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-Egg cells are the ultimate in flexibility, able to create all the bits and parts of an organism from raw genetic instructions. They are far more flexible, or potent, than even the embryonic-like stem cells from which the researchers created them.
- Making eggs in a dish is such a difficult task that it required a little help from ovary cells that support egg growth, stem cell researcher Katsuhiko Hayashi of Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, and colleagues found.

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Lab technique re-creating ovary conditions in a dish needs refinement

For the first time, researchers have grown eggs entirely in a lab dish.

Skin-producing cells called fibroblasts from the tip of an adult mouse's tail have been reprogrammed to make eggs, Japanese researchers report online October 17 in Nature. Those eggs were fertilized and grew into six healthy mice. The accomplishment could make it possible to study the formation of gametes - eggs and sperm - a mysterious process that takes place inside fetuses. If the feat can be repeated with human cells, it could make eggs easily available for research and may eventually lead to infertility treatments.

"This is very solid work, and an important step in the field," says developmental biologist Diana Laird of the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. But, she cautions, "I wouldn't want patients who have infertility to think this can

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In a first, mouse eggs grown from skin cells

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Lab technique re-creating ovary conditions in a dish needs refinement For the first time, researchers have grown eggs entirely in a lab dish. Skin-producing cells called fibroblasts from the tip of an adult mouse's tail have been reprogrammed to make eggs, Japanese researchers report online October 17 in Nature.

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/14/human-cell-atlas-project-aims-to-map-the-human-bodys-35-trillion-cells

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Human Cell Atlas project aims to map the human body's 35 trillion cells

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Aiming to decipher the types and properties of every cell, the project will attempt to work out exactly what we are made from and how illness develops

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1.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161012102702.htm

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-scientist discover a factor in the Zika Virus that may lead to the vaccine
-the Zika Virus defects the human DNA causing babies to grow in an irregular way, scientist have found a way to decrease the risk of it happening

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Everything we know about Zika fever may change due to a discovery from the University of California, San Diego's School of Medicine. The disease only recently became public knowledge and has been the subject of a significant amount of scientific study.

One alarming aspect of the Zika virus is the insidious way it can damage neurological and immunological functions and also cause developmental defects in newborn infants, such as microcephaly. But a recent study from UC San Diego could help scientists develop drugs to lower the risk of birth defects in pregnant women who become infected.

Researchers found that the disease actually changes a part of human genetic material to " hide in plain sight, " Tariq Rana, the lead author of the study and a professor of pediatrics at UC San Diego, told USA Today. In a study published in the journal Cell host & Microbe, Rana and her fellow researchers explain that Zika may cause birth defects when it enters a human cell.

Genetic material in human cells is made up of DNA and RNA, but Zika is only made up of RNA. So, when it enters a cell, the body tries to get rid of the infection by modifying viral RNA. As a result, human enzymes are activated, which could possibly impact the cell's barriers.

The change of the RNA could be related to birth defects that are affiliated with Zika. While the study may not help develop a vaccine any time soon, it could help scientists develop drugs that tackle the way Zika targets and modifies cells.

In addition, Seattle's Infectious Disease Research Institute received a two-year grant for $491,000 to create an RNA-based vaccine, the Seattle Times reported. Scientists at the Infectious Disease Research Institute (IDRI) are looking to use the genetic information from the virus to create a stronger immune response.

" It's a way of hijacking the virus' own machinery to express proteins to make a safe and effective vaccine," Dan Stinchcomb, the institute's senior vice president for vaccine development viral disease programs, told the Times.

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Zika found to change human cells - report

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Everything we know about Zika fever may change due to a discovery from the University of California, San Diego's School of Medicine. The disease only recently became public knowledge and has been the subject of a significant amount of scientific study.

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Australia has among the world's highest concentrations of stem cell businesses advertising medical and cosmetic treatments online, despite a lack of evidence about the efficacy or safety of many of those procedures, a study has found.

