Stem Cell Clinic

Autologous and Adult Stem Cells Transplant in Mexico – Video

Autologous and Adult Stem Cells Transplant in Mexico
http://www.mexicohealth.com The video shows a top stem cell specialist in Mexico explaining why autologous stem cell treatment is a better choice than adult stem cell transplant. The doctor goes on to caution about risks of reaction in case of adult stem cells transplant. In some cases, the reaction could kill. Autologous, on the other hand, is a safe proposition. The doctor has been in the profession since 1978 and has treated over 40 patients with acute degenerative disorders like, multiple sclerosis. To read the transcript of the video about autologous and adult stem cell transplant in Mexico, click the link above. Related Searches: Autologous stem cell transplant mexico, Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation mexico, Stem Cell Transplantation in Adults mexico, Stem cell treatment ms mexico, stem cell treatment glaucoma mexico, stem cell therapy brain disorders mexico, stem cell therapy brain injury mexico, stem cell treatment spinal cord MX,From:mexicohealthViews:2 0ratingsTime:03:08More inPeople Blogs

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Autologous and Adult Stem Cells Transplant in Mexico - Video

Benefit raises funds for stem cell infusion

Plainview has raised more than $28,000 to help one man in his quest to regain mobility with a life-changing stem cell infusion procedure.

A ranch rodeo benefit held Oct. 27 for Kent Winders brought in $26,000 after proceeds from donations, a silent auction, raffle and concessions were tallied. That, combined with earlier donations, means he can pay for the procedure in which stem cells are extracted from his belly fat, harvested, banked and infused into his body.

I, and family and friends, were amazed at the generosity that people displayed, and we were able to meet my need, the 53-year-old who suffers from primary-progressive multiple sclerosis, said. We all wish to say a big thank-you to everyone who helped in any form or fashion.

Winders grew up in Lazbuddie, lived in New Mexico much of his life and has been at the Plainview assisted living facility for over three years to be near son Cory and daughter-in-law Jennifer.

He said there were people participating at the benefit whom he had never seen before.

My gratitude and heart goes out to everyone who helped make that a successful day.

Winders received a modest stem cell treatment in Tijuana, Mexico, in 2001 and saw noticeable improvement to his overall condition. Among them were regaining bladder control and seeing his swollen purple feet return to normal size. The volume of stem cells he received then were 3 million to 5 million, However, stem cell infusions now available in the Houston area could deliver up to 600 million stem cells in multiple injections of 100 million to 150 million each, he said.

Winders and his family have researched stem cell treatment for some time now, and his daughter previously made contact with Hale County native physician Stanley Jones, who performs these procedures in the Houston area.

Hes even talked to Texas State Rep. Rick Hardcastle, who himself has undergone stem cell infusion for MS.

He said youve got to figure out a way to raise the money and do it, Winders recalled.

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Benefit raises funds for stem cell infusion

Stem cell therapy improves heart function 2 years after heart attack

Washington, November 7 (ANI)

Stem cell therapy improves heart function in patients who had previous heart attacks, according to researchers from the University of Louisville and Brigham and Women's Hospital.

In a Late-Breaking Clinical Trial session at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2012 meeting, Roberto Bolli, M.D., of the University of Louisville and Piero Anversa, M.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, presented data from their groundbreaking research in the use of autologous adult stem cells with patients who had previous heart attacks.

They report that after two years, all patients receiving the stem cell therapy show improvement in heart function, with an overall 12.9 absolute unit increase in left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), a standard measure of heart function that shows the amount of blood ejected from the left ventricle during a heartbeat.

No adverse effects resulting from the therapy were seen. Moreover, MRIs performed on nine patients in the trial showed evidence of myocardial regeneration - new heart tissue replacing former dead tissue killed by heart attack.

