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Generally speaking, the American public is well accustomed to the concept of tissue and organ transplantation, as stories of life-saving heart and kidney transplants, or American Red Cross blood drives collecting blood and platelets for transfusions have become commonplace. Since these procedures typically require a transfer of tissue from one patient to another, physicians must be careful to choose well-matched donors to avoid rejection by the recipient’s immune system. But what about other specialized tissues that can be affected by disease, such as those of the eye? A recent study published in the journal Stem Cells by Winston Kao and...

A treatment for eye diseases that is derived from human embryonic stem cells might have improved the vision of two patients, bolstering the beleaguered field, researchers reported Monday. Dr. Steven Schwartz, a retina specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles, conducted the trial with two patients. Sue Freeman said her vision improved in a meaningful way after the treatment, which used embryonic stem cells. The report, published online in the medical journal The Lancet, is the first to describe the effect on patients of a therapy involving human embryonic stem cells. The paper comes two months after the Geron...

When you hear the term “stem cells”, what comes to mind? Religious controversy? Ethical debate? embryonic stem cell research? These associations are common, and unfortunately could be limiting how often stem cells are donated for use as a life-saving transplant. Many people equate stem cells with embryonic stem cell research but non-embryonic (or adult) stem cells are different and they’re used every day in modern medicine to save lives. Furthermore, to date, embryonic stem cells have not been used for many human therapeutic purposes.Nearly everyone knows someone that has had or needed a bone marrow transplant, but did you know...

For the first time ever, stem cells from umbilical cords have been converted into other types of cells, which may eventually lead to new treatment options for spinal cord injuries and multiple sclerosis, among other nervous system diseases.  “This is the first time this has been done with non-embryonic stem cells,” says James Hickman, a University of Central Florida bioengineer and leader of the research group, whose accomplishment is described in the Jan. 18 issue of the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience.“We’re very excited about where this could lead because it overcomes many of the obstacles present with embryonic stem cells.” ...

Surgeons in Sweden have replaced the cancerous windpipe of a Maryland man with one made in a laboratory and seeded with the man’s cells. The windpipe, or trachea, made from minuscule plastic fibers and covered in stem cells taken from the man’s bone marrow, was implanted in November. The patient, Christopher Lyles, 30, whose tracheal cancer had progressed to the point where it was considered inoperable, arrived home in Baltimore on Wednesday. It was the second procedure of its kind and the first for an American. “I’m feeling good,” Mr. Lyles said in a telephone interview from his home, where...

A FOUNTAIN of youthful cells reverses the damage found in diseases like multiple sclerosis, a study in mice reveals. Nerve cells lose their electrically insulating myelin sheath as MS develops. New myelin-generating cells can be produced from stem cells, but the process loses efficiency with age. Julia Ruckh at the University of Cambridge, and colleagues, have found a way to reverse the age-related efficiency loss. They linked the bloodstreams of young mice to old mice with myelin damage. Exposure to youthful blood reactivated stem cells in the old mice, boosting myelin generation.

A new research breakthrough has enabled scientists to grow human tissue to repair or replace organs, and someday, maybe even limbs. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports.Be advised: Some of the images are graphic.MILES O'BRIEN: I am not sure when or why I thought it was a good idea to go for a bike ride on a 100-degree Texas afternoon with a 26-year-old Marine corporal. There I was eating Isaias Hernandez's dirt. No surprise, right? Well, take a look at his right thigh.CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ, U.S. Marine Corps: It looked like a chicken, like if you would take a bite out...

The Democrats’ decade-long strategy of hyping embryo stem cell research crashed into a hard fact on Nov.15. That’s when Geron Corp., the world’s leading embryo research company, announced it was closing down its much-touted stem cell program, despite the guarantee of more government aid from Democratic-affiliated sources. The political battle waged over embryonic stem cell research burst onto the front pages in 2001, when many reporters and scientists began touting stem cells as medical miracles that would offer cures for Alzheimers, diabetes, Parkinsons and other diseases. From 2000 onwards, “Democrats and liberals were hyping the research absurdly,” Princeton professor Robert...

