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Skin cells turned directly into neurons By Clive Cookson Published: January 28 2010 02:00 | Last updated: January 28 2010 02:00 Stem cell scientists at Stanford University in California announced "a huge step forward" last night, with the publication of research that turned skin into nerve cells without any intermediate step. The production of neurons [nerve cells] directly from other adult cells, without making stem cells en route, could transform "regenerative medicine" - providing a plentiful supply of neurons for treating people with degenerative brain diseases such as Parkinson's or those with spinal injuries. "We actively and directly induced one...

Invetech has delivered what it calls the "world's first production model 3D bio-printer" to Organovo, developers of the proprietary NovoGen bioprinting technology. Organovo will in turn supply the devices to institutions investigating human tissue repair and organ replacement. Keith Murphy, CEO of Organovo, based in San Diego, said the units represent a breakthrough because they provide for the first time a flexible technology platform for organizations working on many different types of tissue construction and organ replacement. "Scientists and engineers can use the 3D bio printers to enable placing cells of almost any type into a desired pattern in 3D,"...

Famous for its antioxidant properties and role in tissue repair, vitamin C is touted as beneficial for illnesses ranging from the common cold to cancer and perhaps even for slowing the aging process. Now, a study published online on December 24th by Cell Press in the journal Cell Stem Cell uncovers an unexpected new role for this natural compound: facilitating the generation of embryonic-like stem cells from adult cells. Over the past few years, we have learned that adult cells can be reprogrammed into cells with characteristics similar to embryonic stem cells by turning on a select set of genes....

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report that regeneration of central nervous system axons can be achieved in rats even when treatment delayed is more than a year after the original spinal cord injury...

In a proof-of-concept study, Mayo Clinic investigators have demonstrated that induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can be used to treat heart disease. iPS cells are stem cells converted from adult cells. In this study, the researchers reprogrammed ordinary fibroblasts, cells that contribute to scars such as those resulting from a heart attack, converting them into stem cells that fix heart damage caused by infarction. The findings appear in the current online issue of the journal Circulation. "This study establishes the real potential for using iPS cells in cardiac treatment," says Timothy Nelson, M.D., Ph.D., first author on the Mayo Clinic...

Tissues in axolotl amputees regenerate themselves by “memory” Given a chance to regrow a limb, salamanders don’t change a thing. Since the 18th century, scientists have puzzled over how salamanders regenerate amputated limbs and have looked for clues to regrow human limbs. Researchers thought they knew part of the answer: Cells at the wound site would lose their identities as they turned back their developmental clocks to become pluripotent stem cells — capable of developing into many cell types in the body — and then recreate the lost limb. But a new study published July 2 in Nature and led...

Cell tracking shows that axolotl cells in a regrowing leg retain distinct roles. The amazing axolotl - legless, but never for long.Wikimedia Commons Salamanders have the ability to regrow amputated limbs – but what stops a tail growing from the stump, instead of a leg? A team of scientists are now a step closer to the answer. They studied tissue regeneration in axolotls (Ambystoma mexicanum), salamanders endemic to Mexico. The creatures heal so well because the muscle, bone and skin cells nearest to the amputation site revert into a more generic form, forming a clump of adult stem cells called...

Pirates can now trade in their peg-legs for real legs as scientists transform wood into bone.In a Royal Society of Chemistry journal Italian chemists show that ordinary wood can be turned into bone suitable for repairing damaged limbs.It brings a whole new meaning to the term "tree surgery".The microstructure of the wood is the perfect natural template for making bone as it allows growth of blood vessels and tissues, Anna Tampieri and colleagues report in the Journal of Materials Chemistry.By treating wood with a fairly simple set of chemical processes, the natural structure of the wood is retained.The wood is...

People die, but one part of them, at least in principle, is immortal. In the germline cells that produce eggs or sperm, biological time stands still. This is why babies are all born with the same age, the clock set to zero, regardless of the age of their parents. A little piece of the germline’s immortality, it now seems, can be acquired by the ordinary cells of the body, and used to give the organism extra longevity. This is the conclusion of a research group at the Massachusetts General Hospital led by Sean P. Curran and Gary Ruvkun. Their studies...

