Stem Cell Clinic

For Lowell native, stem cell match becomes a match as friends – Lowell Sun

From left to right: Richard Stone, a doctor at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, poses with Peter Karalekas (center), 76, and Matthew Churitch, 22. Churitch donated stem cells to Karalekas two years ago, and he visited Dana-Farber with Karalekas earlier this summer. (Courtesy photo)

BOSTON -- After winding his way through Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Maine for 76 years, Peter Karalekas has a proclamation: He's a Southerner now.

He still lives in Kittery, Maine, just about an hour from the Lowell middle school where he taught for 21 years.

He has no plans to move.

Rather, Karalekas considers himself a Southerner because of his stem cells.

He never exactly felt all that sick.

Karalekas worked tirelessly for decades, first as a teacher and coach at the James S. Daley Middle School in Lowell and then as the owner of a half-dozen T-Bones restaurants across New Hampshire.

Even despite the 12-hour days, seven days a week, in the grind of the restaurant industry, Karalekas felt healthy and rarely fell ill.

Peter Karalekas, left, a 76-year-old former Lowellian, smiles during his first meeting with Matthew Churitch, 22, of Nashville, Tennessee, who helped save Karalekas life by donating stem cells. (Courtesy photo)

The two, who do not have children, moved to Kittery 17 years ago.

Everything started to change in 2014.

Karalekas recalls being "short-winded," but he had very few other symptoms when he was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a rare type of cancer in which the bone marrow is damaged and cannot produce enough blood cells.

The prognosis was not good.

"They said the only thing that would save me was a stem cell transplant," Karalekas said. "Otherwise, I had a couple of months to live, because my cells were all dropping drastically.

He went onto a registry, hoping for a donor to pop up, but doctors told him it could take from six months to two years to find the right match. Even with a transplant, Karalekas said, his chances of success were "30 to 40 percent."

The call came four weeks later.

Matthew Churitch got his call quickly, too.

He joined the National Marrow Donor Program's Be the Match Registry in 2014, the summer between his freshman and sophomore years at Clemson University. His mother had been on the registry to donate for years. Churitch's decision was simple: When a friend was diagnosed with leukemia, he knew he should sign up, too.

He did the requisite cheek swab, unsure if he would ever even be contacted to donate. By the time he had finished the following semester, he got the call.

A match was found.

Churitch went through several more levels of testing and preparation to donate stem cells to a stranger. He went to Clemson's student health center to have blood drawn.

He returned to his native Nashville, Tennessee, going to a medical center 10 days in a row to receive shots in his stomach that would stimulate his bone marrow and prepare his cells for transplant.

He sat for eight hours, a needle in each arm as his stem cells were filtered out so they could be transferred to Boston.

"Getting the shots isn't fun," he said. "You're pretty sore afterward for a few weeks. But knowing that the person on the other end is in hundreds and hundreds times more pain than any donor would ever go through -- that kind of pushed me through."

Karalekas and Churitch first connected via an anonymous letter, per the transplant registry's rules, updating Churitch on Karalekas's lengthy, isolated recovery. They were able to speak directly after a year.

Churitch dialed Karalekas' number on a lengthy walk to class, took a deep breath and hit the call button. Moments later, both men were crying and laughing.

"That was really awesome, just being able to hear his voice and recognize that there's somebody else on the other end of this," Churitch said. "A lot of people don't get the chance to connect with their recipients or their donors."

Karalekas wanted more. He told his wife early on that he wanted to meet his "angel from heaven," so when Churitch graduated Clemson earlier this year, Karalekas paid to bring the 22-year-old and his mother to New England.

In late June, Karalekas and his wife pulled into a pickup lane at Logan International Airport in Boston.

"I got out of the car, I charged over, and I gave them both a huge hug," Karalekas said.

Karalekas showed Churitch and his mother around for five days.They went on a private tour of Fenway Park; they wandered the historic streets of Portsmouth, New Hampshire; they visited Dana-Farber together to meet the team that treated Karalekas.

Both families quickly bonded. Karalekas recalls his brother George asking Churitch about his portable phone charger, expressing curiosity about how convenient it was. A few weeks later, a brand-new portable charger arrived at George's door, a gift from Churitch.

In January, Karalekas and his wife will vacation in Arizona and will cheer on Churitch's mother -- without Churitch even present -- in the Phoenix Marathon.

Donor and recipient talk every week.

"It's like we're a very, very close-knit family now," Karalekas said. "He's the son we never had."

Churitch is now in his first year at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville with hopes of becoming a physician. He hopes to use Karalekas's experience as inspiration for any patients facing future hardship, and he hopes that others, especially young people, will see their success and join the registry.