Subsidies: A firm that received tax dollars to pursue embryonic stem cell research abandons what was touted as the most promising avenue of research for medical miracles. Then there's that "conscience thing." When Geron Corp. announced in January 2010 that the first clinical trial using its embryonic stem cells to treat an actual human patient was under way, its stock shot up 6.4%. Geron got the first Food and Drug Administration license to use embryonic stem cells to treat people in a clinical trial, in this case patients with a spinal cord injury. Last week Geron announced that it was...

Geron, the company that helped pioneer human embryonic stem (hES) cell research, said yesterday that it is stopping its first-in-the-world clinical trial and pulling out of further stem cell work. The company, based in Menlo Park, California, will instead concentrate on its anticancer therapies, CEO John Scarlett said in a statement. "Deciding to move out of the stem cell business was a very difficult decision to make," he told investors and journalists this morning. Geron helped to fund the work of James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who in 1998 was the first to isolate hES cells. That...

Cardiac stem cell infusion improves left ventricular function and reduces infarct size in a phase I trial in patients with post-myocardial infarction heart failure, according to a study published online Nov. 14 in The Lancet to coincide with presentation at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2011, held from Nov. 12 to 16 in Orlando, Fla. MONDAY, Nov. 14 (HealthDay News) -- Cardiac stem cell (CSC) infusion improves left ventricular (LV) function and reduces infarct size in a phase I trial in patients with post-myocardial infarction (MI) heart failure, according to a study published online Nov. 14 in The Lancet...

Scientists in Britain face being barred from developing life-saving treatments after a court ruled it is ‘immoral’ to use embryos to produce stem cells. The European Court of Justice has decreed that patenting any treatment using the cells is ‘commercial exploitation’ and ‘contrary to morality’. Scientists warned the ‘devastating decision’ will stop pioneering treatments for degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s being developed in the UK, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the multi-million pound biotechnology industry. But pro-life groups, who argue it is immoral to experiment with embryos to advance medicine, welcomed the ruling. The decision, made unanimously by...

(Medical Xpress) -- Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a way to stimulate a rat’s stem cells after a liver transplant as a means of preventing rejection of the new organ without the need for lifelong immunosuppressant drugs. The need for anti-rejection medicines, which carry serious side effects, is a major obstacle to successful long-term transplant survival in people. With a combination of a very low, short-term dose of an immunosuppressive drug to prevent immediate rejection and four doses of a medication that frees the recipient’s stem cells from the bone marrow to seek out and populate the donor organ, the...

Enlarge Image Turn it on. A fused human egg cell and skin cell form an early embryo that turns on the skin cell's green fluorescent protein on day 4 of development and forms a blastocyst by day 6. Credit: Noggle et al., Nature 478 (6 October 2011) Researchers have found a new way to turn adult cells into embryonic stem (ES) cells: using human eggs, or oocytes. The feat comes after more than a decade of failed attempts, and it is still a work in progress. The resulting stem cells are not normal; they carry the genomes of both...

Enlarge Image Gene fix. Red cells in this slice of mouse liver are making a human protein called A1At. Credit: K. YUSA ET AL., NATURE (ADVANCED ONLINE EDITION) ©2011 MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS LTD. Researchers have taken a step toward showing how stem cells might one day be used to help patients born with a deadly liver disease. The researchers corrected a DNA spelling error in patient skin cells that had been converted into so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, then coaxed the cells to form liver cells that seemed to function normally in mice. The approach is still a long...

Two of the holy grails of medicine - stem cell technology and precision gene therapy - have been united for the first time in humans, say scientists.It means patients with a genetic disease could, one day, be treated with their own cells. A study in Nature corrected a mutation in stem cells made from a patient with a liver disease. Researchers said this was a "critical step" towards devising treatments, but safety tests were still needed. At the moment, stem cells created from a patient with a genetic illness cannot be used to cure the disease as those cells would...

