Stem Cell Clinic

Salk Institute and Stanford University to Lead New $40 Million Stem Cell Genomics Center

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Newswise LA JOLLAThe Salk Institute for Biological Studies will join Stanford University in leading a new Center of Excellence in Stem Cell Genomics, created through a $40 million award by California's stem cell agency, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

The center will bring together experts and investigators from seven different major California institutions to focus on bridging the fields of genomics the study of the complete genetic make-up of a cell or organism with cutting-edge stem cell research.

The goal is to use these tools to gain a deeper understanding of the disease processes in cancer, diabetes, endocrine disorders, heart disease and mental health, and ultimately to find safer and more effective ways of using stem cells in medical research and therapy.

"The center will provide a platform for collaboration, allowing California's stem cell scientists and genomics researchers to bridge these two fields," says Joseph Ecker, a Salk professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Investigator. "The Center will generate critical genomics data that will be shared with scientists throughout California and the rest of the world."

Ecker, holder of the Salk International Council Chair in Genetics, is co-director of the new center along with Michael Snyder, a professor and chair of genetics at Stanford.

Salk and Stanford will lead the center, and U.C. San Diego, Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, the Scripps Research Institute, the J. Craig Venter Institute and Illumina Inc., all in San Diego, will collaborate on the project, in addition to U.C. Santa Cruz, which will also run the data coordination and management component.

"This Center of Excellence in Stem Cell Genomics shows why we are considered one of the global leaders in stem cell research," says Alan Trounson, president of the stem cell agency. "Bringing together this team to do this kind of work means we will be better able to understand how stem cells change as they grow and become different kinds of cells. That deeper knowledge, that you can only get through a genomic analysis of the cells, will help us develop better ways of using these cells to come up with new treatments for deadly diseases."

In addition to outside collaborations, the center will pursue some fundamental questions and goals of its own, including collecting and characterizing induced pluripotent stem cell lines from patients with familial cardiomyopathy; applying single-cell genomic techniques to better understand cellular subpopulations within diseased and healthy brain and pancreatic tissues; and developing novel computational tools to analyze networks underlying stem cell genome function.

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Salk Institute and Stanford University to Lead New $40 Million Stem Cell Genomics Center

Split Decision: Stem Cell Signal Linked with Cancer Growth

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Newswise Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified a protein critical to hematopoietic stem cell function and blood formation. The finding has potential as a new target for treating leukemia because cancer stem cells rely upon the same protein to regulate and sustain their growth.

Hematopoietic stem cells give rise to all other blood cells. Writing in the February 2, 2014 advance online issue of Nature Genetics, principal investigator Tannishtha Reya, PhD, professor in the Department of Pharmacology, and colleagues found that a protein called Lis1 fundamentally regulates asymmetric division of hematopoietic stem cells, assuring that the stem cells correctly differentiate to provide an adequate, sustained supply of new blood cells.

Asymmetric division occurs when a stem cell divides into two daughter cells of unequal inheritance: One daughter differentiates into a permanently specialized cell type while the other remains undifferentiated and capable of further divisions.

This process is very important for the proper generation of all the cells needed for the development and function of many normal tissues, said Reya. When cells divide, Lis1 controls orientation of the mitotic spindle, an apparatus of subcellular fibers that segregates chromosomes during cell division.

During division, the spindle is attached to a particular point on the cell membrane, which also determines the axis along which the cell will divide, Reya said. Because proteins are not evenly distributed throughout the cell, the axis of division, in turn, determines the types and amounts of proteins that get distributed to each daughter cell. By analogy, imagine the difference between cutting the Earth along the equator versus halving it longitudinally. In each case, the countries that wind up in the two halves are different.

When researchers deleted Lis1 from mouse hematopoietic stem cells, differentiation was radically altered. Asymmetric division increased and accelerated differentiation, resulting in an oversupply of specialized cells and an ever-diminishing reserve of undifferentiated stem cells, which eventually resulted in a bloodless mouse.

What we found was that a large part of the defect in blood formation was due to a failure of stem cells to expand, said Reya. Instead of undergoing symmetric divisions to generate two stem cell daughters, they predominantly underwent asymmetric division to generate more specialized cells. As a result, the mice were unable to generate enough stem cells to sustain blood cell production.

The scientists next looked at how cancer stem cells in mice behaved when the Lis1 signaling pathway was blocked, discovering that they too lost the ability to renew and propagate. In this sense, the effect Lis1 has on leukemic self-renewal parallels its role in normal stem cell self-renewal, Reya said.

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Split Decision: Stem Cell Signal Linked with Cancer Growth

First Study Tracking Stem Cell Treatments For Children With Spinal Cord Injuries Shows Potential Benefit

Durham, NC (PRWEB) February 03, 2014

Previous studies have shown that multiple stem cell implantations might assist adults suffering from complete spinal cord injuries (SCI). Now a groundbreaking study released today in STEM CELLS Translational Medicine shows for the first time that children with SCI might benefit, too.

Marcin Majka, Ph.D., and Danuta Jarocha, Ph.D., led the study at Jagiellonian University College of Medicine in Krakow, Poland. "Although it was conducted on a small number of patients carrying a different injury level and type, preliminary results demonstrate the possibility of attaining neurological, motor and sensation and quality-of-life improvement in children with a chronic complete spinal cord injury through multiple bone marrow derived cell (BMNC) implantations. Intravenous implantations of these cells seem to prevent and/or help the healing of pressure ulcers," Dr. Majka said.

The study involved five children, ranging in age from 3 to 7, all of whom were patients at University Childrens Hospital in Krakow. Each had suffered a spinal cord injury at least six months prior to the start of the stem cell program and was showing no signs of improvement from standard treatments. The patients collectively underwent 19 implantation procedures with BM-derived cells, with every treatment cycle followed by an intensive four weeks of rehabilitation.