"You never know where that will take you," he said. "You can gain a friend for life, impact somebody and their family in need."

Karalekas said he feels he has a new life: His chances of beating the disease are now 97 percent, he says, up from the 30 percent or 40 percent when he started treatment. Thanks to the transplant from a handsome, athletic college student in Tennessee.

"I said, 'I'm a Southerner now,'" Karalekas said. "My stem cells are 99 percent this gentleman. I'm 99 percent him."

Follow Chris on Twitter @ChrisLisinski.

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For Lowell native, stem cell match becomes a match as friends - Lowell Sun

Brain cell replacement for Parkinson’s boosted by monkey study – The San Diego Union-Tribune

A brain cell replacement therapy reduced Parkinsons disease symptoms in monkeys, Japanese researchers report in a study released Wednesday. The positive result boosts prospects to test the therapy in people.

The goal is to implant neurons derived from stem cells into the brains of Parkinsons patients, a project pursued by scientists in San Diego, New York, Britain and Sweden as well as in Japan. If all goes well, the neurons will function as replacements for those destroyed in the disease.

In addition, human testing of a related brain cell therapy from Carlsbads International Stem Cell Corp. is already under way in Australia.

While treatments exist for the movement disorders caused by Parkinsons, none of them actually halt progression. Replacing the brain cells destroyed in Parkinsons holds the promise of actually reversing the disease.

Moreover, success with Parkinsons could pave the way to treating many other neurodegenerative diseases, such as ALS (Lou Gehrigs disease) and perhaps Alzheimers, along with brain and spinal cord injuries. These afflictions cost hundreds of billions annually, and most importantly, produce immense suffering in patients and caregivers.

Years of extensive research are required before any such therapy can be tried in people. Testing in monkeys or other primates is often regarded as the last step before human treatment can be contemplated.

The study was published in the journal Nature. Its senior author was Jun Takahashi, a prominent stem cell researcher at Kyoto University in Kyoto, Japan. Go online to j.mp/parkips for the study.

There is precedent to suggest the therapy might work. Beginning decades ago, brain cells taken from human fetuses have been implanted into the brains of Parkinsons patients, with mixed results. Some patients experienced improved movement control. But others gained nothing, or experienced uncontrolled movements.

Scientists in the field say using stem cells should provide improved results. Stem cells can be made in greater quantity than the limited number of fetal brain cells available. In addition, the stem cells and neurons made from them can be analyzed for quality before implantation.

The study was praised by regenerative medicine researcher Tilo Kunath at the University of Edinburgh, in comments provided by the UK Science Media Centre.

This is extremely promising research demonstrating that a safe and highly effective cell therapy for Parkinsons can be produced in the lab, Kunath said.

Such a therapy has the potential to reverse the symptoms of Parkinsons in patients by restoring their dopamine-producing neurons. The next stage will be to test these therapies in a first-in-human clinical trial.

In the study, researchers produced neurons that secrete dopamine, a neurotransmitter deficient in Parkinsons disease. These neurons were made from human stem cells derived from both healthy people and those with Parkinsons.

The researchers then implanted the human neurons into 10 monkeys whose own dopamine-making neurons had been destroyed. The monkeys were given immunosuppressive drugs to prevent rejection of the human cells.

The human neurons integrated into the brains of the monkeys and functioned as dopamine-making neurons. The monkeys improved in movement ability, save for one monkey that became ill and was euthanized. Both cells from healthy and Parkinsons patients were effective.

A companion study in Nature Communications demonstrated a method of immune-matching the cells to reduce the immune response. Takahashi was also senior author of that study. Go online to j.mp/ipsimmune for the study.

Both studies used artificial embryonic stem cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS). These act-alike cells are not derived from embryos, but are genetically reprogrammed from adult cells, usually skin cells.

The IPS cells appear to act virtually identically to embryonic stem cells, but dont raise the ethical objections many have to using embryonic stem cells. These cells were invented in 2006 by a team led by Shinya Yamanaka, a co-author of the Nature Communications study.

Moreover, the cells can be made from the patients themselves, which is not expected to cause an immune reaction. This is the approach taken by the San Diego team, including scientists at The Scripps Research Institute.

Carlsbads International Stem Cell Corp. uses a different approach. It starts with unfertilized, or parthenogenetic, human egg cells. These are grown into immature neurons that are implanted. The cells are expected to grow not only into dopamine-making neurons, but other kind of brain cells that preserve the remaining neurons.

The Australian clinical trial has gathered evidence of safety, and continued testing is under way determine efficacy.

The Nature study dovetails with research by the San Diego group, Summit for Stem Cell, (www.summitforstemcell.org), including scientists at The Scripps Research Institute and doctors at Scripps Health.