Enlarge ImageSpare parts. Blood vessels grown from a person's own cells may soon help kidney dialysis patients.Credit: Cytograft Tissue Engineering Scientists report today that artificial blood vessels made using a person's own skin cells work well in patients receiving kidney dialysis. The new blood vessels mark the first vascular grafts to be derived entirely from a patient's own tissues, which lowers the odds of a harmful immune reaction. Down the road, engineered grafts may also prove useful in treating patients with circulatory problems in their legs and coronary arteries. About 300,000 people a year in the United States receive...

The cold war helps settle a hot debate about how hearts grow.New cells in old hearts.Punchstock Fallout from nuclear bomb tests during the cold war has just yielded encouraging news for those searching for ways to reverse heart disease.A team led by Jonas Frisén from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm has shown that adult human hearts make new muscle cells, albeit very, very slowly1.Human heart cells that can generate cardiomyocytes in culture have been identified before. But how the heart regenerates naturally has been hotly contested, says Kenneth Chien of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge. "This study shows...

Carbon 14 from Cold War–era nuclear bomb tests allowed researchers to track cell birth By monitoring carbon 14 emitted from Cold War–era nuclear bomb tests, researchers found that heart muscle cells continue to divide throughout adulthood, shows a study appearing in the April 3 Science. The low-level cell renewal may eventually be exploited to treat damaged hearts, says study coauthor Jonas Frisén of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The finding contradicts the belief of many scientists that the heart muscle cells sticking around until the end were present at birth. “The dogma has always been that cell division in the...

In a finding that may open new approaches to treating heart disease, Swedish scientists have succeeded in measuring a highly controversial property of the human heart — the rate at which its muscle cells are renewed during a person’s lifetime... --snip-- The nuclear blasts generated a radioactive form of carbon, known as carbon-14. The amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere has gradually diminished since 1963, when above-ground tests were banned, as it gets incorporated into plants and animals or diffuses into the oceans. In the body, carbon-14 in the diet gets into the DNA of new cells and stays unchanged...

A team of scientists has advanced stem cell research by finding a way to endow human skin cells with embryonic stem cell-like properties without inserting potentially problematic new genes into their DNA. The team was led by James A. Thomson, V.M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and supported in part by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, a component of the National Institutes of Health. This is not the first time that scientists have endowed differentiated cells like skin cells with the capacity to develop into any of the roughly 220 types of cells in the body, a...

Stem-cell advance could bring tailored treatments closer. Researchers are close to making safer stem cells.K. Woltjen et al. For the first time, specialized human cells have been transformed into a state similar to that seen in embryonic stem cells, without using viruses. The advance edges stem-cell biologists closer to clearing a barrier to using reprogrammed cells for therapies and drug screening."The field has been waiting for these papers," says Marie Csete, chief scientific officer at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine in San Francisco. Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent — capable of generating all the body's specialized cell types —...

Scientists in Canada and Scotland have developed a virus-free method for generating embryonic-like stem cells that does not involve destroying embryos. Scientists say the new approach to growing so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells is an important step toward creating safe and reliable populations of cells for research and therapy. To create iPS cells, researchers turn back the clock in mature cells. They do this by reactivating dormant genes associated with pluripotency--a primitive state in which a cell has the potential to become any cell type in the body. Scientists first introduced iPS cells in 2006 and since then have...