"The trial shows the feasibility of isolating and expanding autologous stem cells from virtually every patient," said Bolli, who is the Jewish Hospital Heart and Lung Institute Distinguished Chair in Cardiology and director of the Institute for Molecular Cardiology in the Department of Medicine at UofL.

"The results suggest that this therapy has a potent, beneficial effect on cardiac function that warrants further study," he stated.

The trial - called SCIPIO for Stem Cell Infusion in Patients with Ischemic CardiOmyopathy - was a randomized open-label trial of cardiac stem cells (CSCs) in patients who were diagnosed with heart failure following a myocardial infarction and had a LVEF of 40 percent or lower; the normal LVEF is 50 percent or higher.

The investigators harvested the CSCs, referred to as "c-kit positive" cells because they express the c-kit protein on their surface, from 33 patients during coronary artery bypass surgery. The stem cells were purified and processed in Anversa's lab in Boston so that they could multiply. Once an adequate number of stem cells was produced - about one million for each patient - Bolli's team in Louisville reintroduced them into the region of the patient's heart that had been scarred by the heart attack.

The researchers reported that in the 20 patients receiving CSCs, LVEF increased from 29 percent to 36 percent at four months following infusion. None of the 13 control patients in the trial received CSCs and this group showed, on average, no improvement.

Excerpt from:
Stem cell therapy improves heart function 2 years after heart attack

VistaGen Therapeutics and Duke University Announce Heart Tissue Engineering Progress at American Heart Association …

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Nov 7, 2012) - VistaGen Therapeutics, Inc. ( OTCBB : VSTA ) ( OTCQB : VSTA ), a biotechnology company applying stem cell technology for drug rescue, predictive toxicology and drug metabolism screening, and Duke University, one of the country's premier academic research institutions, announced that results of their collaboration were presented yesterday at the American Heart Association 2012 Scientific Sessions in Los Angeles.

The presentation, entitled "Human embryonic stem cell-derived cardiac tissue patch with advanced structure and function," highlighted the important synergistic interactions of VistaGen's stem cell-derived human cardiomyocytes (heart cells) and Duke's tissue engineering and analytical technologies.The research, which expands the scope of VistaGen's drug rescue capabilities focused on heart toxicology, was led at Duke by Dr. Nenad Bursac, Associate Professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Cardiology, and at VistaGen by Dr. Ralph Snodgrass, President and Chief Scientific Officer.

The high-quality and purity of VistaGen's cardiomyocytes, together with Dr. Bursac's innovative tissue engineering technologies, enabled the development of novel methods of engineering three-dimensional (3D) cardiac tissues and unique in vitro systems for studying the maturation and electromechanical function of human cardiac muscle. These technologies provide novel in vitro tools for evaluating drug effects, positive and negative, on human cardiac tissues.

"I am very excited by the opportunities created and results we have achieved by combining our stem cell-based cardiomyocyte technologies and expertise with Dr. Bursac's leading-edge tissue engineering team at Duke," stated Dr. Snodgrass. "This important collaboration further demonstrates the quality and functionality of our pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes, and suggests potential new tools for our cardiac drug rescue program, while also highlighting the potential therapeutic applications for our combined technologies."

"VistaGen's human cardiomyocytes produced engineered cardiac tissues that exhibited functional properties far superior to those previously reported," said Dr. Bursac. "These superior properties offer exciting new opportunities to develop novel electrical and mechanical tools to guide and evaluate our tissue engineering design of functional bioartificial muscle for stem cell-based therapies aimed at treating heart disease and injury, as well as cardiac arrhythmias."

About Dr. Bursac

Dr. Bursac, Associate Professor in the Departments of Cardiology and Biomedical Engineering at Duke University, is a leader in the field of cardiac tissue engineering and cell-based therapies in which different cells, either alone or in combination with therapeutic molecules or biomaterials, can be transplanted into the human body to restore function of damaged or diseased organs. Dr. Bursac's research has additional applications in the fields of cardiac electrophysiology and in vitro drug screening. Over the last five years, Dr. Bursac's lab has developed and validated novel bioengineered model systems and experimental tools that are providing a more detailed understanding of normal and abnormal heart muscle development and function, the intricate processes of cardiomyogenesis and the potential of stem cell-based tissue engineering therapies for the treatment of different heart muscle diseases, cardiac infarction and arrhythmias.

