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With ethical issues concerning use of discarded embryos and technical problems hindering development of stem cell therapies, scientists in Korea are reporting the first successful use of a drug-like molecule to transform human muscle cells into nerve cells.  Their report, scheduled for the August 8 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a weekly journal, states that the advance could lead to new treatments for stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. In the study, Injae Shin and colleagues point out that stem cell research shows promise for repairing or replacing damaged nerve cells to treat...

Scientists have used stem cells to repair arthritis damage in mice.They tweaked the stem cells’ genes to pump up production of a bone-building protein called BMP-4. When mice with knee injuries got those stem cells, their knees healed better than other mice with the same injuries.  The finding comes from doctors including Ryosuke Kuroda, MD, PhD, of Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh.  The experiment, described in Arthritis & Rheumatism, only included mice, not people. Joint damage is a hallmark of arthritis, and scientists don’t have a way to make arthritis-damaged joints as good as new.Healing an...

April 3, 2006 — The news is being hailed as a medical milestone: Several years after receiving new bladders engineered entirely in a laboratory, seven young patients are all still healthy. It marks the first long-term success of total-organ tissue regeneration, an area of medicine that until now was more the stuff of science fiction than clinical reality. Dr. Anthony Atala, the director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, reports in tomorrow's issue of the medical journal The Lancet on the success of the new procedure, which was performed on children born with...

Stem cells taken from human fat can be transformed into smooth muscle cells, offering a way to treat many kinds of heart disease, gastrointestinal and bladder ills, US researchers reported yesterday. While the experiment does not quite offer a way to turn a pot belly into a flat stomach, the researchers said the transformed cells contracted and relaxed just like smooth muscle cells. These cells help the heart beat and blood flow, push food through the digestive system and make bladders fill and empty, the researchers reported. Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is...

In the first clinical study of its kind in North America, women with stress urinary incontinence (SUI) were treated using muscle-derived stem cell injections to strengthen deficient sphincter muscles responsible for the condition. Results of the study, led by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, suggest that the approach is safe, improves patients' quality of life and may be an effective treatment for SUI. The findings will be presented at an experts' session at the annual meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) in Atlanta, and will be published in...