Stem Cell Clinic

The UFC's Supposed Testosterone Epidemic: Critics Living in the Past

By Stem Cell Treatment

Last year Peyton Manning flew to Europe on a private jet, not for tea and crumpets or to see the Louvre, but for an experimental stem-cell treatment on his injured neck.

The procedure, one that isn't even legal in the United States, allegedly took his own fat cells and used them to try to regrow damaged neck tissue:

"There are many proposed therapies that are being tested in clinical trials, and there are more to come," Dr. Lawrence Goldstein, director of the stem cell program at the University of California, San Diego, told ABC News. "But in the absence of reliable evidence, it is impossible to know whether the 'treatment' will make Manning better or worse or merely financially poorer."

TheNFL doesn't have any rules specifically banning illegal procedures that an athlete can have done in foreign locales. Kobe Bryant, the NBA's aging lion, had similarly cutting-edge treatment on his arthritic knee in Germany. It's called "Biologic Medicine,"and in addition to Bryant, super-agent Ari Emanueland the late Pope John Paul II were ardent believers.

There are a ton of controversial treatments possible where science collides with loose regulation. Bone marrow injections filled with those miracle-working stem cells can be injected into the body. Blood can be heated up, spun and spun in an incubator, the healing agents isolated and injected. The 34-year-old Bryant felt like a new man after first undergoing the procedure, like Manning's one not approved by the FDA:

He even recommended the treatment to Alex Rodriguez, which led the baseball star to undergo the same treatment on his knee late last year. Bryant hasn't commented publicly on the treatment, but A-Rod has described the feelings of his friend.

Bryant "was really adamant about how great the procedure was for him," Rodriguez told reporters."I know that he was hurting before, almost even thinking about retirement, that's how much pain he was under. And then he said after he went to Germany he felt like a 27-year-old again. I was still a little apprehensive about it, and he kept staying on me about it."

Athletes at the highest levels will do almost anything to maintain that edgeto feel younger, sprier and as explosive as they did in their primes. And with the right money and resources, they are extending their careers further than any of their predecessors would have dared dream. Is it any wonder athletes in mixed martial arts are doing the same?

Frank Mir on TRT

In that sport, some of the UFC's top aging stars have undergone Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT), looking to bring their bodies' natural level of testosterone back to the levels they enjoyed in their 20s. Top contenders like Dan Henderson (41), Chael Sonnen (35) and Frank Mir (33)have all undergone the procedure. Former middleweight champion Rich Franklin (37)is considering it.

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The UFC's Supposed Testosterone Epidemic: Critics Living in the Past

New Applications in Drug Discovery Platforms to Fuel Advance of Stem Cells, Says Frost & Sullivan

By Stem Cell Treatment

Ethical, Clinical and Commercial Issues to be Navigated before Full Potential of Stem Cell Therapies can be Unleashed

LONDON, June 13, 2012 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- Stem cells offer exciting potential in regenerative medicine, and are likely to be widely used by mid-2017. Pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies are showing increased interest in stem cell research.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan (http://www.pharma.frost.com), Analysis of the Stem Cell Markets-Unlocking the New Era in Therapeutics, finds that the market will be driven by stem cell applications in drug discovery platforms and by successful academia commercial company partnership models.

"The high attrition rates of potential drug candidates has piqued the interest of pharmaceutical and biotech industries in stem cell use during the drug discovery phase," notes Frost & Sullivan Consulting Analyst Vinod Jyothikumar. "Previously, animal cell lines, tumours, or genetic transformation have been the traditional platform for testing drug candidates; however, these 'abnormal' cells have significantly contributed to a lack of translation into clinical studies."

Many academic institutes and research centres are collaborating with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies in stem cell research. This will provide impetus to the emergence of novel cell-based therapies.

Key challenges to market development relate to reimbursement, ethics and the complexity of clinical trials.

Securing reimbursement for stem cell therapeutic products is expected to be critical for commercial success. However, stem cell therapies are likely to be expensive. Insurers, therefore, may be unwilling to pay for the treatment. At the same time, patients are unlikely to be able to afford these treatments.

"The use of embryonic stem cells raises a host of thorny ethical, legal, and social issues," adds Jyothikumar. "As a result, market prices for various products may be affected."

Moreover, many research institutes are adopting policies promoting the ethical use of human embryonic tissues. Such policies are hindering the overall research process for several companies working in collaboration with these institutes.