A senior author on the paper, Prof John Rasko from the University of Sydney, has called on Australia's medical regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), to close a loophole that, he said, was allowing the businesses to promote and offer potentially ineffective or harmful treatments.

Websites frequently made implausible claims, were vague about the medical conditions for which they could treat or only offered information "on request" and used inconsistent terminology, the researchers found.

Stem cells found in bone marrow and umbilical cord blood have long been used to successfully treat some cancers, and blood and immune diseases, but those are among the few proven treatments. Clinical trials by academic centres are exploring the potential of stem cells to treat a wider range of diseases, including multiple sclerosis and diabetes.

However, some operators not affiliated with academic institutions are directly offering to the general public stem cell treatments for diseases still under clinical trial or for which no evidence exists and for which the safety and efficacy is as yet unproven.

"Over the past decade the public has been very excited about the publicity surrounding stem cells, which are being advertised as nature's own way of repairing the body," Rasko said.

"We found an increasing number of operators that appear to be preying on the public's vulnerability and advertising treatments without any proof that the thing they're selling is actually working or even safe."

What had shocked the researchers, Rasko said, was that so many clinics were now operating in Australia. They charged consumers thousands of dollars.

"It used to be that stem cell tourism was the only way to get these treatments, forcing Australians to fly to developing countries with less stringent medical regulations to get them," he said.

It took shonky clinics years to realise they could take advantage of this but take advantage they certainly now have

Prof John Rasko

Rasko said the reason stem cell clinics had been able to proliferate in Australia was due to a regulatory loophole that had never been closed.

Autologous treatments involve moving a person's tissue or cells. For example, a vein would be removed from a patient's leg and transferred into their heart to bypass a blocked blood vessel. The TGA declared that such treatments could not be considered therapeutic goods and, therefore, did not regulate their use.

It means stem cells taken from and used in the same patient fall into the category of autologous when the donor and the recipient are the same.

"It allowed doctors to take cells from any parts of the body, manipulate them and reinject them into the body," Rasko said.

"It took shonky clinics years to realise they could take advantage of this but take advantage they certainly now have."

Complicating matters is that stem cells used for medical practice and therapeutic purposes are overseen by different regulatory frameworks.

Following pressure from people like Rasko and concerns about the lack of regulation for unproven stem cell treatments, the TGA sought comments from a range of stakeholders and interested parties on whether the regulation applied to some autologous cells would be appropriate. Consultation closed in March last year but no action has been taken.

"A total of 80 submissions were received," a TGA spokeswoman told Guardian Australia.

"Following this there were a large number of face-to-face meetings with healthcare professionals and other stakeholders and, based on these consultations, a second consultation paper will shortly be released by the TGA to try to resolve these concerns without constraining normal medical practice."

Rasko hopes the research by him and his team, published on Friday in the journal Cell Stem Cell, will prompt the TGA to act with more urgency. He believes the World Health Organisation should also develop a policy to ensure guidelines were consistent between countries.

Australians have already died from undergoing expensive and unproven stem cell treatments. In June, a New South Wales coroner found that a 75-year-old woman, Sheila Drysdale, died after undergoing experimental stem cell treatment for her severe dementia.

Coroner Hugh Dillon found that Drysdale died as a direct result of blood loss suffered following the liposuction stem cell procedure that doctors claimed might improve her quality of life by reducing her symptoms.

The procedure was performed by a cosmetic physician at a private facility and Drysdale died shortly after arriving home.

Dillon said the death "highlights the vulnerability of elderly sick people and their families, desperate for help, to 'quack' medicine".

"I recommend that the TGA and the NSW Ministry of Health consider how best to manage and regulate the provision of 'experimental' or 'innovative' medical or surgical procedures that have not yet been approved following clinical trials or other recognised peer-reviewed evaluation processes," he said.