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who recently underwent an experimental injection of his own adult stem cells to relieve back pain, pushed a bill through the Legislature in June that paves the way for a company co-owned by his doctor to become the first state-approved "bank" to store and cultivate such cells for medical treatment, according to internal emails and corporate records obtained by NBC News. The measure, which was adopted without any public hearings, could prove a financial bonanza for Celltex Therapeutics Corp. — a Houston company headed by Stanley Jones, the surgeon who injected the cells into Perry, and...

He calls it innovative. Some scientists call it a big risk. In any case, the stem cell procedure that Gov. Rick Perry had last month was an unusual experiment to fix a common malady: a bad back. Perry has access to the best possible care and advice. Yet he and his doctor chose a treatment beyond mainstream medicine: He had stem cells taken from fat in his own body, grown in a lab and then injected into his back and his bloodstream July 1 to fuse part of his spine. The treatment carries potential risks ranging from blood clots to...

A breakthrough in Parkinson's disease research came to light this week when researchers reported successfully growing stem cells from the skin of a patient with a rapidly progressing form of the disease. The researchers took skin samples from a patient diagnosed with one of the most progressive forms of Parkinson's disease. "As this type of Parkinson's progresses rapidly it will also make it easier to pick up the effects of drugs tested to prevent nerve cells targeted by the disease from dying," said Devine.

A Bergen County, New Jersey pain management and spine clinic is reporting excellent results with non-embryonic adult stem cell injection therapy HACKENSACK, N.J., June 23, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- A spine clinic Bergen County recognized as a leader in pain management and orthopedic treatments is now offering a revolutionary treatment for individuals with chronic joint problems using the patient's own stem cells. Performed at Spine & Joint Center by Dr. Damon Noto, the treatment utilizes adult stem cells harvested from the patient's own fat cells (not controversial embryonic stem cells), which are then injected into the injured joint to help stimulate...

He calls it innovative. Others call it a big risk. In any case, the stem cell procedure that Texas Gov. Rick Perry had last month was an unusual experiment to fix a common malady: a bad back. Perry, the newest GOP presidential candidate, has access to the best possible care and advice. Yet he and his doctor chose a treatment beyond mainstream medicine: He had stem cells taken from fat in his own body, grown in a lab and then injected into his back and his bloodstream during a July 1 operation to fuse part of his spine. … His...

A major clinical trial will investigate whether stem cells can be safely used to treat multiple sclerosis (MS).It is hoped eventually to slow, stop or even reverse the damage MS causes to the brain and spinal cord. The trial, involving up to 150 patients across Europe, is due to start later this year. Dr Paolo Muraro from Imperial College London said: "There is very strong pre-clinical evidence that stem cells might be an effective treatment." Researchers will collect stem cells from the bone marrow of patients, grow them in the laboratory and then re-inject them into their blood. The stem...

A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit challenging the Obama administration’s funding of stem cell research. The lawsuit, filed by Boston biological engineer James L. Shirley, asserted that the funding violated a 1996 law prohibiting federal taxpayer money from supporting work that harms an embryo. The Obama administration policy allows research on embryos that were harvested long ago through private funding ... ... The Court of Appeals overruled him, and (Judge Royce) Lamberth said Wednesday he is bound by the higher court’s ruling and dismissed the case. The White House hailed the ruling as a “victory for research and...

Mesenchymal stem cells protect and healA stem cell that can morph into a number of different tissues is proving a natural protector, healer and antibiotic maker, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and their peers have found. Mesenchymal stem cells reaped from bone marrow had been hailed as the key to growing new organs to replace those damaged or destroyed by violence or disease, but have failed to live up to the billing. Instead, scientists who'd been trying to manipulate the cells to build replacement parts have been finding the cells are innately potent antidotes to a growing list of...

SEONGNAM, South Korea (Reuters) - More than five years after South Korea's scientific reputation was shattered by a cloning research scandal, the country has approved stem cell medication in the form of a treatment for heart attack victims for the world's first clinical use... --snip-- SHARES SOAR ON GROUND-BREAKING TREATMENT FCB-Pharmicell specializes in developing stem cell drugs for incurable diseases. Hearticellgram-AMI takes somatic stem cells extracted from the patient's own bone marrow that are then cultured and directly injected into the damaged heart. "Our first goal is to apply them in patients with illnesses that are not curable through conventional...

