Caution urged in using PRP or stem cells to treat young athletes’ injuries – Science Daily

Caution urged in using PRP or stem cells to treat young athletes' injuries Science Daily "Evidence from laboratory and veterinary research suggests that mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) may provide an alternative treatment option for conditions that affect muscle, tendons, ligaments, and cartilage," said the authors. "This evidence, however ...

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Caution urged in using PRP or stem cells to treat young athletes' injuries - Science Daily

‘Stem cell therapy offers me a glimmer of hope, but my date with … – Herald Scotland

Well, unfortunately I am still alive.

Dying can become unexpectedly complicated.

The TV crew filming the story of my final journey to Switzerland completed the initial shoot this week in my home town of Inverness.

The producer, cameraman and lighting technician were accompanied by Alexander - he is a 63-year-old man diagnosed with dementia who is also considering voluntary assisted suicide in Switzerland.

Along with us enjoying liquid highland hospitality many thoughts on death were discussed.

I was asked what I expected would happen after I died. I said oblivion is my expectation although I respect that many believe in an afterlife. And whilst being greeted by more than twenty beautiful virgins is the expectation of some it is definitely not something I believe will happen to me..

Inevitably the opposers of voluntary assisted suicide continue to seek to deny a change in the law. Their argument is care not killing which from my experience is meaningless. I have been offered no support in obtaining ground floor accommodation - I am an MS suffer who lives in an upstairs flat. Similarly, outwith the hospital I have been offered no care. I recall my recent discharge from hospital at the height of the flu season. For that reason I was in a single room rather than a ward. The nurse tied on a face mask to me then helped me into a wheelchair which she pushed down to the taxi rank on the ground floor. There were no ambulances available so a nervous looking taxi driver would have to take me back to my flat.

The fact that I am in a second floor flat which is in a listed building without permission to instal a lift offered me the chance for some humorous scenarios with the film makers. Whilst the film makers were at the foot of the stairs I told them this was their base camp.

They would film me bravely making a solo and hazardous attempt to reach the summit - in imagined deteriorating weather conditions. They filmed my uncertain efforts to climb ahead until I vanished from sight into a snowstorm. Eventually they met me seated in a chair at the summit and we regretted we did not have a flag with us to mark the achievement.

Back to grim reality, and I remain very much the condemned man alone in his cell on death row.

Each day continues with the challenge of holding onto a zimmer frame as I try to get dressed without falling over. Then it is through to the bathroom for a quick shower before my legs time out.

Now seated safely in a chair I use my electric shaver as leg tremor makes razor blade shaves unsafe.

For the moment, I do not require assistance with toileting and I do not yet have any difficulties with swallowing liquids. I am, though, aware that eventually choking whilst trying to swallow liquids is a likely outcome.

As I do not have any carers I survive on microwave meals.

I try not to watch too much TV and when I do watch TV it is mostly news and documentaries and some comedies. And listening to all types of music is a great joy for me. I am attempting not to add any more songs to my iTunes purchased collection which is now at 502 songs.

And a peaceful conclusion to my day is 10 minutes of improvised melodic acoustic guitar.

Bed time for me is strictly at 10pm as it requires about 15 minutes preparation to safely get into bed. I then read for about 15 minutes before falling asleep.

As an former IT specialist, much of this week has been taken up emailing old IT colleagues to lament the failings of IT staff in having not been proactive in countering the WannaCry ransom ware computer virus that hit the NHS. Incredibly it seems that the failure of regular patching of now unsupported Microsoft operating systems has made things worse. Microsoft always give plenty advance notice of withdrawing support for its older operating systems. Ten years since release date is usually the end of support for older software.

The cyber attack inevitably inspired me to update my website hosted by the excellent Go Daddy.com where I talk and write about the things I love: friends, music, blues guitar, and beer. It is much more relevant to me than Facebook.

Unsurprisingly my website is named seekingoblivion.com ...