"Among the issues to considered, I recommend that the questions of potential conflict of interest and informed consent be given high priority."
Do you know more? melissa.davey@theguardian.com Topics

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Untested stem cell treatments proliferate in Australia, study finds

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Australia has among the world's highest concentrations of stem cell businesses advertising medical and cosmetic treatments online, despite a lack of evidence about the efficacy or safety of many of those procedures, a study has found.

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1. every year around 2 million people around europe and the U.S are diagnosed

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Researchers have conducted the first human tests of transplants to repair damaged knees using cartilage cells harvested from the noses of a small number of patients.

Because of injuries and accidents, damage to articular cartilage - tissue on the end of a bone that cushions the surface of the joint and is vital for painless movement - is common.

Since this tissue lacks its own blood supply, damage to it can lead to degenerative joint conditions such as osteoarthritis.

The Arthritis Alliance of Canada says the condition affects about one in eight Canadians.

More specifically, every year around 2 million people across Europe and the U.S. are diagnosed with damage to articular cartilage.

But there are no gold-standard treatments to prevent or delay cartilage degeneration. Current options include microfracture surgery, which involves piercing very small holes near the damaged cartilage to stimulate a healing response, or transplanting patients' own articular cartilage cells, such as from the other knee.

In this new approach, Swiss researchers used engineered cartilage tissue grown from subjects' own nasal septums.

Lead author Ivan Martin, a professor of tissue engineering at the University of Basel, and his colleagues describe their early-stage study on 10 patients aged 18 to 55 with knee lesions in Wednesday's online issue of the medical journal The Lancet.

Investigators took biopsy specimens that were 6 mm in diameter from the nasal septum, under local anaesthetic.

Then they grew the harvested cells in the lab for two weeks. The cartilage grafts were further prepared and then cut into the right shapes.

Finally, surgeons used the engineered grafts to replace damaged cartilage that was removed.

Nine subjects reached two years of follow-up (one was excluded because of an unrelated sports injury).

Important advance

Even though the level of repaired tissue appeared to vary among patients and over time, MRI scans at two years showed new tissue developed with similar properties to the original cartilage.

The nine recipients reported improvements in use of their knees and better pain scores compared to before their surgeries.

No side-effects were reported.

Investigators plan to extend the study to 25 patients and to follow them for longer.

The lack of mechanical tests and a control group mean it's possible that the self-reported improvements were a result of the placebo effect, the researchers acknowledged.

Treatment of articular cartilage injuries remains an important clinical problem, said Dr. Nicole Rotter and Dr. Rolf Brenner from Ulm University Medical in Germany in a journal commentary.

"Overall, this first-in-human trial represents an important advance towards less invasive, cell-based repair technologies for articular cartilage defects," they wrote.

"However, long-term results ...and analysis of cost-effectiveness will be needed to establish whether this technology has the potential to be approved by the European Medicines Agency and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration."

Still experimental

The editorial authors cautioned that potential side effects at the harvest site in the nose also need to be examined and reported with special care.

Dr. Moin Khan of the orthopedics department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor called the results preliminary but encouraging.

"Cartilage injuries in the knee are a challenging problem and unfortunately our current treatment options have limited long term results and are based on studies of relatively poor quality," Khan said in an email.

"The technique reported on by the authors is still experimental and based on the results from a few patients. Further research involving more patients will be required to truly establish if the technique described is significantly better than our current treatment options."

The study was funded by Deutsche Arthrose-Hilfe.

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Damaged knee joints repaired with nose cells | CBC News

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Researchers have conducted the first human tests of transplants to repair damaged knees using cartilage cells harvested from the noses of a small number of patients. Because of injuries and accidents, damage to articular cartilage - tissue on the end of a bone that cushions the surface of the joint and is vital for painless movement - is common.

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Creating a DNA Record with CRISPR

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WIKIMEDIA, MATTOSAURUS Utilizing the bacterial CRISPR/Cas adaptive immune system, researchers at Harvard have developed a method for permanently recording molecular events in living cells, according to a report published in Science today (June 9). The system integrates specific synthetic DNA elements into the bacterial genomes in temporally-ordered arrays, which, once sequenced, can provide a readout of the bacteria's timeline of DNA events.