"In addition to apprehensions about how many products will actually make it through human-based clinical trials, companies are also worried about which financial model can be applied to stem cell therapies," cautions Jyothikumar. "Possibly low return on investment (ROI) is also resulting in pharmaceutical companies adopting a cautious approach to stem cell therapeutics."

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New Applications in Drug Discovery Platforms to Fuel Advance of Stem Cells, Says Frost & Sullivan

Fresh, purified fat stem cells grow bone faster, better

By Stem Cell Medical Center

LOS ANGELES UCLA stem cell scientists who purified a subset of stem cells from fat tissue and used the stem cells to grow bone discovered that the bone formed faster and was of higher quality than bone grown using traditional methods.

The finding may one day eliminate the need for painful bone grafts that use material taken from patients during invasive procedures.

Adipose, or fat, tissue is thought to be an ideal source of mesenchymal stem cells cells capable of developing into bone, cartilage, muscle and other tissues because such cells are plentiful in the tissue and easily obtained through procedures like liposuction, said Dr. Chia Soo, vice chair of research for the UCLA Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

Soo and Bruno Pault, the co-senior authors on the project, are members of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA.

Traditionally, cells taken from fat had to be cultured for weeks to isolate the stem cells which could become bone, and their expansion increases the risk of infection and genetic instability. A fresh, non-cultured cell composition called stromal vascular fraction (SVF) also is used to grow bone. However, SVF cells taken from adipose tissue are a highly heterogeneous population that includes cells that aren't capable of becoming bone.

Pault and Soo's team used a cell-sorting machine to isolate and purify human perivascular stem cells (hPSC) from adipose tissue and showed that those cells worked far better than SVF cells in creating bone. They also showed that a growth factor called NELL-1, discovered by Dr. Kang Ting of the UCLA School of Dentistry, enhanced bone formation in their animal model.

"People have shown that culture-derived cells could grow bone, but ours are a fresh cell population, and we didn't have to go through the culture process, which can take weeks," Soo said. "The best bone graft is still your own bone, but that is in limited supply and sometimes not of good quality. What we show here is a faster and better way to create bone that could have clinical applications."

The study was published Monday (June 11) in the early online edition of Stem Cells Translational Medicine, a new peer-reviewed journal that seeks to bridge stem cell research and clinical trials.

In the animal model, Soo and Pault's team put the hPSCs with NELL-1 in a muscle pouch, a place where bone is not normally grown. They then used X-rays to determine that the cells did indeed become bone.

"The purified human hPSCs formed significantly more bone in comparison to the SVF by all parameters," Soo said. "And these cells are plentiful enough that patients with not much excess body fat can donate their own fat tissue."

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Fresh, purified fat stem cells grow bone faster, better

Some Stem-Cells May Not Be The Answer For Heart Disease

By Stem Cell Medical Center

June 12, 2012

The use of stem-cells building-block cells that are harvested from embryos or adults to treat heart disease could rely on faith as much as it does science, after billions of dollars in research has not produced the results that researchers have been looking for.

Questions and concerns on the topic arose during the recent opening of the multi-million-dollar Scottish Center for Regenerative Medicine (SCRM) in Edinburgh, chaired by Sir Ian Wilmut, the renowned scientist whose Dolly the sheep clone in 1996, was a groundbreaking step in stem cell technology.

During the opening ceremonies of the Center, Christine Mummery of the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands discussed how a 2001 claim, based on mice experimentation, indicated that bone-marrow cells could mend heart damaged by coronary disease, caused a mad rush of people to the clinics looking for a cure-all.

With nothing in the way of systematic research in animals, the first patients were being treated within a year, prematurely by Mummerys account. She argued that the paper that launched the mass stampede was completely wrong, and subsequent studies proved that. But despite the findings, the 2001 paper has never been withdrawn.

Norwegian professor Harald Arnesen in 2007 voiced his concerns over those heart trials as well. He concluded that they were not convincing and that one German team had achieved striking results only because the control group had done particularly badly. Arnesen called for a moratorium on this kind of stem-cell therapy, based on that research.

But neither Arnesen, nor Mummery, could deter clinicians. Another trial, the largest to date, began in January 2012 and included 3,000 heart-attack patients recruited from across Europe. The trial was funded by the European Union as well.

The idea behind the trials is straightforward. During a heart attack, a clogged blood vessel starves heart muscle of oxygen. Up to a billion heart muscle cells, called cardiomyocytes, can be damaged, and the body responds by replacing them with relatively inflexible scar tissue, which can lead to fatal heart failure.