Towards the end of this week my landlord considerately persuaded me to seek stem cell treatment with Swiss Medica. They say they presently cannot cure multiple sclerosis but the stem cell treatment will improve mobility and halt progression. I have now chosen to defer but not cancel my plan for assisted suicide in Switzerland.

My treatment with Swiss Medica will probably involve several weeks at their Belgrade clinic.

Depending on the outcome of the treatment I will decide whether or not to complete my original intention of voluntary assisted suicide with Lifecircle in Switzerland on June 15.

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'Stem cell therapy offers me a glimmer of hope, but my date with ... - Herald Scotland

Mouse study looks at safety of stem cell therapy for early … – Science Daily

Mouse study looks at safety of stem cell therapy for early ... Science Daily Now that we know that egg-making stem cells exist in adults and that these cells can be transplanted into mice with premature ovarian failure to produce ... and more »

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Mouse study looks at safety of stem cell therapy for early ... - Science Daily

Caution urged in using PRP or stem cells to treat young athletes’ injuries – Medical Xpress

May 19, 2017

Physicians, parents and coaches should be cautious when considering treating injured young athletes with platelet rich plasma (PRP), stem cells or other types of regenerative medicine, says a nationally recognized sports medicine clinician and researcher at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and UHealth Sports Medicine Institute.

"While regenerative medicine appears to have promise in many areas of medicine, little is known about the safety or effectiveness of these treatments for bone, cartilage, ligament or muscle tissue injuries in children and adolescents," said Thomas Best, M.D., Ph.D., professor of orthopedics, family medicine, biomedical engineering and kinesiology, and team physician for University of Miami athletics and the Miami Marlins. "Everyone wants a young athlete to get back to sports as quickly as possible, but it is important to look first at treatments that have been shown to be effective, before considering unproven options."

Best was the lead author of a new collaborative study, "Not Missing the Future: A Call to Action for Investigating the Role of Regenerative Medicine Therapies in Pediatric/Adolescent Sports Injuries," published May 15 in the American College of Sports Medicine's Current Sports Medicine Reports.

"Evidence from laboratory and veterinary research suggests that mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) may provide an alternative treatment option for conditions that affect muscle, tendons, ligaments, and cartilage," said the authors. "This evidence, however, is based largely on studies in adults and it remains unknown whether these results will be duplicated in our younger populations."

Young athletes are vulnerable to a wide range of injuries, including overuse of arm, shoulder and leg muscles, ligaments and joints in sports like baseball, tennis, soccer and golf, said Best, who is past president of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). "Unregulated clinics may sound attractive to parents and youngsters seeking aggressive regenerative therapy," Best said. "But far more scientific research is necessary to determine if those treatments are helpful in overcoming sports injuries and, more importantly, without serious short- or long-term side effects."

The new ACSM study grew from an August 2016 meeting of sport medicine clinicians, researchers, and a bioethicist who felt that a call to action was urgently needed to understand the current evidence, risks and rewards, and future directions of research and clinical practice for regenerative medicine therapies in youth sports. The meeting was supported by the National Youth Sports Health and Safety Institute, a partnership between the American College of Sports Medicine and SanfordHealth, a Midwest HMO.

The collaborative study included a seven-point call to action:

1. Exercise caution in treating youth with cell-based therapies as research continues.

2. Improve regulatory oversight of these emerging therapies.

3. Expand governmental and private research funding.

4. Create a system of patient registries to gather treatment and outcomes data.

5. Develop a multiyear policy and outreach agenda to increase public awareness.

6. Build a multidisciplinary consortium to gather data and promote systematic regulation.

7. Develop and pursue a clear collective impact agenda to address the "hype" surrounding regenerative medicine.

Reflecting on the evidence, the study's authors wrote, "Despite the media attention and perceived benefits of these therapies, there are still limited data as to efficacy and long-term safety. The involvement of clinicians, scientists and ethicists is essential in ourquest for the truth."