"The importance of the work is in providing a proof of principle: that a fascinating bacterial immune system may be utilized as a tool harboring an impressive recording capacity," said microbiologist Udi Qimron of Tel Aviv University who was not involved in the work.

The CRISPR/Cas system works by snipping short DNA elements from the genomes of infecting viruses, integrating those elements into the bacterium's genome (at the CRISPR locus), and using the RNAs produced from the integrated elements to direct destruction of the corresponding virus. In essence, the bacterium keeps a DNA account of its viral foes, and uses it against them.

Integration of these viral DNA elements-or oligomers-into the CRISPR locus is nonrandom: the most recent viral elements are consistently integrated ahead of older viral elements in the array. Harvard's George Church and colleagues considered that this temporal ordering of integration could form the basis of a molecular recording device. If defined synthetic DNA oligomers could be integrated into CRISPR loci just as viral elements are, then sequencing the cells' CRISPR loci would provide a log of which oligomers the cells had been exposed to and when, the researchers reasoned.

To test this idea, the team used an E. coli strain that contained a CRISPR DNA locus and a stripped-down version of the Cas protein machinery. The minimal machinery consisted of inducible versions of Cas1 and Cas2-enzymes required for integrating the DNA oligomers-but lacked all the Cas machinery required for virus destruction. The researchers found that, by introducing specific synthetic DNA sequences into these cells in a timed manner (different oligomers on different days, for example), the resulting sequences of the CRISPR loci did indeed accurately reflect the order in which the oligomers had been introduced.

"It's the first demonstration of the ordered acquisition of intentionally introduced DNA sequences," said bioengineer Adam Arkin of the University of California, Berkeley, who did not participate in the work.

Using directed evolution, the team went on to create new versions of Cas1 and Cas2 that could integrate oligomers in a subtly different and discernable way (though still temporally ordered) to that of wildtype Cas1 and 2. Putting these modified Cas enzymes under the control of a different inducer allowed the team to record DNA events in two different modes-depending on which versions of Cas1 and 2 were operational.

"Essentially, we're measuring concentrations of nucleic acids," said Church. "Ideally it would be messenger RNAs but in this case it is DNA. . . . This is a proof of concept on the way to other things," he added.

Church suggested, for example, that if a CRISPR/Cas system were to be combined with a reverse transcriptase-an enzyme that converts RNA to DNA-in cells or animals, it could be used to provide a record of which messenger RNAs are expressed, when.

Another possibility, suggested Arkin, is to use CRISPR/Cas-engineered bacteria to provide information about the other microorganisms present in an environment-be that the soil, the human gut, or wherever.

"[The bacteria] could kill a few neighboring [bugs], secrete an enzyme that cleaved their DNA, and express a competence system to take that DNA in," Arkin said. "That sounds insane, but there are bacteria who do that naturally," he added. The foreign microbial DNA could then be incorporated and logged at the bacteria's CRISPR locus, he explained.

Such applications are as-yet distant possibilities, but the new paper, said Arkin, "conceptually sets the flag in the ground and says, 'Here's how we should move forward.'"

S.L. Shipman et al., "Molecular recordings by directed CRISPR spacer acquisition," Science, doi: 10.1126/science.aaf1175, 2016.

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WIKIMEDIA, MATTOSAURUS Utilizing the bacterial CRISPR/Cas adaptive immune system, researchers at Harvard have developed a method for permanently recording molecular events in living cells, according to a report published in Science today (June 9). The system integrates specific synthetic DNA elements into the bacterial genomes in temporally-ordered arrays, which, once sequenced, can provide a readout of the bacteria's timeline of DNA events.

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Scientist's Thomas Leijtens and Professor Mike McGhee examine solar cells perovskite solar cells.

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Kiran Johal got sick last year, just two months after starting college.

She noticed she was often out of breath after climbing stairs and experienced a lot of bruising on her legs.