About VistaGen Therapeutics

VistaGen is a biotechnology company applying human pluripotent stem cell technology for drug rescue, predictive toxicology and drug metabolism screening. VistaGen's drug rescue activities combine its human pluripotent stem cell technology platform, Human Clinical Trials in a Test Tube, with modern medicinal chemistry to generate new chemical variants (Drug Rescue Variants) of once-promising small-molecule drug candidates. These are drug candidates discontinued by pharmaceutical companies, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) or university laboratories after substantial investment and development due to heart or liver toxicity or metabolism issues. VistaGen uses its pluripotent stem cell technology to generate early indications, or predictions, of how humans will ultimately respond to new drug candidates before they are ever tested in humans, bringing human biology to the front end of the drug development process.

Additionally, VistaGen's small molecule drug candidate, AV-101, is completing Phase 1 development for treatment of neuropathic pain. Neuropathic pain, a serious and chronic condition causing pain after an injury or disease of the peripheral or central nervous system, affects millions of people worldwide.To date, VistaGen has been awarded over $8.5 million from the NIH for development of AV-101.

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VistaGen Therapeutics and Duke University Announce Heart Tissue Engineering Progress at American Heart Association ...

In University of Miami study, stem cell injections repair damaged heart

Embryonic stem cells

When he was only 43, Peter Harrison had a severe heart attack that left him suffering from the symptoms of a damaged heart: shortness of breath, chest pain and increased risk of another heart attack. An otherwise healthy commercial real estate agent from Key Biscayne, Harrison was in and out of the hospital for 20 years treating his heart condition until last year when doctors at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine injected his heart with stem cells as part of a study.

Three weeks later, he was hiking the steep hills of the U.S. Virgin Islands, keeping up with his wife.

"There was no chest pain and I was not out of breath -- it was quite a revelation," he said. "I was hoping that the damaged part of my heart would come back to life, and the indication is that it has."

The study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week, found that stem cell injections into the heart muscle reduced scar tissue by one third, built up healthy heart tissue and remodeled the spherical shape of the damaged heart to look more like a football-shaped healthy heart.

Dr. Joshua Hare, the director of the UM Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute and the lead author of the study, said the stem cells -- cells that are not fully formed and have the potential to become different kinds of cells -- internalize information from their "milieu" to know what to become.

"We think the cells respond to environmental cues to determine how they divide and differentiate," he said. The stem cells used in this study were taken from bone marrow and have a "limited repertoire" of possibility, meaning they are more easily transformed into bone or muscle than blood or brain.

Half of the 30 men enrolled in this small pilot study at UM and Johns Hopkins University received injections of their own stem cells, while the other half got stem cells from a third party donor. Harrison was in the group that got donated stem cells. There are no compatibility requirements for stem cell donors as there is with blood and bone marrow, and one donor can provide enough stem cells for "many, many people," Hare said.

"This is an elegant treatment in that it doesn't transgress any ethical boundaries," Hare said, alluding to the controversy surrounding the use of stem cells from human embryos. "You don't need to create a donor bank, it's easy to implement and relatively inexpensive."

Stem cell therapy, a growing area of research, drew attention earlier this year when the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to John B. Gurdon of the University of Cambridge in England and Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan for their work in turning mature cells back into "pluripotent" stem cells that have the potential to become other types of cells. Hare said the UM study was essentially the opposite -- rather than reduce mature cells to stem cells, these injections of stem cells differentiated into healthy heart tissue.