What is notably surprising, explained Mummery, is that stem cells come in many different forms: Embryonic stem cells are the building-blocks of the body and have the potential to turn into all 200 cell types found in the human body. Adult stem cells, however, are limited in what they can do. For example, bone marrow stem cells only generate blood cells.

So, the 2001 study claiming that bone marrow stem cells could turn into healthy heart muscle was a surprising and exciting claim, although a bold move.

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Some Stem-Cells May Not Be The Answer For Heart Disease

Life Technologies and Cellular Dynamics International Partner for Global Commercialization of Novel Stem Cell …

By Uncategorized

CARLSBAD, Calif., June 12, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Life Technologies Corporation (LIFE) today announced a partnership with Cellular Dynamics International (CDI), the world's largest producer of human cells derived from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, to commercialize a set of three new products optimized to consistently develop and grow human iPS cells for both research and bioproduction.

The partnership marries CDI's leadership in human iPS cell development with Life Technologies' expertise in stem cell research tool manufacturing and global distribution network to make these novel technologies accessible to researchers around the world. Life Technologies' commercialization of Essential 8 Medium, Vitronectin (VTN-N), and Episomal iPSC Reprogramming Vectors addresses several challenges associated with developing relevant cells for use in a wide range of studies, from basic and translational research to drug discovery efforts. The effectiveness of these products is the focus of recent validation studies published in the journals Nature Methods and PLoS One.

"The launch of these new stem cell culture products furthers CDI founder and stem cell pioneer Jamie Thomson's vision to enable scientists worldwide to easily access the power of iPSC technology, thus driving breakthroughs in human health," noted Bob Palay, CDI Chief Executive Officer.

To eliminate the variability introduced by a mouse cell feeder layer previously used during the culture of human iPS cells, researchers have adopted "feeder-free" media. However, existing feeder-free culture media contain more than 20 interactive ingredients, many of which, such as bovine serum albumin (BSA) and lipids, are highly uncharacterized and vary significantly from lot-to-lot.This leads to variability in iPS cell growth and differentiation and impedes the progress of disease studies and potential clinical applications.

Essential 8 Medium, manufactured in a Life Technologies current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) facility, overcomes this barrier. In addition, BSA and other undesirable components have been removed from the media, thus reducing the number of ingredients to just eight well-characterized elements required to support efficient growth, eliminate variability, and enable large-scale production of human iPS cells.

"Essential 8 has far fewer variables, it's more straight-forward and a lot more reproducible," said Emile Nuwaysir, Ph.D., Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Cellular Dynamics International. "If the goal is to make a billion cardiomyocytes a day, every day, you want to make sure they're all the same. That's virtually impossible using mouse embryonic fibroblasts and it's very difficult using the more complex, feeder-free media that were available before Essential 8."

Optimized for use with Essential 8 Medium, Vitronectin (VTN-N) is a defined, human protein-based substrate that further eliminates variability during iPS cell culture unlike most existing feeder-free media that requires the use of an undefined matrix derived from mouse tumor cells for cell attachment and growth. The combination of Essential 8 Medium and Vitronectin (VTN-N) provides a defined, culture system free of non-human components for robust, cost-effective and scalable iPS cell culture.

Life Technologies is also introducing the Episomal iPSC Reprogramming Vectors, which leverages non-viral, non-integrating technology to deliver six genes to initiate the reprogramming of human somatic cells, such as blood and skin cells, to iPS cells. A non-viral approach offers a key advantage: human-derived iPS cells have more relevance for patient-specific, disease research. Traditional viral-based methods, such as lentivirus or retrovirus, require integration into the host genome for replication and can disrupt the genome of the reprogrammed cells.

"The ability to reproducibly establish andculture iPS cells using defined reagent systems is key for the advancement of stem cell research, disease modeling and drug discovery," said Chris Armstrong Ph.D, General Manager and Vice President of Primary and Stem Cell Systems at Life Technologies. "The commercialization of these exciting new products serves that purpose and underscores our commitment to provide the most innovative and relevant workflow tools to our customers."

All three products were developed at the University of Wisconsin by Dr. James Thomson, whose lab pioneered embryonic stem cell research and much of the technology surrounding stem cell culturing conditions, in vitro differentiation and iPS cell generation.

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Life Technologies and Cellular Dynamics International Partner for Global Commercialization of Novel Stem Cell ...