Scientists have raised hope that stem cell therapy could provide significant relief for patients disabled by untreatable chest pain.Patients with severe angina had stem cells from their blood injected into their heart.The therapy, carried out by Chicago's Northwestern University, halved the number of bouts of angina chest pain.But UK experts have stressed the work is still at an early stage, and the potential longer benefit is unknown.The procedure may also carry a risk: it is suspected of causing heart muscle damage in two patients, and others reported bone and chest pain.The study, reported in the journal Circulation Research, was carried...

Dr. Robin Smith, CEO of NeoStem, announces the joint venture at the Vatican on June 16, 2011 Vatican City, Jun 16, 2011 / 12:35 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Vatican has signed its first ever commercial agreement with an outside company. The contract with U.S.-based bio-pharmaceutical firm NeoStem will advance ethical research into stem cells. “We would like to create a hotspot for scientists, benefactors, academics (and) Church leaders that will now join this group and would work together for the benefit of humanity,”Fr. Tomaz Trafny of the Vatican’s Council for Culture told CNA June 16. The deal was announced...

A Chicago-based scientist says he’s grateful to U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk for siding with legislation that backs stem cell research. Kirk on Monday called for congressional action to codify an executive order on the research issued by President Barack Obama in 2009. (snip) The Illinois Republican says, if senior Democratic senators choose not to move the stem cell legislation in this Congress, he will.

Enlarge Image Self-healing? After a heart attack like this patient has suffered, cells in the heart might be able to make new muscle, a mouse study suggests. Credit: Fotosearch Heart attacks kill because they strangle heart muscle, destroying cells and preventing the organ from pumping properly. Now, researchers reveal that they have nudged cells within mouse hearts to repair some of the damage, a discovery that might prompt new treatments for heart attacks in humans. Researchers are probing several ways to encourage the heart to fix itself. Last year, for instance, cardiac stem cell biologist Deepak Srivastava of the...

Bartolo ColonBOCA RATON, Florida, June 7, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Bartolo Colon’s career seemed to be going down the drains, after being one of major league baseball’s top starting pitchers. In 2005 Colon won the American League Cy Young award, but a series of shoulder and elbow injuries sidelined him until, in 2010, he didn’t play in the majors at all. By 2009, Colon’s astonishing 97 mph fastball had slowed down considerably and every pitch he threw resulted in agonizing pain: so he went home to the Dominican Republic, defeated. But in March of 2010, a doctor in the Dominican Republic,...

A team of researchers at Lund University in southern Sweden have managed to develop nerve cells from human skin cells without using stem cells - a development described as an ethical and medical breakthrough. "This fundamentally changes how we look at mature cells and their capacity. Previously a skin cell was thought to always remain a skin cell, but we have shown that it can be any cell," said Malin Parmar, the Lund University researcher leading the study, to The Local on Tuesday. The new technique works by reprogramming connective tissue cells, so-called human fibroblasts, directly into nerve cells, opening...

CHATOM, Ala. — Every now and then, Timothy J. Atchison thinks he feels a little something when rubbing his legs. But he knows to temper any feelings of excitement or optimism. Left paralyzed from the chest down after a car crash last fall, the baby-faced 21-year-old reminds himself that it could be simply phantom feelings. A lot rides on his immobile legs — they carry the hopes and dreams of tens of thousands of severely injured people. Atchison is Patient A, the formerly anonymous person who volunteered to have embryonic stem cells injected into his spine. It was the first...

Since the HIV virus was discovered 30 years ago this week, 30 million people have died from the disease, and it continues to spread at the rate of 7,000 people per day globally, the UN says. There's not much good news when it comes to this devastating disease. But that is perhaps why the story of the man scientists call the "Berlin patient" is so remarkable and has generated so much excitement among the HIV advocacy community. Timothy Ray Brown suffered from both leukemia and HIV when he received a bone marrow stem cell transplant in Berlin, Germany in 2007....