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Caution urged in using PRP or stem cells to treat young athletes' injuries - Medical Xpress

Mouse study looks at safety of stem cell therapy for early menopause – Medical Xpress

May 18, 2017

Now that we know that egg-making stem cells exist in adult rodents and humans and that these cells can be transplanted into mice with premature ovarian failure to produce offspring, the next question is to assess whether the offspring from the egg-making stem cells of a single adult mouse are biologically normal compared to natural births. On May 18 in the journal Molecular Therapy, researchers in China show that female mice with early menopause that receive egg-making stem cells from another mouse are capable of producing healthy pups 2 months later with no observable genetic malfunctions.

"One of our aims is to cure the disease of premature ovarian failure using female germline stem cells," says senior author Ji Wu, a reproductive biologist at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. "Before this treatment can be applied to humans, we need to know the mechanism of female germline stem cell development and safety after transplantation of single mouse female germline stem cells."

Premature ovarian failure, also called early menopause, is the loss of normal ovarian function, and thereby the release of eggs, before the age of 40. The condition is rare, affecting 200,000 women in the United States per year, and is incurable, although it can be treated with hormone supplements. Multiple groups are now looking at whether stimulating tissue regeneration or using stem cell transplants could help.

In the Molecular Therapy study, Wu and her colleagues isolated and characterized female germline stem cells from a single transgenic mouse with cells that show green fluorescence when activated by a blue laser. This allowed the researchers to observe and analyze the development of the transplanted stem cells, which were introduced to the ovaries of other mice using a fine glass needle.

Wu and colleagues found that the transplanted egg-producing stem cells exhibited a homing ability and began to differentiate into early-stage oocytes when they reached the edge of the ovary. The oocytes spent a few weeks maturing and yielded offspring within 2 months. The researchers then demonstrated that the developmental mechanisms of eggs derived from transplanted germline stem cells were similar to that of normal eggs.

"The results are exciting because it's not easy to get offspring from female germline stem cells derived from a single mouse," Wu says.

Wu's lab is also working to establish female egg-producing stem cell lines from scarce ovarian tissues derived from follicular aspiratesthe leftover cells gathered when a clinician searches a patient for oocytesthat are produced and discarded in in vitro fertilization centers worldwide. These aspirates can yield stem cells that differentiate into eggs in the lab, with the potential to be transplanted. The study not only provides a new approach to obtain human female germline stem cells for medical treatment, but also opens several avenues to investigate human oogenesis in vitro.

Explore further: Making sperm from stem cells in a dish

More information: Molecular Therapy, Wu et al.: "Tracing and characterizing the development of transplanted female germline stem cells in vivo" http://www.cell.com/molecular-therapy-family/molecular-therapy/fulltext/S1525-0016(17)30180-6 , DOI: 10.1016/j.ymthe.2017.04.019

Journal reference: Molecular Therapy

Provided by: Cell Press

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Mouse study looks at safety of stem cell therapy for early menopause - Medical Xpress

Gene therapy and stem cells prompt bone to regrow itself – FierceBiotech

Bone grafts, though imperfect, are used to repair fractures so severe the bone cannot mend the breach on its own. A Cedars-Sinai-led team has developed a combination treatment using ultrasound, stem cells and gene therapy that could replace this method.

Bone grafted either from the patient, usually from the hipor from a donor, is designed to actas a scaffold for the broken bone to heal and to be reabsorbed over time. But both types of grafts can cause problems. Some patients do not have enough healthy bone for a graft. In other cases, taking bone from the hip can lead to new injuries or infection. And donor grafts may not integrate properly into the bone,failing to fix the break.

The Cedars-Sinai investigators, led by Dan Gazit, injected a collagen matrix into the fractured leg bones of lab animals, according to a statement. Over two weeks, this matrix recruited stem cells from the fractured leg. Then, to kickstart healing, the team used an ultrasound pulse and microbubbles to deliver a bone-inducing gene. Eight weeks later, the fracture was healed in all animals that underwent the treatment. (See video below.)

Were combining an engineering approach with a biological approach to advance regenerative engineering, which we believe is the future of medicine, Gazit said.