Heart disease and stem-cell treatments: caught in a clinical stampede

By Stem Cell Treatment

A few years ago, concerns over these heart trials were voiced by a Norwegian professor, Harald Arnesen. He concluded in 2007 that they are not convincing and that one German team had achieved striking results only because the control group in its trial had done particularly badly. Prof Arnesen called for a moratorium on this kind of stem-cell therapy.

That still did not deter the clinicians. This January, another trial funded by the EU was announced the largest of all, with 3,000 heart-attack patients recruited from across Europe.

The idea behind the trials is straightforward. During a heart attack, a clogged blood vessel starves heart muscle of oxygen. Up to a billion heart muscle cells, called cardiomyocytes, can be damaged, and the body responds by replacing them with relatively inflexible scar tissue, which can lead to fatal heart failure. So why not implant stem cells that can grow into cardiomyocytes?

Stem cells, of course, come in many kinds: the embryonic variety have the potential to turn into all 200 cell types in the body. Adult stem cells, harvested from the patient, have a more limited repertoire: bone marrow stem cells generate blood cells, for example. So to claim, as was done in 2001, these bone marrow stem cells could turn into heart muscle was both surprising and exciting.

Analysis shows that, at best, the amount of blood pumped during a contraction of one heart chamber rose by 5 per cent after treatment. In a patient where heart efficiency has fallen to 30 per cent of normal, that could be significant but it is relatively meagre, none the less. And it turns out that this level of improvement results whatever the cells injected into the damaged muscle even if they have no prospect of forming cardiomyoctes.

Even the believers in the technique now agree that implanted cells exert a paracrine action, triggering a helpful inflammatory response or secreting chemicals that boost blood vessel formation. But were still waiting for convincing evidence that a patients lost heart muscle cells can be replaced.

Embryonic stem cells offer one route to that goal, though it is difficult to turn them into the right cell type reliably, and there are other risks, such as uncontrolled growths. Another option has come from work by Prof Richard Lee at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, who has found that some adult stem cells can recruit other stem cells already in the heart to become cardiomyocytes.

Meanwhile, other fields of medicine that have seen more systematic research on stem cells are making real progress in using them for example, to treat Parkinsons, diabetes and macular degeneration. The lesson here is that, ultimately, it takes careful experiments, not belief, to make that huge leap from the laboratory to the hospital.

Roger Highfield is director of external affairs at the Science Museum Group

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Heart disease and stem-cell treatments: caught in a clinical stampede

Stanford researcher identifies unusual 'altruistic' stem cell behavior with possible link to cancer

By Stem Cell Medicine

Public release date: 11-Jun-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Krista Conger kristac@stanford.edu 650-725-5371 Stanford University Medical Center

STANFORD, Calif. When most groups of mammalian cells are faced with a shortage of nutrients or oxygen, the phrase "every man for himself" is more apt than "all for one, one for all." Unlike colonies of bacteria, which often cooperate to thrive as a group, mammalian cells have never been observed to help one another out. But a new study led by a researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine has shown that certain human embryonic stem cells, in times of stress, produce molecules that not only benefit themselves, but also help nearby cells survive.

"Altruism has been reported among bacterial populations and among humans and other animals, like monkeys and elephants," said Stanford postdoctoral scholar Bikul Das, MBBS, PhD. "But in mammalian cells at the cellular level the idea of altruism has never been described before." Das is the lead author of a paper, to be published online June 11 in Stem Cells, documenting altruistic behavior by human embryonic stem cells, or hESCs.

While altruism is generally thought of as a virtue, it can have a downside for hESCs: The altruistic cells appear to be more prone to accumulating mutations, a sign that they could lead to cancers. A better understanding of hESC altruism could provide new insights into cancer therapies, as well as improving scientists' ability to develop safe and effective stem cell treatments for other diseases.

The finding arose from Das' research into how hESCs react to low-oxygen environments, important because many cancerous tumors are low in oxygen. Embryonic stem cells have the capability to develop into many different cell types through a process called differentiation. Das found that when hESCs were placed for 24 hours in an environment with only one-tenth of a percent of oxygen (the air we breathe, by comparison, is almost 21 percent oxygen), free-radical molecules were generated that began causing internal damage in some cells. Ninety percent of the hESCs differentiated into other cell types or died, with only 10 percent maintaining their so-called "stemness," meaning they retained their ability to develop into any type of cell.

Das wanted to know what set these more hearty cells apart and so began sorting them based on what molecules they contained.

