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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...

SAN DIEGO, CA--(Marketwire - December 10, 2010) - Medistem Inc. (PINKSHEETS: MEDS) announced today peer-reviewed publication of its data on what is believed to be the first "combination therapy" adult stem cell protocol for spinal cord injury. The patient treated, who was 29 years old at the time, suffered a spinal cord injury resulting from an airplane crash on May 13th of 2008. He had no walking ability, intermittent pain and loss of sexual function. The patient was injected with a combination universal donor stem cell therapy in November of 2008, and January and July of 2009. A gradual improvement was observed subsequent to each...

Q: How did you get involved in the debate on stem cell research?A: Hardly a week goes by that people don't ask me, "Have you ever talked with Christopher Reeve? I saw him the other day on television and ..." People are curious about where I stand regarding the paralyzed actor's hope for a cure through what he calls therapeutic cloning. After all, I'm disabled. Don't I want a cure? I would love to walk. But 35 years of quadriplegia since a diving accident in 1967 has honed my perspective. I look at the broader implications of medical research as...

Direct Conversion May Make Embryonic Stem Cell Research Obsolete New York, NY -- Scientists made a major step towards making embryonic stem cell research obsolete when they used direct reprogramming to convert adult stem cells to an embryonic-like state. Now direct conversion is moving the ball forward. The process of direct conversion involves changing one kind of specialized stem cell into another kind -- and it eliminates the need for controversial embryonic stem cells, which some scientists promote because they can change into most any kind of cells. http://LifeNews.com/bio-3220

Science: Supporters of California's failed 2004 stem-cell law will ask strapped taxpayers to support another $3 billion bond initiative in 2014. Maybe it's time to restore fiscal sanity as well as science to its rightful place. When it was passed in 2004, Proposition 71, with its $3 billion state fund and 10-year mandate for embryonic stem-cell research (ESCR), held out the promise of imminent miracle cures for everything from spinal disorders to Parkinson's. One campaign ad showed actor Christopher Reeve, aka Superman, asking California voters to "stand up for those who can't." Some six years later, with about $1.1 billion...

A retired military service dog is getting a new lease on life in Washington, D.C., after undergoing a revolutionary stem cell treatment. ... The cutting-edge treatment helps dogs grow new cartilage by injecting stem cells from their own fat, normally from the abdomen, into the affected joint. The treatment takes about three days and has an 80 percent success rate, MyFoxDC.com reported.

BERLIN, November 26, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Doctors associated with the German umbilical cord blood bank Vita 34 say that they have cured a child’s leukemia completely using an infusion of stem cells from umbilical cord blood.The procedure was reportedly performed in 2005 on a four-year-old girl whose chemotherapy treatment had failed and who had a prognosis of only three months to live.  The procedure was possible because the parents had decided to preserve their child’s umbilical cord blood at the time of birth.After continuous monitoring of the child for five years now, with no sign of leukemia cells in...

Enlarge Image Shape-shifters. Some cells within these mouse blood vessels developed from human brain tumor cells. Credit: R. Wang et al., Nature, Advanced Online Publication (2010) Tumors are notoriously hard to kill. Attack them with chemotherapy, and they develop drug resistance; surgically remove them, and they may have already metastasized to other parts of the body. Now scientists have found that tumors have yet another trick up their sleeve: They can create their own blood supply by morphing into blood vessels. The observations, reported by two separate teams online today in Nature, could explain why drugs designed to choke...

After six years, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine has faced questions about leaders' pay and the lack of medical breakthroughs. But its chairman plans to ask voters for another $3 billion in bonds. When millionaire Silicon Valley real estate developer Bob Klein launched his ballot drive to create a $3-billion state fund for stem-cell research in 2004, he pitched it as a way of taking politics out of science and focusing on cures. One particularly heartbreaking campaign ad showed former big screen Superman Christopher Reeve paralyzed in a wheelchair, struggling for breath and imploring California voters to "stand up...

STEM cell researchers have found a way to turn a person's skin into blood, a process that could be used to treat cancer and other ailments, according to a Canadian study published today. The method uses cells from a patch of a person's skin and transforms it into blood that is a genetic match, without using human embryonic stem cells, said the study in the journal Nature. By avoiding the controversial and more complicated processes involved with using human embryonic stem cells to create blood, this approach simplifies the process, researchers said. "What we believe we can do in the...

In a letter sent Friday to the leadership of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the deans of American medical schools, chief executives of U.S. hospitals and heads of organizations with names like the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the American Society of Human Genetics said that federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research “is essential” if scientists are to succeed in turning the cells into usable treatments. “The therapeutic potential of human embryonic stem cells is remarkable and could well prove to be one of the most significant paradigm-shifting advances in the history of...