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In University of Miami study, stem cell injections repair damaged heart

2 years out, patients receiving stem cell therapy show sustained heart function improvement

Public release date: 6-Nov-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Jill Scoggins jill.scoggins@louisville.edu 502-852-7461 University of Louisville

LOS ANGELES Marked sustained improvement in all patients with zero adverse effects.

For a phase I clinical trial, these results are the Holy Grail. Yet researchers from the University of Louisville and Brigham and Women's Hospital today reported just such almost-never-attained data.

In a Late-Breaking Clinical Trial session at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2012 meeting, Roberto Bolli, M.D., of the University of Louisville and Piero Anversa, M.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, presented data from their groundbreaking research in the use of autologous adult stem cells with patients who had previous heart attacks.

They report that after two years, all patients receiving the stem cell therapy show improvement in heart function, with an overall 12.9 absolute unit increase in left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), a standard measure of heart function that shows the amount of blood ejected from the left ventricle during a heartbeat. No adverse effects resulting from the therapy were seen. Moreover, MRIs performed on nine patients in the trial showed evidence of myocardial regeneration new heart tissue replacing former dead tissue killed by heart attack.

"The trial shows the feasibility of isolating and expanding autologous stem cells from virtually every patient," said Bolli, who is the Jewish Hospital Heart and Lung Institute Distinguished Chair in Cardiology and director of the Institute for Molecular Cardiology in the Department of Medicine at UofL. "The results suggest that this therapy has a potent, beneficial effect on cardiac function that warrants further study."

"In all patients, cells with high regenerative reserve were obtained and employed therapeutically," said Anversa, professor of Anaesthesia and Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. "Our efforts to carefully characterize the phenotype and growth properties of the cardiac stem cells may have contributed to these initial positive results."

The trial called SCIPIO for Stem Cell Infusion in Patients with Ischemic CardiOmyopathy was a randomized open-label trial of cardiac stem cells (CSCs) in patients who were diagnosed with heart failure following a myocardial infarction and had a LVEF of 40 percent or lower; the normal LVEF is 50 percent or higher.

The investigators harvested the CSCs, referred to as "c-kit positive" cells because they express the c-kit protein on their surface, from 33 patients during coronary artery bypass surgery. The stem cells were purified and processed in Anversa's lab in Boston so that they could multiply. Once an adequate number of stem cells was produced about one million for each patient Bolli's team in Louisville reintroduced them into the region of the patient's heart that had been scarred by the heart attack.

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2 years out, patients receiving stem cell therapy show sustained heart function improvement

Stem cell therapy using patient's own cells after heart attack does not enhance cardiac recovery

Public release date: 6-Nov-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Steve Goodyear sgoodyear@mhif.org 952-807-8365 Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation

MINNEAPOLIS, MN November 6, 2012 Administering autologous stem cells obtained from bone marrow either 3 or 7 days following a heart attack did not improve heart function six months later, reports a new clinical trial supported by the National Institutes of Health. The results of this trial, called TIME (Transplantation In Myocardial Infarction Evaluation), were presented by Jay Traverse, MD of the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation Tuesday, Nov. 6, at the 2012 Scientific Sessions of the American Heart Association in Los Angeles.

The results of this trial mirror a previous, related study (LateTIME) which found that autologous bone marrow stem cell therapy given 2-3 weeks after a heart attack did not improve cardiac recovery. Both TIME and LateTIME were carried out by the Cardiovascular Cell Therapy Research Network (CCTRN), sponsored by the NIH's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

"The data presented by TIME do much to advance stem cell therapy research," said Jay Traverse, MD of the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation and Principal Investigator of this study. "While this study did not provide a demonstrated cardiac benefit after six months, we still learned a great deal. Together, TIME and Late TIME have shown that stem cell therapy is safe, and they have set a baseline in terms of quantity of stem cells, type of stem cells, and severity of heart attack."

