Stem Cell Clinic

Boy getting a chance for a better life

An Okotoks boy may not understand his community is helping to give him a better life this weekend, but there is a good chance he will be smiling anyway.

At four years old, Ryker Menzies communicates through a series of sounds, suffers from frequent muscle spasms, is in a wheelchair because hes unable to walk or sit on his own and is constantly on painkillers.

This has been Rykers reality since infancy due to a severe case of cerebral palsy, and his parents Tiffany Boyd and Jamie Menzies are hopeful stem cell therapy treatment in Panama City will improve his muscle movement, vision and speech.

Unfortunately, they havent been able to afford the procedure living on one income while Boyd cares for Ryker.

To help pay for the $15,600 treatment, the couple is organizing a mini-market at the Foothills Centennial Centre on June 14 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and inviting the community to check out an abundance of second-hand items and products from home-based and privately-owned businesses for an entry fee of $2.

Money will also be raised through a food vendor, numerous raffle tickets for prizes including vacations and toys, and items donated by residents. Okotoks singer Emily Gryba will perform at the event.

Ive been getting a lot of calls from people donating stuff to the market to sell there, as well as a few online donations, said Boyd. We will just set up about five tables and have family run them. The proceeds will go to Ryker.

Boyd said she is ecstatic at the amount of community support for Rykers stem cell treatment. An online fund she established called Raise for Rykstar collected $1,300, with another $2,000 donated by family, friends and community members.

The feedback has been fantastic, she said. Were already at $3,500.

As the family gets closer to reaching their financial goal, Boyd is eager to book an appointment to give Ryker the best life possible. She said she was told they will have an appointment within a month or two of making the call.

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Boy getting a chance for a better life

Mice With MS Walk Again After Stem Cell Tx

Mice severely disabled by a condition similar to multiple sclerosis (MS) could walk less than two weeks following treatment with human stem cells. The study, which uncovers new avenues for treating MS, was don e at the University of Utah and published online on May 15th 2014, in the journal Stem Cell Reports.

The scientists we surprised and encouraged by their finding. When they transplanted human stem cells into MS mice, they expected no benefit from the treatment. They thought the cells would be rejected, much like rejection of an organ transplant. Instead, the experiment yielded spectacular results.

A release from the university quotes co-senior author, Tom Lane, Ph.D., a professor of pathology at the University of Utah, who began the study at the University of California, Irvine, as saying, My postdoctoral fellow Dr. Lu Chen came to me and said, The mice are walking. I didnt believe her.

Within a short period of time, 10 to 14 days, the mice could walk and run. Six months later, they showed no signs of slowing down.

This result opens up a whole new area of research for us to figure out why it worked, said co-senior author Jeanne Loring, Ph.D., director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

More than 2.3 million people worldwide have MS, a disease in which the immune system attacks myelin, an insulation layer surrounding nerve fibers. The resulting damage inhibits transmission of nerve impulses, producing a wide array of symptoms including difficulty walking, impaired vision, fatigue and pain.

Current FDA-approved medications slow early forms of the disease by dampening attacks by the immune system. In recent years, scientists have turned their attention to searching for ways to halt or reverse MS. Such a discovery could help patients with latter, or progressive, stages of the disease, for whom there are no treatments.

Results from the study demonstrate the mice experience at least a partial reversal of symptoms. Immune attacks are blunted, and the damaged myelin is repaired, explaining their dramatic recovery.

The way we made the neural stem cells turns out to be important, said Loring, describing the reason behind the novel outcome.

Prior to transplantation, Lorings graduate student and co-first author on the paper, Ronald Coleman, followed his intuition and grew the cells so they were less crowded on the Petri dish than usual. The change in protocol yielded a human neural stem cell type that turned out to be extremely potent. The experiments have since been successfully repeated with cells produced under the same conditions, but by different laboratories.

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Mice With MS Walk Again After Stem Cell Tx

It takes a Village; local brewery hosts swab-a-thon

Ryan White, CTV Calgary Published Saturday, June 7, 2014 4:38PM MDT Last Updated Saturday, June 7, 2014 6:30PM MDT

Dozens of men stepped forward to offer their cheek cells for testing in the hope of assisting patients in need of stem cell or bone marrow transplants.

On Saturday, the Village Brewery offered beer tastings and tours to those who took part in the swab-a-thon.

The event was created by Steve Carpenter, the operator of a local micro-brewery, whose brother Al was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia in November. Al, married and the father of two, was in desperate need of stem cell treatment and Canadian Blood Services was unable to locate a suitable match through its stem cell and bone marrow donor program.

Steve and his friends organized a swab-a-thon in the hopes of locating a suitable donor, and Jim Button, a childhood friend of Als and the owner of Village Brewery, offered the use of his brewery.

Miraculously, in the days before the swab-a-thon was to be held, a suitable stem cell match was located for Al and he underwent treatment in an Ottawa hospital. Doctors say Al is responding well to the treatment.

Despite the fact a donor had been located for his brother, Steve made the decision to continue with his plans for Saturdays event.

We are here to tell people it is a very easy program, said Steve. We really appreciate anybody coming out to sign up on registry, be it for my brother or any other people in need.

Mike Carron was the first volunteer to step up to register and offer up a saliva sample. He says he wanted to help the cause after stem cell treatment extended the life of a close family member.

I thought it would be good to pay it forward, explains Carron. I had an uncle who needed stem cell treatment three years ago and it gave him an extra three years.