The South Asian teenager was diagnosed with severe aplastic anemia, a disease that prevents her bone marrow from making enough blood cells.

The only cure is a life-saving stem cell transplant. Unfortunately, no members of her family were good matches so she had to turn to the unrelated donor registry.

"My specialist said, 'I am really disappointed with (the) registry.' He was like, 'If you weren't Indian, we probably would have found you a match by now,'" Johal said.

Eleven months later, she is still waiting.

"The South Asian community only has only six per cent of the registry right now in Canada," Trudi Goels of Canadian Blood Services said. "So out of 380,000 people registered, only six per cent are South Asian."

Friends, family members and strangers showed up at Surrey's Guildford Mall Wednesday to register at a Canadian Blood Services stem cell drive.

"She's such a sweet girl...we had to come down here today," Kiran's cousin Jasmeet Johal said.

Johal is one of 800 Canadians looking for stem cell matches.

The most desirable donors are ethnically diverse men between the ages of 17 and 35, but everyone is encouraged to register as well as give blood.

Those interested in becoming donors can learn more at blood.ca.
- With files from Linda Aylesworth

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Stem cell drive held to help Surrey teenager find donor

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Kiran Johal got sick last year, just two months after starting college. She noticed she was often out of breath after climbing stairs and experienced a lot of bruising on her legs. The South Asian teenager was diagnosed with severe aplastic anemia, a disease that prevents her bone marrow from making enough blood cells.

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Scientists launched a global initiative on Friday to map out and describe every cell in the human body in a vast atlas that could transform researchers' understanding of human development and disease.

The atlas, which is likely to take more than a decade to complete, aims to chart the types and properties of all human cells across all tissues and organs and build a reference map of the healthy human body, the scientists said.

Cells are fundamental to understanding the biology of all health and disease, but scientists cannot yet say how many we have, how many different types there are, or how they differ from one organ to another, one project leader said.

"The human cell atlas initiative is the beginning of a new era of cellular understanding," Sarah Teichmann, head of cellular genetics at Britain's Sanger Institute, told reporters.

"We will discover new cell types, find how cells change across time during development and disease and gain a better understanding of biology," she said.

The project is currently led by a team from the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard in the United States and the Sanger Institute and Wellcome Trust in Britain. The plan is for research teams and funders worldwide to collaborate.

Describe all cells in healthy human body

By making the atlas - essentially a vast database of cellular detail - freely available to scientists the world over, the scientists hope to transform research into human development and the progression of diseases such as asthma, Alzheimer's and cancer.

The human body is made of trillions of cells - the fundamental units of life - which divide, grow and take on distinct functions in the embryo, eventually leading to different cell types such as skin cells, neurons or fat cells.

Until recently, scientific knowledge of cells has been limited to what can be found out by looking at them under microscopes, or by genetically analysing clumps of hundreds or thousands of cells and finding their average properties.

But technological advances in a field known as single-cell genomics means researchers can now separate individual cells from different tissues and organs, analyse their properties and measure and describe which molecules are produced in each.

"We now have the tools to understand what we are composed of, which allows us to learn how our bodies work, and uncover how all these elements malfunction in disease," said Aviv Regev of Broad Institute, who is working on the initiative.

"We believe that a successful description of all the cells in the healthy human body will impact almost every aspect of biology and medicine in the decades to come."

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Scientists seek to map all human cells in vast atlas | CBC News

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Scientists launched a global initiative on Friday to map out and describe every cell in the human body in a vast atlas that could transform researchers' understanding of human development and disease.

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http://globalnews.ca/news/2902424/stem-cell-drive-held-to-help-surrey-teenager-find-donor/   Bly

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When investigating why the derived blood cells did not function as well as donor blood cells, the Lund University researchers found high levels of reactive oxygen species (a class of molecules that cause oxidation) in the newly derived blood cells.

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In many cases mammalian cells are the only option to produce recombinant proteins with correct post-translational modifications, e.g. glycosylation, which are required for proper function of the therapeutic protein.