The group proposes to treat Parkinsons patients with neurons grown from their own IPS cells. The scientists have received funding from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the states stem cell agency.

The studies support the personalized approach that we are taking for a neuron replacement therapy for Parkinson's disease patients, said Jeanne Loring and Andres Bratt-Leal, stem cell scientists at The Scripps Research Institute.

Two points from the studies should be highlighted, Loring and Bratt-Leal said by email.

Parkinson's disease is a late-onset disorder, they said. That means that there was nothing wrong with the neurons that people with Parkinson's were born with. Few PD patients have a family history of the disease, which suggests that genetic mutations did not cause their disease.

So for the great majority of patients, transplantation of their own neurons is a promising approach to relieving symptoms, without having to take expensive and risky immunosuppressive drugs, they said.

The Summit for Stem Cell scientists are members of an international partnership of laboratories developing neuron replacement therapies for Parkinsons, called GForce PD.

Takahashi belongs to the partnership, as do scientists in the UK, Sweden and New York. These use both embryonic and IPS stem cells. The Summit for Stem Cell effort is the only one using patient-matched IPS cells, Loring and Bratt-Leal said.

Brain cells reprogrammed to make dopamine, with goal of Parkinsons therapy

Parkinson's stem cell therapy shows signs of safety

Parkinson's therapy funded by California's stem cell agency

Dopamine-making neurons can be chemically controlled in animal model of Parkinson's

Stem cell clinical trial for Parkinson's begins

Summit for Stem Cell

bradley.fikes@sduniontribune.com

(619) 293-1020

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Brain cell replacement for Parkinson's boosted by monkey study - The San Diego Union-Tribune

Collaboration Key to 3D Bioprinting Stem Cell Research Success at BioFab3D@ACMD in Australia – 3DPrint.com

Medical researchers and scientists have created all kinds of medical marvels, from brain tissue and cartilage to a heart and a pancreas, by 3D printing stem cells. In Australia, Swinburne University of Technology PhD candidateLilith Caballero Aguilar is currently collaborating on a project with surgeons and researchers at BioFab3D@ACMD, the countrys first bioengineering facility based in a hospital, about how stem cells are fed once theyre inside the body. She is working to develop methods to control the rate of release for growth factors, which stem cells need for development once theyve been implanted, and the research could help doctors use biological 3D printing techniques to regenerate damaged or missing tissue.

Caballero Aguilar says that working alongside surgeons and other university researchers at the facility has had a major impact on her work.

We complement each other. If I have doubt, we can discuss it and reshape the project as we go, which helps to reach a better outcome.At the end of the day, everyone is doing a bit of work in a big project. It feels very rewarding,Caballero Aguilar said.

The facility was established through a partnership between Swinburne, St Vincents Hospital Melbourne, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science, the University of Melbourne,RMIT University, and the University of Wollongong Australia. Biology experts, surgeons, researchers, and biomedical engineers work at the facility to pioneer innovations, like nerves, re-engineered limbs, and tissues.

Cellink Inkredible Bioprinters [Image: Swinburne]

Caballero Aguilars stem cell work is part of two of the facilitys major research projects, one which focuses on repairing damaged muscle fibers and another regarding damaged cartilage regeneration; both are using advanced technologies, like bioprinting, to implant materials into the body, including the handheld 3D Biopen that allows surgeons to draw biomaterials into a patient directly and has been successfully tested, using knee cartilage, on six sheep.

BioPen

She is working to manipulate polymer materials into release mechanisms for stem cell growth factors, which would form part of the 3D bioink drawn into the body. Controlling the delivery of growth factors is very important stem cells take at least six weeks to grow into tissue, so the growth factors need to be slowly released over the entire time period.Caballero Aguilar shakes an oil and water solution at an intense rate, which is called the emulsion method, to create microspheres, which are crosslinked to form a substance thats able to hold the growth factors.

Swinburne Professor of Biomedical Electromaterials Science Simon Moulton, who is Caballero Aguilars supervisor, said that the success of her stem cell research project was helped along by the opportunity to collaborate directly with orthopaedic surgeons and muscle specialists at St Vincents Hospital.

Swinburne PhD candidate Lilith Caballero Aguilar and Professor Simon Moulton in a lab at BioFab3D@ACMD. [Image: Swinburne]

Professor Moulton said, Without this space, Liliths project would be a much smaller project without the translation benefit.It still would be great research done at a very high level, she would have publications and be able to graduate, but working in this collaborative environment, she can achieve all of that, while also having her research go into a clinical outcome that actually has benefit to patients.

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Collaboration Key to 3D Bioprinting Stem Cell Research Success at BioFab3D@ACMD in Australia - 3DPrint.com