CHICAGO — Meet Zoey Walsh, a teenage stem-cell recipient who is pushing the frontier of medical science. He’s a dog. Unable to alleviate his pain with drugs and unwilling to risk another hip surgery on a dog so old, Zoey’s owners turned to a treatment that involved injecting stem cells, which had been extracted from Zoey’s fat, back into the animal. The stem cells stimulate repairs. The therapy is gaining momentum as a treatment option for pets. But it also holds promise for humans, researchers and companies involved say. “It did wonders,” Zoey’s owner, Raymond Walsh of Palos Heights, Ill.,...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Researchers said on Tuesday they had made a type of nerve cell out of ordinary skin cells in a new approach to stem cell research. They made motor neurons out of induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells -- a type of cell made from ordinary skin cells that resembles human embryonic stem cells. Scientists hope that iPS cells might offer a substitute for embryonic stem cells and a short-cut to tailored medical therapy for a range of diseases. Motor neurons make muscles contract, and being able to make new motor neurons might help treat diseases such...

Since their discovery, stem cells have been hailed as the ultimate answer for crippling and incurable diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other conditions that leave vital organs like heart or nerves damaged beyond repair. Researchers from the University of Cambridge, under the leadership of Professor Austin Smith, Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research at the University of Cambridge, recently published a paper detailing a new technology that can transform adult stem cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS). This technique is able to reliably reprogram adult cells into iPS rapidly and can forego the need...

Bone marrow stem cells may have helped patients with multiple sclerosis.MedicalRF.com / Alamy A stem-cell therapy appears to help some patients with early-stage multiple sclerosis recover, according to results from a preliminary study.Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic disease where the body's immune system attacks the central nervous system. White blood cells in the body attack the protective myelin sheaths surrounding nerve fibres in the brain and spinal cord. Although symptoms of the disease wax and wane, they generally grow worse over time and include fatigue, blurred vision and difficulty walking. In the new trial, the patients' immune cells were...

AP Science Writer A U.S. biotech company says it plans to start this summer the world's first study of a treatment based on human embryonic stem cells - a long-awaited project aimed at spinal cord injury. --snip-- Each patient will receive a low dose of anti-rejection drugs for about two months, because after that time the medications shouldn't be needed, Okarma said. The study will follow each patient for at least a year...

Stroke patients to be treated with tailor-made brain cells. Stem cells will be grafted into the brains of patients during the new trial.ALAMY UK researchers have been given the go-ahead for a clinical trial to assess the use of stem-cell transplants for stroke. Twelve people will take part in the preliminary safety study, the first time that brain-derived stem cells have been used to treat stroke patients.The trial, due to start later this year, will see different doses of cultured human neural stem cells grafted into the brains of patients who have had a stroke — often caused by a...

A study published in the current issue of CELL TRANSPLANTATION (Vol.17, No. 8) suggests that mature adipocytes - fat cells - could become a source for cell replacement therapy to treat central nervous system disorders. According to the study's lead researcher, Dr. Yuki Ohta of the Institute of Medical Science, St. Mariana University School of Medicine, Kawasaki, Japan, adipose-derived stem/stromal cells have in the past been shown to differentiate into neuronal cells in an in vitro setting. In their study, for the first time fat cells have been shown to successfully differentiate into neuronal cells in in vivo tests. The...

Like it or not, your living room probably says a lot about you. Given a few uninterrupted moments to poke around, a stranger could probably get a pretty good idea of your likes and dislikes, and maybe even your future plans. Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine employing a similar "peeping Tom" tactic to learn more about how stem cells develop have taken a significant step forward by devising a way to recreate the cells' lair — a microenvironment called a niche — in an adult animal. "We have isolated the cells in mouse bone that make bone...

Despite the promise of stem cell therapy, little has been achieved thus far.STEM cells have been used for treating patients with leukaemia who relapsed and did not respond to chemotherapy and radiotherapy since the late 60s. These patients had bone marrow transplants.However, media and public interest was only fired up after the announcement of the birth of Dolly, the sheep which was the first mammalian clone from adult cells, on July 5, 1996. Since then, interest has continued unabated, with research findings continuing to find their way into the media, with all its attendant hype. Stem cells leaped into the...

Researchers at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC have been able to effectively repair damaged heart muscle in an animal model using a novel population of stem cells they discovered that is derived from human skeletal muscle tissue. The research team - led by Johnny Huard, PhD - transplanted stem cells purified from human muscle-derived blood vessels into the hearts of mice that had heart damage similar to that which would occur in people who had suffered a heart attack. These transplanted myoendothelial cells repaired the injured muscle, stimulated the growth of new blood vessels in the heart and reduced...