Das and his colleagues discovered that of the embryonic stem cells that had survived the oxygen deprivation, half had high levels of HIF2-alpha (a protein that turns up the production of antioxidant molecules) and low levels of p53 (a protein that normally encourages cells to die when they have too much DNA damage). These levels of HIF2-alpha and p53 are enough, Das showed, to keep the cells from differentiating by turning off cellular pathways typically involved in the process.

But the other half of the stem cells that had kept their "stemness" had relatively normal levels of HIF2-alpha and p53, he and his colleagues report in their paper. There was no clear explanation as to how they would remain undifferentiated without the help of high HIF2-alpha and low p53 unless the other cells were helping them out.

"When I saw this data, I began to suspect that maybe there was altruism going on," said Das.

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Stanford researcher identifies unusual 'altruistic' stem cell behavior with possible link to cancer

Clues Found to Way Embryonic Kidney Maintains Its Fleeting Stem Cells

By Stem Cell Medical Center

Newswise Studying mice and humans, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and their collaborators in Paris have identified two proteins that are required to maintain a supply of stem cells in the developing kidney.

In the presence of the two proteins, FGF9 and FGF20, mouse kidney stem cells stayed alive outside the body longer than previously reported. Though the cells were maintained only five days (up from about two), the work is a small step toward the future goal of growing kidney stem cells in the lab.

In the developing embryo, these early stem cells give rise to adult cells called nephrons, the blood filtration units of the kidneys.

The results appear online June 11 in Developmental Cell.

When we are born, we get a certain allotment of nephrons, says Raphael Kopan, PhD, the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Professor of Developmental Biology. Fortunately, we have a large surplus. We can donate a kidney give away 50 percent of our nephrons and still do fine. But, unlike our skin and gut, our kidneys cant build new nephrons.

The skin and the gut have small pools of stem cells that continually renew these organs throughout life. Scientists call such pools of stem cells and their support system a niche. During early development, the embryonic kidney has a stem cell niche as well. But at some point before birth or shortly after, all stem cells in the kidney differentiate to form nephrons, leaving no self-renewing pool of stem cells.

In other organs, there are cells that specifically form the niche, supporting the stem cells in a protected environment, Kopan says. But in the embryonic kidney, it seems the stem cells form their own niche, making it a bit more fragile. And the signals and conditions that lead the cells to form this niche have been elusive.

Surprisingly, recent clues to the signals that maintain the embryonic kidneys stem cell niche came from studies of the inner ear. David M. Ornitz, MD, PhD, the Alumni Endowed Professor of Developmental Biology, investigates FGF signaling in mice. Earlier this year, Ornitz and his colleagues published a paper in PLoS Biology showing that FGF20 plays an important role in inner ear development.

Mice without FGF20 are profoundly deaf, Ornitz says. While they are otherwise viable and healthy, in some cases we noticed that their kidneys looked small.

Past work from his own lab and others suggested that FGF9, a close chemical cousin of FGF20, might also participate in kidney development. FGF20 and FGF9 are members of a family of proteins known as fibroblast growth factors. In general, members of this family are known to play important and broad roles in embryonic development, tissue maintenance, and wound healing. Mice lacking FGF9 have defects in development of the male urogenital tract and die after birth due to defects in lung development.

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Clues Found to Way Embryonic Kidney Maintains Its Fleeting Stem Cells

A Better Way to Grow Bone: Fresh, Purified Fat Stem Cells Grow Bone Better, Faster

By Stem Cell Medical Center

Newswise UCLA stem cell scientists purified a subset of stem cells found in fat tissue and made from them bone that was formed faster and was of higher quality than bone grown using traditional methods, a finding that may one day eliminate the need for painful bone grafts that use material taken from the patient during invasive procedures.

Adipose, or fat, tissue is thought to be an ideal source of cells called mesenchymal stem cells - capable of developing into bone, cartilage, muscle and other tissues - because they are plentiful and easily attained through procedures such as liposuction, said Dr. Chia Soo, vice chair for research at UCLA Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. The co-senior authors on the project, Soo and Bruno Pault, are members of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA.

Traditionally, cells taken from fat had to be cultured for weeks to isolate the stem cells which could become bone, and their expansion increases risk of infection and genetic instability. A fresh, non-cultured cell composition called stromal vascular fraction (SVF) also is used to grow bone. However, SVF cells taken from adipose tissue are a highly heterogeneous population that includes cells that arent capable of becoming bone.