Related: Medtronic defends handling of Infuse bone graft study to probing lawmakers

It is difficult to pin down exact numbers for bone graft procedures, but the team said more than 2 million procedures are performed around the world annually. Grand View Research valued the bone graft market at $2.3 billion in 2015 and projected it willgrow beyond $3.6 billion by 2024.

This study is the first to demonstrate that ultrasound-mediated gene delivery to an animals own stem cells can effectively be used to treat nonhealing bone fractures, said Gadi Pelled, an assistant professor of surgery at Cedars-Sinai, in the statement. It addresses a major orthopedic unmet need and offers new possibilities for clinical translation.

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Gene therapy and stem cells prompt bone to regrow itself - FierceBiotech

MS patient reveals he may ‘defer’ assisted suicide to undergo stem cell therapy in Serbia – Herald Scotland

A SCOT with crippling multiple sclerosis who planned to end his life at a Swiss suicide clinic has revealed he is applying to undergo an experimental stem cell treatment abroad in a last ditch attempt to reverse his symptoms and prolong his life.

Colin Campbell, from Inverness, said he would postpone his appointment at the LifeCircle clinic in Basel, where he had expected to end his life on June 15, if he was accepted for the pioneering therapy by medical chain, Swiss Medica. A 12-day course at its facility in Belgrade, Serbia costs around 15-16,000 and floods patients with up to 300 million stem cells which have been shown to restore myelin - a fatty coating around nerve cells destroyed by multiple sclerosis - leading to improved brain function and mobility.

Several clinical trials worldwide are exploring stem cell therapy as a means of "pausing" the degeneration associated with MS, but it cannot cure the condition and the treatment is not available on the NHS or privately in Britain.

Former IT consultant Mr Campbell praised his "very kind" landlord, Robert More, for persuading him to try out the procedure.

Mr Campbell, 56, said: "Robert said 'I don't want you to die - you can go abroad and try this. If it works, great; if it doesn't, it doesn't. There's nothing to lose'. So I would say I've moved into a new territory where I'm a 'deferred' suicide, but not a cancelled suicide.

"I will hopefully get onto the treatment programme, but if not then June 15 goes ahead as planned. So I'm in a limbo situation. I'm still holding on to June 15 because I don't want to knock that back and find that the time passes and I'm thinking 'why didn't I get out when I could?'. I've got no desire to spend another winter in the UK with MS - death would be preferable for me.

"That's the thing about not having [voluntary assisted suicide] in Scotland though. If I could do it here I wouldn't have to be too concerned about a date because it would be available to me whenever I choose, whereas when you have the travel to Switzerland and you've got a progressive illness you probably don't want to plan it too far ahead because you might not be up to the journey."

He added that MS patients were also let down because doctors did not routinely highlight the options for treatment outside the NHS.

He said: It would be nice after a diagnosis if a neurologist would go through your options - if they said look, you cant get this on the NHS at the moment, but you can get this abroad, but they dont even have this discussion with you. You get nothing, and thats the experience I hear from talking to other MS sufferers."MS

Mr Campbell was a keen footballer, swimmer and tennis player before being diagnosed aged 34 with primary progressive MS, a rarer form of the disease which results in a steady deterioration without any periods of remission. He now relies on walking aids to move around his first-floor flat and a wheelchair outdoors.

He revealed his plan to end his life in Switzerland to the Herald's sister paper, the Sunday Herald, in April as part of a campaign calling on MSPs to bring a new Bill on assisted dying to Holyrood. The proposed Bill would bring Scotland into line with Canada and parts of the US and Australia by allowing terminally ill people with less than six months to live the right to be prescribed a lethal dose of medication which they can then self-administer.

Mr More, who has rented a flat to Mr Campbell for three years, said: "He's a decent man and, quite frankly, he was depressed with his condition and all he was getting was tea and sympathy. There's nobody doing anything to really help him. Nobody is giving him options and in those situations there are always options.