TIME enrolled 120 volunteers (avg. age 57) between July 2008 and February 2011; the participants all had moderate to severe impairment in their left ventricle and had undergone coronary stent placement as treatment for the heart attack. The participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups: day 3 stem cell, day 3 placebo (inactive cells), day 7 stem cell, or day 7 placebo. The CCTRN researchers developed a method of processing and purifying the stem cells from the bone marrow of each volunteer to ensure everyone received a uniform dose (150 million stem cells).

Heart improvement was assessed six months after stem cell therapy by measuring the percentage of blood that gets pumped out of the left ventricle during each contraction (left-ventricular ejection fraction, or LVEF). The study found no significant differences between the change in LVEF readings at the six month follow-up in either the Day 3 or Day 7 stem cell groups compared with placebo or with each other; every group showed about a 3 percent improvement in LVEF. However, the researchers found that younger patients randomized to Day 7 had greater improvement in their LVEF compared to their placebo counterparts

"The lack of six-month improvement seen for TIME and, prior to that, LateTIME, does not mean stem cell therapy is not a viable post-heart attack strategy," said Traverse. "Because we have this data we can start to address some parameters; for example this therapy may work better in younger people, or maybe we need to use cells from healthy volunteers (allogeneic) since their cells may provide greater therapeutic benefit. There will also be upcoming studies using novel cell types which we look forward to using in future clinical trials."

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Stem cell therapy using patient's own cells after heart attack does not enhance cardiac recovery

Studies On Stem Cell Therapy After Heart Attack Show Mixed Results

April Flowers for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Conflicting studies were highlighted at this years American Heart Association Scientific Sessions meeting concerning stem cell therapy for heart attack patients.

The first study, from the University of Louisville and Brigham and Womens Hospital, reported holy grail results for a Phase I clinical trial: marked sustained improvement in all patients with zero adverse effects.

Roberto Bolli, M.D., of the University of Louisville and Piero Anversa, M.D., of Brigham and Womens Hospital presented data from their groundbreaking research in the use of autologous adult stem cells with patients who had previous heart attacks in a Late-Breaking Clinical Trial session.

The researchers report that all patients receiving the stem cell therapy showed improved heart function after two years, with an overall 12.9 absolute unit increase in left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF). LVEF is a standard measure of heart function that shows the amount of blood ejected from the left ventricle during a heartbeat. They saw no adverse effects from the therapy. In fact, nine patients showed evidence of myocardial regeneration new tissue replacing formerly dead tissue killed by heart attack in MRI scans.

The trial shows the feasibility of isolating and expanding autologous stem cells from virtually every patient, said Bolli, who is the Jewish Hospital Heart and Lung Institute Distinguished Chair in Cardiology and director of the Institute for Molecular Cardiology in the Department of Medicine at UofL. The results suggest that this therapy has a potent, beneficial effect on cardiac function that warrants further study.

In all patients, cells with high regenerative reserve were obtained and employed therapeutically, said Anversa, professor of Anesthesia and Medicine at Brigham and Womens Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Our efforts to carefully characterize the phenotype and growth properties of the cardiac stem cells may have contributed to these initial positive results.

The Stem Cell Infusion in Patients with Ischemic CardiOmyopathy, or SCIPIO, trial was a randomized open-label trial of cardiac stem cells (CSCs) in patients who were diagnosed with heart failure following a myocardial infarction and had a LVEF of 40 percent or lower. A normal LVEF reading is 50 percent or higher.

The CSCs, referred to as c-kit positive cells because they express the c-kit protein on their surface, were harvested from 33 patients during coronary artery bypass surgery. The stem cells were then purified and processed so that they could multiply, and once an adequate number was produced about one million for each patient they were reintroduced into the region of the patients heart that suffered scarring during the heart attack.

At four months after infusion, the researchers report that LVEF increased from 29 percent to 36 percent for 200 patients. On average, the 13 control patients who did not receive a CSC infusion showed any improvement.

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Studies On Stem Cell Therapy After Heart Attack Show Mixed Results