Pault and Soos team used a cell sorting machine to isolate and purify human perivascular stem cells (hPSC) from adipose tissue and showed that those cells worked far better than SVF cells in creating bone. They also showed that a growth factor called NELL-1, discovered by Dr. Kang Ting of the UCLA School of Dentistry, enhanced the bone formation in their animal model.

People have shown that culture-derived cells could grow bone, but these are a fresh cell population and we didnt have to go through the culture process, which can take weeks, Soo said. The best bone graft is still your own bone, but that is in limited supply and sometimes not of good quality. What we show here is a faster and better way to create bone that could have clinical applications.

The study appears June 11, 2012 in the early online edition of the peer-reviewed journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine, a new journal that seeks to bridge stem cell research and clinical trials.

In the animal model, Soo and Paults team put the hPSCs with NELL-1 in a muscle pouch, a place where bone is not normally grown. They then used X-rays to determine that the cells did indeed become bone.

The purified human hPSCs formed significantly more bone in comparison to the SVF by all parameters, Soo said. And these cells are plentiful enough that patients with not much excess body fat can donate their own fat tissue.

Soo said if everything goes well, patients may one day have rapid access to high quality bone graft material by which doctors get their fat tissue, purify that into hPSCs and replace their own stem cells with NELL-1 back into the area where bone is required. The hPSC with NELL-1 could grow into bone inside the patient, eliminating the need for painful bone graft harvestings. The goal is for the process to isolate the hPSCs and add the NELL-1 with a matrix or scaffold to aid cell adhesion to take less than an hour, Soo said.

Excitingly, recent studies have already demonstrated the utility of perivascular stem cells for regeneration of disparate tissue types, including skeletal muscle, lung and even myocardium, said Pault, a professor of orthopedic surgery Further studies will extend our findings and apply the robust osteogenic potential of hPSCs to the healing of bone defects.

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A Better Way to Grow Bone: Fresh, Purified Fat Stem Cells Grow Bone Better, Faster

A better way to grow bone: Fresh, purified fat stem cells grow bone faster and better

By Uncategorized

Public release date: 11-Jun-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Kim Irwin kirwin@mednet.ucla.edu 310-206-2805 University of California - Los Angeles Health Sciences

UCLA stem cell scientists purified a subset of stem cells found in fat tissue and made from them bone that was formed faster and was of higher quality than bone grown using traditional methods, a finding that may one day eliminate the need for painful bone grafts that use material taken from the patient during invasive procedures.

Adipose, or fat, tissue is thought to be an ideal source of cells called mesenchymal stem cells - capable of developing into bone, cartilage, muscle and other tissues - because they are plentiful and easily attained through procedures such as liposuction, said Dr. Chia Soo, vice chair for research at UCLA Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. The co-senior authors on the project, Soo and Bruno Pault, are members of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA.

Traditionally, cells taken from fat had to be cultured for weeks to isolate the stem cells which could become bone, and their expansion increases risk of infection and genetic instability. A fresh, non-cultured cell composition called stromal vascular fraction (SVF) also is used to grow bone. However, SVF cells taken from adipose tissue are a highly heterogeneous population that includes cells that aren't capable of becoming bone.

Pault and Soo's team used a cell sorting machine to isolate and purify human perivascular stem cells (hPSC) from adipose tissue and showed that those cells worked far better than SVF cells in creating bone. They also showed that a growth factor called NELL-1, discovered by Dr. Kang Ting of the UCLA School of Dentistry, enhanced the bone formation in their animal model.

"People have shown that culture-derived cells could grow bone, but these are a fresh cell population and we didn't have to go through the culture process, which can take weeks," Soo said. "The best bone graft is still your own bone, but that is in limited supply and sometimes not of good quality. What we show here is a faster and better way to create bone that could have clinical applications."

The study appears June 11, 2012 in the early online edition of the peer-reviewed journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine, a new journal that seeks to bridge stem cell research and clinical trials.

In the animal model, Soo and Pault's team put the hPSCs with NELL-1 in a muscle pouch, a place where bone is not normally grown. They then used X-rays to determine that the cells did indeed become bone.

"The purified human hPSCs formed significantly more bone in comparison to the SVF by all parameters," Soo said. "And these cells are plentiful enough that patients with not much excess body fat can donate their own fat tissue."

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A better way to grow bone: Fresh, purified fat stem cells grow bone faster and better

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