Clinical trial » Researchers are searching for patients who have few other options for a remedy. University of Utah researchers are going to be the first in the country to inject patients' own stem cells into their hearts to treat two types of heart failure. After drawing about 3 tablespoons of patients' own bone marrow, researchers will grow cardiac-repair cells -- believed to help heart muscles and improve blood flow -- in culture for about 12 days. The cells that survive culture are healthier than the original ones extracted from the patient, said Amit N. Patel, director of cardiovascular regenerative...

Artificial Bladder: John Carnett Almost 100,000 people languish on organ-transplant waiting lists. But new tissue-fabrication techniques should make swapping in a man-made liver as easy as snapping Lego bricks into place. Blood vessels Method: 3-D printer When: 5 years Gabor Forgacs, a tissue engineer at the University of Missouri, is making blood-vessel networks by culturing three types of vessel cells and loading them into a fridge-size bioprinter. This machine prints out the cells to build capillaries in preprogrammed patterns. Liver Method: Grown using stem cells from umbilical-cord blood When: 15–25 years Colin McGuckin has made silver-dollar-size, functional “mini livers.”...

Reanimating lifeless organs brings new hope for the millions on transplant waiting lists Born to Beat: a rat heart fused with rat cells incubates in a bioreactor at the University of Minnesota: Courtesy Emily Jensen In late 2005, cardiac researcher Doris Taylor revived the dead. She rinsed rat hearts with detergent until the cells washed away and all that remained was a skeleton of tissue translucent as wax paper—a ghost heart, as Taylor calls it. She injected the scaffold with fresh heart cells from newborn rats. Then she waited. What she witnessed four days later, once the cells had a...

(UWIRE.com) This story was written by June Q. Wu, Harvard Crimson Researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute are one step closer to achieving the ultimate promise of stem cell research creating tissues for every part of the body without the use of harmful viruses or cancer-causing genes. Harvard Medical School professor Konrad A. Hochedlinger and his colleagues reported last week on the Web site of the journal Science that they have created mouse induced pluripotent stem cells without permanently altering the genetic makeup of the cells. Their technique allows scientists to genetically manipulate a patients cells typically skin cells...

With a nearly paralyzed right side, Chloe Levine was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at 1. A year later, she can say her nickname and is walking normally and jumping on beds. With one simple word from the back seat of a car cruising between North Carolina and New York, 2-year-old Chloe Levine signaled a great leap forward. "Coco," the Colorado toddler said, uttering her nickname for the first time. Those two syllables marked a milestone in stem-cell therapy, helping prove that infusing a baby with its own stem cells can repair a brain ravaged by cerebral palsy. Before a one-time...

When people envision using human embryonic stem cells for “regenerative medicine,” they often talk about making neurons to treat Parkinson’s disease, cardiac cells to... --snip-- The idea faces other challenges beyond the huge volume of cells needed. The red cells produced from embryonic stem cells so far tend to resemble embryonic or fetal red cells more than adult ones. They tend to be larger and often contain nuclei, which could impede their passage through the body. And they have a different form of the globin molecule, which carries oxygen. --snip-- “The real test is in vivo,” said Dr. Thalia Papayannopoulou,...

Engineers at Georgia Tech have used skin cells to create artificial bones that mimic the ability of natural bone to blend into other tissues such as tendons or ligaments. The artificial bones display a gradual change from bone to softer tissue rather than the sudden shift of previously developed artificial tissue, providing better integration with the body and allowing them to handle weight more successfully. The research appears in the August 26, 2008, edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "One of the biggest challenges in regenerative medicine is to have a graded continuous interface, because anatomically...