"There was a 36-year-old woman that was at this [Swiss Medica] clinic and she went in in a wheelchair and when she came out her only complaint was she got tired after long walks. Stem cell therapy doesn't offer a cure, but it might make his life better and that's what I want for the man."

Mr More said he felt compelled to help after his own experience 32 years ago when his youngest daughter was diagnosed with spina bifida and the family were told she would never walk again.

He said: "If someone tells me that I try to do something about it so I took her to the Peto Institute in Budapest. I took her there for four years running and when she came out she could walk. So just because people tell you it's a death sentence, I don't believe it. She's alive and well - the Hungarians did a magnificent job with her."

Mr Campbell said he had also been boosted after being contacted by a fellow MDS sufferer, Rona Tynan, who encouraged him to test out a mobility scooter after seeing reports about his plans to end his life.

He said: "This has given me some kind of optimism which I definitely didn't have - so I owe that to Rona."

Mrs Tynan said: "What alarmed me about Colin was, I felt he was more able than myself."

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MS patient reveals he may 'defer' assisted suicide to undergo stem cell therapy in Serbia - Herald Scotland

Encouraging results after Jonathan Pitre’s transplant, mother says – CTV News

Nick Wells, CTVNews.ca Published Wednesday, May 17, 2017 7:04AM EDT Last Updated Wednesday, May 17, 2017 12:28PM EDT

An Ottawa-area boy who suffers from a rare and painful blistering skin disease is recovering in a Minneapolis hospital, after undergoing a second potentially life-changing transplant.

Jonathan Pitre, known as the "Butterfly Boy" because of his delicate, blistering skin, received a second transfusion of his mother Tina Boileaus stem cells in April.

In a Facebook post Tuesday, Boileau said the donor study tests are showing that her son is officially growing her cells.

Pitre was born with a severe form of epidermolysis bullosa (EB), an incurable genetic collagen disorder. The condition causes a never-ending series of raw and painful blisters -- some of which hes had for years.

His mother told CTV News on Wednesday that the positive turn in Pitres long and painful treatment was exactly what we needed.

Boileau said her son has had infections on top of infections and endured much pain over the past year. The second stem cell transplant has been really hard on his body, she said, but there now seems to be light at the end of the tunnel.

Yesterday was just the greatest day. We were speechless. Jonathan hugged me and we were like, We did it, she said in an interview from the hospital.

Boileau said that even some of the nurses were crying when Pitre received the good news.

Its finally now feeling like its all been worth it.

However, she pointed out that if Pitre is unable to grow his own cells, he could be diagnosed with Graft vs. Host disease a condition where the donor's cells take over the host's organs and bodily functions, leading to complications.

We still have a long road ahead of us, but you know what, this is definitely what weve been waiting for, Boileau said.

The $1.5-million transplant procedure Pitre is undergoing is currently only performed as a University of Minnesota clinical trial.

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Encouraging results after Jonathan Pitre's transplant, mother says - CTV News

Scientists get closer to making personalized blood cells by using patients’ own stem cells – Los Angeles Times

New research has nudged scientists closer to one of regenerative medicines holy grails: the ability to create customized human stem cells capable of forming blood that would be safe for patients.

Advances reported Wednesday in the journal Nature could not only give scientists a window on what goes wrong in such blood cancers as leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma. They could also improve the treatment of those cancers, which affect some 1.2 million Americans.

The stem cells that give rise to our blood are a mysterious wellspring of life. In principle, just one of these primitive cells can create much of a human beings immune system, not to mention the complex slurry of cells that courses through a persons arteries, veins and organs.

While the use of blood-making stem cells in medicine has been common since the 1950s, it remains pretty crude. After patients with blood cancers have undergone powerful radiation and chemotherapy treatments to kill their cancer cells, they often need a bone-marrow transplant to rebuild their white blood cells, which are destroyed by that treatment.

The blood-making stem cells that reside in a donors bone marrow and in umbilical cord blood that is sometimes harvested after a babys birth are called hematopoietic, and they can be life-saving. But even these stem cells can bear the distinctive immune system signatures of the person from whom they were harvested. As a result, they can provoke an attack if the transplant recipients body registers the cells as foreign.

