Stem Cell Clinic

Stem Cell Factor Tied to Reduced Risk of Cardiac Events, Death – Anti Aging News

407 0 Posted on Sep 07, 2017, 9 a.m.

High levels of stem cell factor (SCF) are associated with reduced risk of mortality and cardiovascular events, according to a study published online Aug. 26 in theJournal of Internal Medicine.

(HealthDay News) -- High levels of stem cell factor (SCF) are associated with reduced risk of mortality and cardiovascular events, according to a study published online Aug. 26 in theJournal of Internal Medicine.

Harry Bjrkbacka, Ph.D., from Lund University in Sweden, and colleagues examined the correlation between circulating levels of SCF and risk for development of cardiovascular events and death. SCF was analyzed from plasma from 4,742 participants in the Malm Diet and Cancer Study; participants were followed for a mean of 19.2 years.

The researchers found that participants with high baseline levels of SCF had lower cardiovascular and all-cause mortality and reduced risk of heart failure, stroke, and myocardial infarction. There was a correlation for smoking, diabetes, and high alcohol consumption with lower levels of SCF. After adjustment for traditional cardiovascular risk factors, the highest versus the lowest SCF quartile remained independently associated with lower risk of cardiovascular (hazard ratio, 0.59; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.43 to 0.81) and all-cause mortality (hazard ratio, 0.68; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.57 to 0.81) and with lower risk of heart failure (hazard ratio, 0.5; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.31 to 0.8) and stroke (hazard ratio, 0.66; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.47 to 0.92) but not myocardial infarction (hazard ratio, 0.96; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.72 to 1.27).

"The findings provide clinical support for a protective role of SCF in maintaining cardiovascular integrity," the authors write.

The possibilities that stem cell therapies present in the prevention, regeneration, and treatment of many health conditions seem to be still untouched. If course, stem cell research is still ongoing and no one is complete stem cell expert yet, but maybe thats a good approach to take. I am not so sure I would be comfortable in this modern area of easily accessible information with a physician that still doesnt consider his or her self a student. Whether your doctor is 65 or 38 I hope they are still open to learning, stated Dr. Ronald Klatz, President of the A4M.

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Stem Cell Factor Tied to Reduced Risk of Cardiac Events, Death - Anti Aging News

CReM Honored for Sharing Stem Cell Lines – BU Today

Darrell Kotton, Gustavo Mostoslavsky, and George Murphy began the Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM) in 2008 with a mission. It was not to win a Nobel Prize, launch more spin-offs than their peers, or make megabucks and retire at 35. Rather, their mantra was both humbler and grander: decrease the burden of human suffering on the planet, help patients, and advance new knowledge.

Since then, the lab has made a name for itself not only through its top-notch research on stem cells and lung disease but also because of its willingness to share the resources they createfor free, to anyone.

CReMs philosophy of openness challenges the cutthroat, hypersecret culture that dominates many other life science labs. And now the labs commitment to open-source biology, as it is known, has earned it the 2017 Sharing Research Resources Award from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), established to recognize successful models for sharing biomedical research resources.

There was a lot of skepticism at first that this plan could succeed, says Kotton, director of CReM, who says his team is humbled and honored to receive the award. But sharing reagents and expertise, without expectation of return, creates a culture of openness that has proven very successful for us.

We are very proud that CReM has been recognized both for the quality of their research and for setting a shining example of how science can advance through information-sharing, says Robert A. Brown, president of BU.

CReM scientists work with induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, which were discovered by Shinya Yamanaka in 2006. Yamanaka figured out how to take an adult human cell and reprogram it into a stem cell with the abilitytheoreticallyto grow into any organ. CReM researchers created an efficient technique for reprogramming adult human blood and skin cells into iPSCs, and in 2009 they began sharing their technology, and the resulting cell lines, free of charge with the research community. By 2010, the CReM investigators, whose work is funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, and others, had published a large number of patient-specific iPSC lines, including the first 100 distinctive to lung disease.

CReMs sharing of unpublished stem cell lines has broadly impacted the lung research community, resulting in collaborations and publications with groups formerly considered CReM competitors, and CReM recently became sole iPSC repository for the 7,000 participants of the long-running Framingham Heart Study, the nations longest running epidemiological study, which began in 1948 and has been run by BU since 1971, with support from theNational Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

Kotton says that the award acknowledges not only the work of CReM, but of all the other labs and institutions that have joined in this venture into scientific sharing. Just the fact that an award like this exists, he says, shows that this way of doing research has value.