Scientists have transformed one type of fully developed adult cell directly into another inside a living animal, a startling advance that could lead to cures for a variety of illnesses and sidestep the political and ethical quagmires associated with embryonic stem cell research. Through a series of painstaking experiments involving mice, the Harvard biologists pinpointed three crucial molecular switches that, when flipped, completely convert a common cell in the pancreas into the more precious insulin-producing ones that diabetics need to survive. The experiments, detailed online yesterday in the journal Nature, raise the prospect that patients suffering from not only diabetes...

Like the masterless samurai for whom it is named, the protein Ronin chooses an independent path, maintaining embryonic stem cells in their undifferentiated state and playing essential roles in genesis of embryos and their development, said Baylor College of Medicine researchers who reported on this novel cellular regulator in the current issue of the journal Cell. Three proteins - Oct4, Sox2 and Nanog -- had previously been considered the "master" regulators of embryonic stem cells, but "Ronin could be as important as these three," said Dr. Thomas Zwaka, assistant professor in the Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine (STaR) Center at...

In an approach that could become a new treatment for the 10 to 20 percent of people whose broken bones fail to heal, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have shown that transplantation of adult stem cells can improve healing of fractures. Adult stem cells are specialized cells with the ability to regenerate tissue in response to damage. However, many patients lack sufficient numbers of these cells and thus cannot heal properly. Researchers have used adult stem cells in a few cases to improve fracture healing, but further studies were needed to show that this method...

Life is regenerative, by definition. But by and large, humans lack the regenerative capacity of creatures such as newts and hydra. Although some of our cells have the innate ability to replenish themselves — and, by doing so, to repair ageing and injured tissues and organs — most of the body's cells form the specialized cell type they are destined for and then go into lock down. Having said that, humans do have organs and tissues, such as liver and skin, that regenerate well. Unfortunately, the insults of injury, disease and age wreak havoc on those that don't. This explains...

WASHINGTON, May 8, 2008 – Thanks to great strides in medical care, today’s U.S. warriors have a 50 percent greater chance of survival if they’re wounded on the battlefield than their Vietnam War counterparts did. State-of-the-art prosthetics help troops who have lost a limb resume many, and in some cases all, of their pre-injury activities. The Defense Department is hoping to find new and even better ways to help the nation’s warriors as it researches a field called regenerative medicine that would enable people to generate new skin and even grow new limbs, Army Col. (Dr.) Robert Vandre told...

Researchers have successfully identified over 5,000 proteins that are present in embryonic stem cells, tripling the size of previous results and in the process creating the largest quantified protein map to date. Stem cells hold great potential in biology and medicine, but a host of questions lingers about how they operate and convert into other cells. To help answer these questions, researchers have begun taking a 'big picture' approach, identifying all the proteins that are expressed in stem cells. Currently, around 1700 proteins have been identified in stem cells. Now, using mass spectrometry and special "heavy" amino acids (made with...

BOSTON (WBZ) ― There's been a lot of controversy over the use of embryonic stem cells in recent years, but adult stem cells, which few people oppose using, are already giving some patients a new lease on life. Donald Reid is hoping adult stem cells will give him more time. "There's not many options left for me." The 57-year-old has clogged arteries and heart disease so bad; he's not a candidate for surgery. Instead, he's joined an experimental study that involves a special machine. It's taking his blood and pulling out stem cells. We're not talking about stem cells from...

An Irishman blinded by an explosion two years ago has had his sight restored after doctors inserted his son's tooth in his eye, he said on Wednesday. Bob McNichol, 57, from County Mayo in the west of the country, lost his sight in a freak accident when red-hot liquid aluminium exploded at a re-cycling business in November 2005. "I thought that I was going to be blind for the rest of my life," McNichol told RTE state radio. After doctors in Ireland said there was nothing more they could do, McNichol heard about a miracle operation called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis (OOKP) being...

A small California biotech company backed by billionaire John Tu claims to have created stem cells without destroying human embryos or introducing cancer-causing genes, in what could be a major step toward using these stem cells for human trials. But the company provided almost no details of how its method worked, leading to skepticism among many scientists. Instead of publishing its method in a scientific journal, the company, PrimeGen Biotech of Irvine, Calif., released the news during a brief presentation at a stem cell industry conference in New York. That means that it sidestepped the careful anonymous vetting that normally...

