements.

Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks,
uncertainties and other factors which may cause our actual
results, performance or achievements to be materially different
from any future results, performance or achievements expressed
or implied by the forward-looking statements. Also,
forward-looking statements represent our management's beliefs
and assumptions only as of the date hereof. Except as required
by law, we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking
statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results
could differ materially from those anticipated in these
forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes
available in the future.

The Company is subject to the risks and uncertainties described
in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission,
including the section entitled "Risk Factors" in its Annual
Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2010, and
its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended
September 30, 2011.

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Frank Young Joins Bioheart as Financial Consultant

Oxford, Harvard scientists lead data-sharing effort

By Stem Cell Medical Center

Public
release date: 29-Jan-2012
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Contact: Adi Himpson
adi.himpson@oerc.ox.ac.uk
44-186-561-0620
Harvard
University

Led by researchers at University of Oxford (UK) and the Harvard
Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) at Harvard University, (USA), more
than 50 collaborators at over 30 scientific organizations
around the globe have agreed on a common standard that will
make possible the consistent description of enormous and
radically different databases compiled in fields ranging from
genetics to stem cell science, to environmental studies.

The new standard provides a way for scientists in widely
disparate fields to co-ordinate each other's findings by
allowing behind-the-scenes combination of the mountains of data
produced by modern, technology driven science.

"We are now working together to provide the means to manage
enormous quantities of otherwise incompatible data, ranging
from the biomedical to the environmental," says Susanna-Assunta
Sansone, Ph.D, Team Leader of the project at the University of
Oxford's Oxford e-Research Centre.

This standard-compliant data sharing effort and the
establishment of its on-line presence, the ISA Commons ?
http://www.isacommons.org, is
described in a Commentary published today in the journal
Nature Genetics. The commentary is signed by all the
collaborators.

"An example of how this works at the Harvard Stem Cell
Institute is that we can now find a relationship between
experiments involving normal blood stem cells in fish and
cancers in children", says Winston Hide, director of HSCI's new
Center for Stem Cell Bioinformatics, and an associate Professor
of Bioinformatics at the Harvard School of Public Health.

ISA Commons is also being used at Harvard Medical School (HMS)
by the HMS LINCS
(Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures)
project, led by Professors Peter Sorger and Timothy
Mitchison.

It was necessary to establish common data standards, say the
commentary's authors, because of the tsunami of data and
technologies washing over the sciences. "There are hundreds of
new technologies coming along but also many ways to describe
the information produced" said Sansone, noting that "we can
take a jigsaw puzzle of different sciences and now fit the many
pieces together to form a complete picture".

"One of the things that I find most empowering about this
effort is that now small research groups can begin to store
laboratory data using this framework, complying with community
standards, without their own dedicated bioinformatics support.
It is a bit like Facebook allowing everyone to create their own
website pages - suddenly you don't need to be an expert in
computing to get your data out to the rest of the world", says
Dr. Jules Griffin, of the University of Cambridge.

"What we like about it is its unifying nature across different
bioscience fields and institutions", says Dr. Christoph
Steinbeck, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, The European
Bioinformatics Institute.

And "it also has the potential to work for large centers too",
says Scott Edmunds, editor of the journal published by
open-access publisher BioMedCentral and BGI Shenzhen
(previously known as the Beijing Genomics Institute) the
world's largest genomics institute, "We are working with this
framework to help harmonizing and presenting may large-data
types as possible in a common standardized and usable form,
publishing it in the associated GigaScience journal."

###

The work was funded, by among others, the Harvard Stem Cell
Institute, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the UK's
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

The Oxford e-Research
Centre works across the University of Oxford, and at
national and international level, to accelerate research
through development of innovative computational and information
technologies in multidisciplinary collaborations. The Harvard Stem Cell Institute
is a collaboration of more than 100 Harvard and
Harvard-affiliated scientists dedicated to using the power of
stem cell biology to advance basic understanding of human
development in order to develop treatments and cures for a host
of degenerative conditions and diseases.

B. D. Colen, Harvard Stem Cell Institute
bd_colen@harvard.edu
- 617-495-7821/617-413-1224

Adi Himpson, Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford
adi.himpson@oerc.ox.ac.uk
- +44 1865 610620

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Oxford, Harvard scientists lead data-sharing effort

KXAN Report: Healing Damaged Hearts with Stem Cells – Video

By Stem Cell Medical Center

23-11-2011 12:03 KXAN November 15, 2011 Dr. James T. Willerson, President and Medical Director: Texas Heart Institute and Professor and Edward Randall III Chair in Internal Medicine The University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, Texas discusses recent advances using stem cells to heal damaged hearts

See original here:
KXAN Report: Healing Damaged Hearts with Stem Cells - Video

Israeli researchers use stem cells to repair damaged tissue for first time – Video

By Stem Cell Medical Center

Israeli researchers have managed for the first time to repair damaged tissue using components produced by embryonic stem cells. The experiment involved tissue regeneration in mice, but the researchers said the method might be usable in the future to repair human tissue and organs that were damaged due to insufficient blood supply. The researchers were from Rambam Medical Center in Haifa and the Technion's medical school.

See original here:
Israeli researchers use stem cells to repair damaged tissue for first time - Video

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