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CReM Honored for Sharing Stem Cell Lines - BU Today

Italian scientists welcome surprise 400 million boost for basic research – Science Magazine

Italian Minister for Education, University, and Research Valeria Fedeli

AP Photo/Luca Bruno

By Marta PaterliniSep. 7, 2017 , 4:50 PM

Plagued by budget cuts and attacks on science, Italian scientists have had little to cheer about recently. But on Sunday, they received a welcome surprise when Valeria Fedeli, the minister for education, university, and research, announced that Italy will put an extra 400 million into its main basic science fund, the Research Projects of National Interest (PRIN). The money, to be spent over 3 years, will more than quadruple PRINs annual funding.

The biggest part of the increase, 250 million, will come out of unused reserves at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), a government-funded private foundation in Genoa that has recently come under criticism.

This is the largest investment in competitive funds for basic research of the last 20 years, says Elena Cattaneo, a stem cell biologist at the University of Milan and a senator for life in the Italian Parliament who had lobbied for the shift to basic science. PRIN funding has been going up and down since 2002, according to a group of academics calling itselfReturn On Academic ReSearch (ROARS), but overall has been modest. The latest funding round, in 2015, provided only 95 million for 3years.

Cattaneo had argued that IIT, founded in 2003 to foster innovation, could easily cough up the funds for a hike at PRIN. Scientists have criticized IIT for a lack of transparency in the way it allocates its fundingcurrently some 98 million annually from the Ministry of Economy and Financeand for its role in the creation of a new research hub at the site of the World Expo 2015 in Milan. Cattaneo has also been very vocal about the accumulation of hundreds of millions in public money in a private body.By reallocating the funds, the government has acknowledged the value of basic research, she says.

IITs scientific director, Roberto Cingolani, says the institutes large surplus is primarily the result of savings during its early years. Three years ago, we started to plan an expansion of the institute in Genoa, that would have cost about 200 million, he saysa plan that is now off the table. Cingolani says he is disappointed by the criticisms of IIT, but glad that the cut there will benefit basic research.

ROARS member Alberto Baccini, a professor of political economics at the University of Siena, applauds the decision as well and credits Cattaneo. We must acknowledge [her] crusade, he says.

A spokesperson for the research ministry could not provide details today about how the money will be spent. Its important that the process uses uniform assessment criteria and is transparent, Baccini says. (He notes that its impossible to find the projects awarded under the 2015 funding bolus for PRIN online.) The problem is not just the lack of money, but also that funding is handed out without a method, really, he says.

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Italian scientists welcome surprise 400 million boost for basic research - Science Magazine

Zika Virus Could One Day Help Treat A Deadly Form Of Brain Cancer – HuffPost

Glioblastoma, the aggressive and hard to treat brain cancer that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) announced he was diagnosed with in July, is the target of new research using a surprising treatment:Zika virus.

About 12,000 people are diagnosed with glioblastomas each year in the United States. Current treatment focuses on surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.

But now, researchers think Zika virus which threatens the health of a fetus and can cause severe birth defects could be an appropriate treatment for glioblastoma because they see similar pathways in the way brain tumor cells and healthy stem cells in fetuses grow and divide.

Because Zika targets fetus stem cells, researchers hypothesized that it might also be able to target glioblastoma cells,according to findings published on Sept. 5 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.

The abundance of neuroprogenitor stem cells in a human fetus partly explains why Zika virus can be so damaging to a fetal brain, while adults, who dont have many neuroprogenitor cells, typically only experience mild symptoms like fever and joint pain when theyre exposed to Zika.

We have guarded optimism about this treatment, said Dr. Michael Diamond, study author and professor of medicine, molecular microbiology, pathology and immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

To test their theory, researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine and the University of California San Diego School of Medicine injected either Zika virus or a saltwater placebo into the brain tumors of mice. After two weeks, the mice that were given the Zika injection had smaller tumors than those given the placebo.

The researchers also experimented with injecting a mutated form of Zika virus into mice, and found that the weaker mutant version still replicated and killed tumor stem cells. The weaker mutant virus should also be easier for the bodys healthy cells to defeat.

Despite the promising research findings, testing in humans, much less availability as a cancer treatment, remains a long way off. If all goes well, the researchers hope to begin human trials in 18 months.

We envision tests in humans, and eventually adding this to existing conventional therapy (surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy) to kill the otherwise resistant stem cell component of the tumor, Diamond said.

But we need to further test safety and we need to first prove this works in human glioblastomas when transplanted into mice.

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Zika Virus Could One Day Help Treat A Deadly Form Of Brain Cancer - HuffPost

Curved substrates restrict spreading and induce differentiation of stem cells – Phys.Org

September 6, 2017 by Adam Lowenstein, Florida Institute Of Technology Credit: Biotechnology Journal

An invention by Florida Institute of Technology's Shengyuan Yang was found to naturally narrow the spreading of stem cells and has the potential to induce and regulate their differentiation.