The children were evaluated over a one to six year period for sensation and motor improvement, muscle stiffness and bladder function. Any improvement in their quality of life was also noted, based on estimated functional recovery. Additionally, the development of neuropathic pain, secondary infections, urinary tract infections or pressure ulcers was tracked.

"Two of the five children receiving the highest number of transplantations demonstrated neurological and quality-of-life improvements," Dr. Jarocha said. "They included a girl who, before the stem cell implantations, had to be tube fed and needed a ventilator to breathe. She is now able to eat and breathe on her own."

The study also demonstrated no long-term side effects from the BMNCs, leading the researchers to conclude that single and multiple BMNCs implantations were safe for pediatric patients as well as adults.

Interestingly, when the scientists compared their study with those done on adults, the results did not suggest an advantage of the younger age. "This is somehow unexpected since the younger age should provide better ability to regenerate. Since the present study was done on a small number of patients, a larger study using the same methodology for pediatric and adult patients allowing a direct comparison should be performed to confirm or contradict the observation. Larger studies with patients segregated according to the type and level of the injury with the same infusion intervals should be performed to obtain more consistent data, too," Dr. Majka added.

"While this studys sample is small, it is the first to report the safety and feasibility of using bone marrow derived cells to treat pediatric patients with complete spinal cord injury," said Anthony Atala, M.D., editor of STEM CELLS Translational Medicine and director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. "The treatment resulted in a degree of neurological and quality-of-life improvement in the study participants."

The full article, "Preliminary study of autologous bone marrow nucleated cells transplantation in children with spinal cord injury," can be accessed at http://www.stemcellstm.com.

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First Study Tracking Stem Cell Treatments For Children With Spinal Cord Injuries Shows Potential Benefit

New stem cell production technique comes as a shock

An international research effort has found that mature animal cells can be shocked into an embryonic state simply by soaking them in acid or putting them under physical stress. The fortuitous breakthrough could prove to be massive for many fields of medical research if the method can be replicated using human cells, something researchers are confident will be possible.

The collaboration between Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Womens Hospital (BWH) and the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Japan found that by bathing mature cells harvested from mice in a weak acid, they reverted to a stem cell-like pluripotent state. Pluripotency, as the name suggests, is when a cell has the potential to become one of the many different cells found in an animal; "pluri" refers to many, as in plural, and "potent" the potential to become that many.

Pluripotent cells are an important resource for many forms of medical research. Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are one type of pluripotent cell, yet the harvesting of ESCs has its opposition, as it involves the destruction of human embryos. Successful attempts at creating stem cells culminated in the 2012 Nobel Prize-winning research in which Shinya Yamanaka produced Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSC) from mature cells by introducing several pieces of DNA. The new technique being pioneered by researchers at Harvard and Riken is much simpler and would greatly reduce the expense of stem cell production.

It may not be necessary to create an embryo to acquire embryonic stem cells. Our research findings demonstrate that creation of an autologous pluripotent stem cell, a stem cell from an individual that has the potential to be used for a therapeutic purpose without an embryo, is possible, said senior author Dr. Charles Vacanti, chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine and director of the Laboratory for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine at BWH.

The origins of the research date back to 2001 and can be credited to Dr. Vacanti, a BWH anaesthesiologist best known for his work on the earmouse which gained notoriety in 1995. In 2001, Dr. Vacanti was working towards finding new cell types able to be used in his tissue engineering research. During this study he mistakenly reported a new type of stem cell he called spore-like cells," by passing neural stem cells and mature tissue cells through ever-smaller pipettes. He believed that these spore-like cells existed in all tissue, and that they remained dormant until needed to repair tissue damage. After heavy peer criticism, the research was shelved.

Six years on, enter Japanese graduate student Haruko Obokata. Armed with new insight, Dr. Vacanti and Obokata started investigating if the harsh process of extraction had produced the stem cells rather than his previous belief that they had been isolated from the tissue mixture. This new line of inquiry led the researchers to a remarkable finding, namely that any mature adult (somatic) cell has the potential to turn pluripotent if subjected to sub-lethal stress such as mild acidity, high or low temperature, or mechanical force. They named the process stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP). It can be seen taking place in the following video.

Mature blood cells taken from a live donor and engineered to glow were treated with a mild acid. These decreased in size and lost their functional characteristics during the process of conversion from mature somatic cell to STAP cell. The glowing STAP cells were then introduced to a (non-glowing) mouse blastocyst and were shown to contribute 100 percent to the somatic tissue in the embryo that formed. This was easily seen, as the embryo indeed glowed.

Its exciting to think about the new possibilities these findings open up, not only in areas like regenerative medicine, but perhaps in the study of cellular senescence and cancer as well. But the greatest challenge for me going forward will be to dig deeper into the underlying mechanisms, so that we can gain a deeper understanding of how differentiated cells can covert to such an extraordinarily pluripotent state, Obokata said.

The research was published in the journal Nature. The glowing mouse embryo can be seen in the video below.

Sources: Brigham and Womens Hospital (BWH), Riken Center for Developmental Biology

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New stem cell production technique comes as a shock

therapy treatment for spinal cord injury by dr alok sharma, mumbai, india – Video

therapy treatment for spinal cord injury by dr alok sharma, mumbai, india
improvement seen in just 5 days after stem cell therapy treatment for spinal cord injury by dr alok sharma, mumbai, india. Stem Cell Therapy done date 7 Jan ...

By: Neurogen Brain and Spine Institute

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therapy treatment for spinal cord injury by dr alok sharma, mumbai, india - Video