Scientists in Finland said they had replaced a 65-year-old patient's upper jaw with a bone transplant cultivated from stem cells isolated from his own fatty tissue and grown inside his abdomen. the breakthrough opened up new ways to treat severe tissue damage and made the prospect of custom-made living spares parts for humans a step closer to reality. "There have been a couple of similar-sounding procedures before, but these didn't use the patient's own stem cells that were first cultured and expanded in laboratory and differentiated into bone tissue,"... the patient was recovering more quickly than he would have if...

It’s called “reprogramming.” Another technical term for it is “somatic cell dedifferentiation.” Just get those terms into your vocabulary because they’ll be around for the foreseeable future. As reported in two scientific papers published today, reprogramming is now the future of stem cell research and renders ethically controversial therapeutic cloning obsolete. Ever since the debate of embryo-destructive stem-cell research began in earnest in 1998 when researchers at the University of Wisconsin first isolated human embryonic stem cells, we’ve known that the best overall answer to the ethical impasse would be a solution that both allows the search for stem-cell related...

News Analysis WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 — It has been more than six years since President Bush, in the first major televised address of his presidency, drew a stark moral line against the destruction of human embryos in medical research. Since then, he has steadfastly maintained that scientists would come up with an alternative method of developing embryonic stem cells, one that did not involve killing embryos. Critics were skeptical. But now that scientists in Japan and Wisconsin have apparently achieved what Mr. Bush envisioned, the White House is saying, “I told you so.” Conservative Republican presidential hopefuls like former Gov....

AP Science Writer NEW YORK --Researchers are trying to find ways to regrow fingers -- and someday, even limbs -- with tricks that sound like magic spells from a Harry Potter novel. There's the guy who sliced off a fingertip but grew it back, after he treated the wound with an extract of pig bladder. And the scientists who grow extra arms on salamanders. And the laboratory mice with the eerie ability to heal themselves. This summer, scientists are planning to see whether the powdered pig extract can help injured soldiers regrow parts of their fingers. And a large federally...

The news embargo now seems to have been broken on what is likely to rank as the most important development in stem cell science since the first derivation of human embryonic stem cells in 1998. Two prominent scientific journals—Science and Cell—are each today publishing papers that demonstrate extraordinary success with a technique called “somatic cell reprogramming.� Working separately, and using slightly different methods, these two teams (one of which is led by James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin, the original innovator of human embryonic stem cells) have each successfully taken a regular human skin cell and transformed it into...

A couple of weeks ago Wake Forest University physicians described the first human recipients of a laboratory-grown organ. In the prestigious medical journal "The Lancet," Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, detailed a series of patients (children and teenagers) who received urinary bladders grown from their own cells. WHAAAAT? Did somebody say "laboratory organs?!" Yes. Perhaps like you, the first reaction of some who heard the news was, “why would anyone need a new bladder?” Well, many infants are born with congenital birth defects a very serous one is spina bifida (incomplete closure of the spine)....

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Inside the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine’s spacious new headquarters here, when asked how many siblings he has, Anthony Atala gives a long gentle laugh instead of a reply. Just to have shared that he was born in Peru and comes from a large family is more than he normally divulges about his personal life to journalists. But asked about his work with urothelial cells — the cells that line the bladder, ureter and urethra — Dr. Atala bends forward and talks a blue streak. Which might be expected of a urologist and tissue engineer who...

Dublin, Ireland (LifeNews.com) -- A scientist in Ireland has made a major breakthrough in the field of adult stem cell research by producing insulin needed by diabetic patients from the stem cells from the umbilical cords of living babies. The result provides real hope for diabetics because the insulin from embryonic stem cells doesn't work as effectively and involves the destruction of human life. Colin McGuckin, professor of regenerative medicine at the University of Newcastle, will soon present the findings to Catholic church leaders at a presentation at the Augustinian Institute in Rome. “We have been able to produce insulin-secreting...