This response, called graft-versus-host disease, affects as many as 70% of bone-marrow transplant recipients in the months following the treatment, and 40% develop a chronic version of the affliction later. It can overwhelm the benefit of a stem cell transplant. And it kills many patients.

Rather than hunt for a donor whos a perfect match for a patient in need of a transplant a process that can be lengthy, ethically fraught and ultimately unsuccessful doctors would like to use a patients own cells to engineer the hematopoietic stem cells.

The patients mature cells would be reprogrammed to their most primitive form: stem cells capable of becoming virtually any kind of human cell. Then factors in their environment would coax them to become the specific type of stem cells capable of giving rise to blood.

Once reintroduced into the patient, the cells would take up residence without prompting rejection and set up a lifelong factory of healthy new blood cells.

If the risk of deadly rejection episodes could be eliminated, physicians might also feel more confident treating blood diseases that are painful and difficult but not immediately deadly diseases such as sickle cell disease and immunological disorders with stem cell transplants.

The two studies published Wednesday demonstrate that scientists may soon be capable of pulling off the sequence of operations necessary for such treatments to move ahead.

One of two research teams, led by stem-cell pioneer Dr. George Q. Daley of Harvard Medical School and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, started their experiment with human pluripotent stem cells primitive cells capable of becoming virtually any type of mature cell in the body. Some of them were embryonic stem cells and others were induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, which are made by converting mature cells back to a flexible state.

The scientists then programmed those pluripotent stem cells to become endothelial cells, which line the inside of certain blood vessels. Past research had established that those cells are where blood-making stem cells are born.

Here, the process needed a nudge. Using suppositions gleaned from experiments with mice, Daley said his team confected a special sauce of proteins that sit on a cells DNA and program its function. When they incubated the endothelial cells in the sauce, they began producing hematopioetic stem cells in their earliest form.

Daleys team then transferred the resulting blood-making stem cells into the bone marrow of mice to see if they would take. In two out of five mice who got the most promising cell types, they did. Not only did the stem cells establish themselves, they continued to renew themselves while giving rise to a wide range of blood cells.

A second research team, led by researchers from Weill Cornell Medicines Ansary Stem Cell Institute in New York, achieved a similar result using stem cells from the blood-vessel lining of adult mice. After programming those cells to revert to a more primitive form, the scientists also incubated those stem cells in a concoction of specialized proteins.

When the team, led by Raphael Lis and Dr. Shahin Rafii, transferred the resulting stem cells back into the tissue lining the blood vessels of the mice from which they came, that graft also took. For at least 40 weeks after the incubated stem cells were returned to their mouse owners, the stem cells continued to regenerate themselves and give rise to many blood-cell types without provoking immune reactions.

In addition to making a workhorse treatment for blood cancers safer, the new advances may afford scientists a unique window on the mechanisms by which blood diseases take hold and progress, said Lee Greenberger, chief scientific officer for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

From a research point of view you could now actually begin to model diseases, said Greenberger. If you were to take the cell thats defective and make it revert to a stem cell, you could effectively reproduce the disease and watch its progression from the earliest stages.

That, in turn, would make it easier to narrow the search for drugs that could disrupt that disease process early. And it would speed the process of discovering which genes are implicated in causing diseases. With gene-editing techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9, those offending genes could one day be snipped out of hematopoietic stem cells, then be returned to their owners to generate new lines of disease-free blood cells.

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Scientists get closer to making personalized blood cells by using patients' own stem cells - Los Angeles Times

Stem cell transplants may advance ALS treatment by repair of blood … – Science Daily

Stem cell transplants may advance ALS treatment by repair of blood ... Science Daily Researchers show that bone marrow stem cell transplants helped improve motor functions and nervous system conditions in mice with the disease Amyotrophic ... and more »

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Stem cell transplants may advance ALS treatment by repair of blood ... - Science Daily