Stem cell research continues to move ahead. Not embryonic stem cell research, however, which relies on the destruction of young human life.After over 30 years of embryonic stem cell research, first with mouse and then human embryonic stem cells, not a single patient has been helped. And while over the past year, three experimental trials have been approved in the U.S., even many embryonic stem cell scientists believe the practical dangers of embryonic stem cells (tumors, incorrect tissue growth, immune problems) make such trials preliminary; simply using patients for experiments. Embryonic stem cells fail on both ethical and practical aspects,...

Scientists believe they've discovered stem cells in the lung that can make a wide variety of the organ's tissues, a finding that might open new doors for treating emphysema and other diseases. When these human cells were injected into mice, they showed their versatility by rebuilding airways, air sacs and blood vessels within two weeks. One expert called that "amazing." While stem cells have been found in bone marrow and some other parts of the body, it hasn't been clear whether such a versatile cell existed in the lung. Experts not involved in the study stressed that the work must...

Findings hold potential for solution to baldness, with wider implications for stem cell researchIn one of the first studies to look at the population behavior of a large pool of stem cells in thousands of hair follicles – as opposed to the stem cell of a single hair follicle – Keck School of Medicine of USC scientists deciphered how hair stem cells in mice and rabbits can communicate with each other and encourage mutually coordinated regeneration, according to an article published in the April 29 edition of the journal Science. The team collaborated with mathematical biologists from the University of...

Opponents of taxpayer-funded embryonic stem cell research lost a key round in a federal appeals court Friday, news that buoyed researchers in Wisconsin where the first of these human cells were isolated and grown by James Thomson in 1998. "I think it's encouraging news, the best news we could hope for at this stage," said Timothy Kamp, director of the University of Wisconsin Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center. "There's a legal cloud overhanging embryonic stem cell research, but the skies are starting to clear," said Erik Forsberg, executive director of WiCell Research Institute in Madison.

The Stem-Cell WarUnlike embryonic stem cells, adult stem cells do have a record of healing. You wouldn't know it from the media. An enduring liberal myth, that of the Republican “war on science,� got a subtle rebuke this week when the first and only patient to receive FDA-approved embryonic-stem-cell therapy publicly revealed his identity. Timothy J. Atchison, a 21-year-old nursing student, had been partially paralyzed in a car crash. Six months ago, scientists at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta sought to test on him the safety of a drug concocted from stem cells of the kind derived by destroying a...

FINDINGS: Certain differentiated cells in breast tissue can spontaneously convert to a stem-cell-like state, according to Whitehead Institute researchers. Until now, scientific dogma has stated that differentiation is a one-way path; once cells specialize, they cannot return to the flexible stem-cell state on their own. These findings hold true for normal mammary cells as well as for breast cancer cells. RELEVANCE: These findings may redefine how researchers view cancer stem cells – the cells capable of seeding new tumors at primary and distant sites in the body. Therapies that specifically target cancer stem cells are currently being investigated in the...

WASHINGTON, DC – Heart failure affects roughly six million Americans, yet treatment consists of either a heart transplant or the insertion of mechanical devices that assist the heart. This is unacceptable to Roberto Bolli, MD, Chief of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Ky., which is why he is on a mission to make cardiac stem cell treatment an option for all who must cope with the limitations of a failing heart. Dr. Bolli is conducting the groundbreaking study, "Cardiac Stem Cell Infusion in Patients with Ischemic cardiOmyopathy (SCIPIO)," in which researchers at the...

A study of the salamander brain has led researchers at Karolinska Institutet to discover a hitherto unknown function of the neurotransmitter dopamine. In an article published in the prestigious scientific journal Cell Stem Cell they show how in acting as a kind of switch for stem cells, dopamine controls the formation of new neurons in the adult brain. Their findings may one day contribute to new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's. The study was conducted using salamanders which unlike mammals recover fully from a Parkinson's-like condition within a four week period. Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disease characterised...

Adult cells that have been reprogrammed into stem cells harbor a number of genetic mutations, some of which appear in genes that have been linked to cancer. While scientists don't yet know how this might affect the use of the cells in medicine, they say the findings show that the cells need to be studied much more extensively.