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It takes a Village; local brewery hosts swab-a-thon

Cerebral Palsy – How Stem Cells Helped One Little Girl! – Video

Cerebral Palsy - How Stem Cells Helped One Little Girl!
Abigail came to David Steenblock, D.O., to help treat her cerebral palsy. She saw incredible results after just one stem cell treatment. There is help for cerebral palsy, just call Dr. Steenblock #39;s...

By: David Steenblock

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Cerebral Palsy - How Stem Cells Helped One Little Girl! - Video

Stem cells work on MS in mice

Human embryonic stem cells the bodys powerful master cells might be useful for treating multiple sclerosis, researchers reported Thursday.

A team has used cells taken from frozen human embryos and transformed them into a type of cell that scientists have hoped might help treat patients with MS, a debilitating nerve disease.

Mice with an induced version of MS that paralyzed them were able to walk freely after the treatment, the teams at Advanced Cell Technology and ImStem Biotechnology in Farmington, Connecticut, reported.

The cells appeared to travel to the damaged tissues in the mice, toning down the mistaken immune system response that strips the fatty protective layer off of nerve calls. Its that damage that causes symptoms ranging from tremors and loss of balance to blurry vision and paralysis.

These embryonic stem cells were carefully nurtured to make them form a type of immature cell called a mesenchymal stem cell. These cells worked better to treat the mice than naturally developed mesenchymal stem cells taken directly from bone marrow, the team wrote in the journal Stem Cell Reports, published by the International Society for Stem Cell Research.

The top mouse is paralyzed, while the mouse on the bottom was treated with human embryonic stem cells and is able to run around.

The company released a video to show the benefits. Untreated mice were suffering. They are paralyzed. They on their backs. They are dragging their limbs. They are in really sad shape, ACTs chief scientific officer, Dr. Bob Lanza, told NBC News.

Treated animals, they are walking and jumping around just like normal mice.

Lanza says human trials are many months away, but he thinks it will not be necessary to use controversial cloning technology to make perfectly matched human embryonic stem cells to treat patients.

We can use an off-the-shelf source and itll work for everyone, he said. So you can use them and not worry about rejection.

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Stem cells work on MS in mice

ImStem Biotechnology, Inc. Advances Multiple Sclerosis Treatment with Embryonic Stem Cells

Farmington, CT (PRWEB) June 05, 2014

ImStem Biotechnology, Inc. (ImStem) announced today it has successfully treated an animal model of multiple sclerosis (MS) using human embryonic stem cells (hESC) derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), called hES-MSCs.

MS is a chronic neuroinflammatory disease with no cure. Most current MS therapies offer only palliative relief without repairing damaged nerve cells. Adult tissues such as bone marrow derived MSCs (BM-MSCs) may reduce neuroinflammation and promote nerve cell regeneration in MS, which are currently being tested in MS clinical trials. However, the application of adult-tissue derived MSCs has significant limitations since these cells must be obtained from a limited number of healthy donors, constraining the availability of this treatment and also resulting in variations in treatment quality.

Now researchers from ImStem, in collaboration with University of Connecticut Health Center (UCHC) and Advanced Cell Technology, Inc., demonstrates that hES-MSCs, which have unlimited stable supply, significantly reduce the disease severity in a mouse model of MS. They also found that hES-MSCs are more effective in treating animal model of MS than MSCs from bone marrow of adult human donors (BM-MSC). This work is published in the June 5th 2014 online edition of Stem Cell Reports, the official journal of International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) by Cell Press.

The beauty of hES-MSCs (embryonic stem cell derived) is their consistently high efficacy in MS model. We found that BM-MSC (adult stem cell) lines show poor or no efficacy in MS animal model and also expressing more proinflammatory cytokines. This definitely adds more advantages to hES-MSCs, which are younger, purer and express the right factors" says the lead author Dr. Xiaofang Wang, CTO of ImStem.

"These great advantages perfectly match the requirements for safety and quality of clinical-grade MSCs as a potential therapy for autoimmune diseases. says Dr. Ren-He Xu, corresponding author of the article, CSO of ImStem, now a professor at the University of Macau.

Dr. Joel Pachter, a UCHC collaborator, observed fluorescently labeled hES-MSCs but not BM-MSCs effectively penetrated the blood brain barrier and migrated into inflamed spinal cord. He remarks, "This difference is extraordinary as it could hold a key to the therapeutic action(s) of hES-MSCs. MSCs might require access to specific sites within the central nervous system in order to remediate disease."

"This was unexpected as bone marrow MSCs are widely believed to be effective in this EAE animal model. Our data indicate that the use of BM-MSCs is highly variable and there may be a previously unrecognized risk of poor outcome associated with proinflammatory cytokines produced by these cells," says Dr. Stephen Crocker, another UCHC collaborator.

The cells not only reduced the clinical symptoms of multiple sclerosis but prevented demyelination, which disrupts the ability of the nervous system to communicate, resulting in a wide range of symptoms in patients, including blurred vision, loss of balance, slurred speech, tremors, numbness, extreme fatigue, paralysis and blindness, says Dr. Robert Lanza, one of the senior authors from ACT.

Imstem was founded by Dr. Xiaofang Wang and Dr. Ren-He Xu, former director of UConn Stem Cell Core in 2012. In 2013, ImStem was awarded a $1.13M grant from the State of Connecticut Stem Cell Research Program and a $150,000 pre-seed fund from Connecticut Innovations. With these supports, ImStem has improved the hES-MSC technology with better efficiency and safety and has developed clinical grade hES-MSCs in its cGMP facility. ImStem is now seeking approval for Phase I clinical trials using its hES-MSCs and is looking for investors to expedite the progress.

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ImStem Biotechnology, Inc. Advances Multiple Sclerosis Treatment with Embryonic Stem Cells