Using Yang's patented and patent-pending technology, stem cells were grown on microscopic glass balls immobilized in a gel medium. Unlike the well-spread stem cells grown on a two-dimensional surface, the stem cells on the glass balls were almost uniformly spindle-shaped . More interestingly, this surface-curvature-induced-restriction in cell spreading also induced the differentiation of the stem cells.

These findings imply that the curvature of a substrate, as provided by the glass balls, may be utilized and tuned for cell and tissue engineering.

The research was recently published in Biotechnology Journal.

Yang's team used glass balls with diameters ranging from 5 m to 4 mm. They found that the minimum diameter of a glass ball on which a human mesenchymal stem cell (hMSC) can attach and spread is 500 m. Their gene expression experiments revealed that the hMSCs growing on the glass balls with diameters of 1.1 mm and below were differentiating into fat cells without the addition of any differentiation induction media.

This means that surface curvatures of a substrate could potentially be designed and optimized to achieve or change a specific cell shape and function. And, due to the different sensitivities of different cell types to substrate curvatures, the particular curvature of a growth environment, such as glass balls of various sizes, may also be used to construct cell-sorting devices.

Based on the experimental findings, Yang has filed three patents to cover the applications of the concept of substrate curvature in sorting cells, in guiding stem cell differentiation, in directing cell attachment and spreading, and in inducing isotropic spreading of cells.

Some past studies have shown the role of geometrical cues in influencing the differentiations of stem cells on two-dimensional surfaces, but to date, the effects of substrates with defined-curvatures on the behaviors of stem cells are still missing. Yang said studies on the cellular responses to substrate curvature are necessary and critical for understanding the cellular behaviors in three-dimensional micromechanical environments and for designing effective and efficient three-dimensional micromechanical environments to control cell and tissue developments. With their unique class of curvature-defined substrates, micro glass ball embedded gels are able to systematically investigate the effects of substrate curvature on the behaviors of stem cells.

With this promising first published report, Yang's group will continue to systematically investigate the effects of substrate curvature on the behaviors of stem cells.

Explore further: Professor publishes on first-ever imaging of cells growing on spherical surfaces

More information: Sang Joo Lee et al, Substrate Curvature Restricts Spreading and Induces Differentiation of Human Mesenchymal Stem Cells, Biotechnology Journal (2017). DOI: 10.1002/biot.201700360

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Curved substrates restrict spreading and induce differentiation of stem cells - Phys.Org

This New, Cutting-Edge Treatment Could Be the End of Baldness – Reader’s Digest

docent/ShutterstockWhether or not theres a scientific benefit to being baldwell let the follically challenged among us be the judge of thatscientists continue to search for a balding cure. According to UCLA researchers, that isnt completely out of the question. A team, led by Heather Christofk, PhD, and William Lowry, PhD, found a new way to activate the stem cells in the hair follicle to make hair grow. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Cell Biology, may lead to new drugs to promote hair growth or work as a cure for baldness or alopecia (hair loss linked to factors like hormonal imbalance, stress, aging or chemotherapy).

Working at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA, the researchers discovered that the metabolism of the stem cells embedded in hair follicles is different from the metabolism of other cells of the skin. When they altered that metabolic pathway in mice, they discovered they could either stop hair growth, or make hair grow rapidly. They did this by first blocking, then increasing, the production of a metabolitelactategenetically.

Before this, no one knew that increasing or decreasing the lactate would have an effect on hair follicle stem cells, says Dr. Lowry, a professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology, as reported on ScienceDaily. Once we saw how altering lactate production in the mice influenced hair growth, it led us to look for potential drugs that could be applied to the skin and have the same effect.

Two drugs in particularknown by the generic designations of RCGD423 and UK5099influenced hair follicle stem cells in distinct ways to promote lactate production. The use of both drugs to promote hair growth are covered by provisional patent applications. However, they are experimental drugs and have been used in preclinical tests only. They wont be ready for prime time until theyve been tested in humans and approved by the Food and Drug Administration as safe and effective. (While youre waiting for a male pattern baldness cure, check out these natural remedies for hair loss.)

So while it may be some time before these drugs are availableif everto treat baldless or alopecia, researchers are optimistic about the future. Through this study, we gained a lot of interesting insight into new ways to activate stem cells, says Aimee Flores, a predoctoral trainee in Lowrys lab and first author of the study. The idea of using drugs to stimulate hair growth through hair follicle stem cells is very promising given how many millions of people, both men and women, deal with hair loss. I think weve only just begun to understand the critical role metabolism plays in hair growth and stem cells in general; Im looking forward to the potential application of these new findings for hair loss and beyond.

This 7-year-old girl living with alopecia will inspire you.

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This New, Cutting-Edge Treatment Could Be the End of Baldness - Reader's Digest