The U.S. District Court injunction that stops federal taxpayer funding of human embryonic stem cell research should make patients happy.  The judge ruled that federal funding for embryonic stem cell research violates a current law, passed annually since the Clinton administration, prohibiting government funding for research that involves the destruction of human embryos.He added that there is a limited amount of federal funding for stem cells, and funding embryonic stem cells competes with adult stem cells. But only adult stem cells are treating people. The good news is that this ruling should free up more funding for adult stem cell...

US Politicians Duped By The Brotherhood In the United States, one individual maintained a pretense of "moderation" which would later embarrass the left and the right. According to the testimony of Dr. Michael Waller to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Abdurahman Alamoudi was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. A man born in Eritrea in 1951, he arrived in the US in 1979 and became a naturalized US citizen on May 23, 1996. From 1985 onwards he became involved in many Muslim groups. In 1990 he founded the Washington DC-based American Muslim Council (AMC), which Waller states "has...

Medical researchers' hopes of replacing politically fraught embryonic stem (ES) cells with stem cells derived from adult tissues have suffered a setback. Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, created by turning back the developmental clock on adult tissues, and ES cells display similar gene-expression patterns, and both can produce any of the various tissues in the human body. But patterns of epigenetic changes — alterations that affect gene expression without changing the DNA sequence — tell a different story about iPS cells, a team led by Joseph Ecker, a molecular geneticist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, reports online...

Stem cells made from mature cells and rewound to an embryonic-like state retain a distinct "memory" of their past that might limit their potential for therapeutic use, scientists reported Wednesday in the journal Nature. [...] They looked at 1.2 billion places in each genome where such chemical markers [epigenomes] exist. The analysis was unusually rigorous — and therefore unusually revealing, Ecker said. Earlier studies examined representative regions in the genome, rather than the whole thing. [...] For the most part, the contents of Ecker's metaphorical rooms looked alike. But when they zoomed in, inconsistencies emerged. In a side-by-side comparison of...

Two recent stories are exciting about the possibility of treating young children, even in the womb, with adult stem cells.  One study shows that cardiac adult stem cells can be isolated from young children with heart problems, even as young as one day old. The researchers found that a very small sample of heart tissue contained ample adult stem cells that could be grown in culture, turned into various types of heart cells, and repair damaged hearts in a lab animal model.  Dr. Sunjay Kaushal, senior author on the study in the journal Circulation, said “The potential of cardiac stem...

Macha is one of those once-in-a-lifetime pets — a tall, lean, savvy dog who lives to hunt pheasant. Out in the field, the Labrador retriever is so focused that she shuns pats from her Woodland Park owner, Tom Bulloch. “She doesn’t want her line of vision obstructed,” he explains. Macha, who can run like the wind, was named after a mythological Irish goddess who was faster than any man or beast. Read more: http://www.gazette.com/articles/pets-110435-pain-lifetime.html#ixzz19nXnqJSS frpa ....“At the time I thought, ‘aren’t stem cells illegal or a political problem?’” Bulloch says. In fact, they can be used for treatment of animals....

A good athlete is often called on to save a game. This is the story of a star football player who was asked to save a life of someone he didn't even know. CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews has the latest example of "The American Spirit." There were four finalists last night for the Gagliardi Trophy, basically the Heisman for Division III college football. But for finalist Matt Hoffman learning if he'd win wasn't the suspense of the night.  Meeting cancer patient Warren Sallach was.  Last year Matt donated his bone stem cells - in an anonymous donation that went...

Big news no matter the circumstances, but in case you stumble across the headline elsewhere and are tempted to think it’s a major breakthrough, I recommend reading this excellent Fox News piece for perspective. The good news, obviously: An HIV-positive patient who was treated for leukemia more than three years ago shows no signs of the virus in his system to this day. Doctors can’t be completely sure that trace amounts aren’t lying dormant somewhere in his body, but as far as they’re able to measure, it’s all gone. He’s the first patient on record to be completely cured.The bad...