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Researchers identify negative role of oxidation in new blood cells

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In many cases mammalian cells are the only option to produce recombinant proteins with correct post-translational modifications, e.g. glycosylation, which are required for proper function of the therapeutic protein.

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Hannah

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K.Hayashi, Kyushu Univ.

In a tour de force of reproductive biology, scientists in Japan have transformed mouse skin cells into eggs in a dish, and used those eggs to birth fertile pups. The report marks the first creation of eggs entirely outside a mouse. If the process could be made to work for humans, researchers could produce artificial eggs without needing to implant immature cells into ovaries to complete their development.

Katsuhiko Hayashi, a reproductive biologist at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, led the group that announced the breakthrough on 17 October in Nature. In 2012, when at the University of Kyoto, he and stem-cell biologist Mitinori Saitou reported taking skin cells down the pathway towards eggs: reprogramming them to embryonic-like stem cells and then into primordial germ cells (PGCs). These early cells emerge as an embryo develops, and later give rise to sperm or eggs. But to get the PGCs to form mature eggs, the researchers had to transfer them into the ovaries of living mice.

The next advance came in July 2016, when a team led by Yayoi Obata, at the Tokyo University of Agriculture, reported transforming PGCs extracted from mouse fetuses into oocytes (egg cells) without using a live mammal. Working with Obata, Hayashi and Saitou have now completed the cycle: from skin cells to functional eggs in a dish. With the use of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) techniques, 26 healthy pups were born (some originally from embryonic stem cells and some from reprogrammed skin cells). Hayashi says some of these animals gave birth to a second generation of mice.

"This is truly amazing," says Jacob Hanna, a stem cell biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. "To be able to make robust and functional mouse oocytes over and over again entirely in a dish, and see the entire process without the 'black box' of having to do any of the steps in host animals, is most exciting."

"Parts of this work were done before - here they are put together in completeness. It's impressive that they got pups that way," says Dieter Egli, a stem cell biologist at the New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute.

K.Hayashi, Kyushu Univ.

Hayashi says the procedure is robust - although technically challenging - and that different groups in his lab have reproduced it. Although the biologists did not need to implant the PGCs into living mice, they did need to add cells taken from the ovaries of other mouse fetuses - effectively, to create an ovary-like support in which the eggs could grow. Hayashi is now trying to concoct an artificial reagent that could replace these cells in his protocol.

The egg-in-a-dish feat comes after researchers in China said in February that they had made rudimentary mouse sperm in a dish. In that case, the researchers created 'spermatids', which are not fully mature cells, although they did claim to use them to create offspring.

From mice to humans

Hayashi says the work will help him study egg development, now that he can make them fully in a dish. He is not trying to make functional human eggs in the lab. (Japanese guidelines forbid fertilization of engineered human germ cells, even for research purposes). But he suspects that others will try. "I do not think it is going to prove much more complex," says Hanna - who himself hopes to create human eggs.

Hanna co-led the team that reported the first artificial human PGCs in 2014, just two years after Hayashi's work with mice. For ethical reasons, he has not implanted them in humans to try to mature them into sperm or eggs. But prospects of maturing human PGCs in a dish are enticing. Hanna's laboratory has already been conducting similar experiments to those described in Hayashi's new paper, he says. One challenge will be to obtain the necessary supporting ovarian (or, for sperm, testicular) cells; currently, the process only works with fetal cells. But he hopes that similar cells from pigs or monkeys might work.

If the Hayashi protocol works with human cells, it could in principle be used to make eggs from a man's skin cells, Hanna says - adding that, as a pro-LGBT rights activist, he thinks that this option is "legitimate to explore when the right time comes." Hayashi, however, has yet to use male skin cells to produce eggs in mice.

Hayashi thinks that "oocyte-like" human eggs might be produced within ten years, but he doubts that they will be of sufficient quality for fertility treatments. "It is too preliminary to use artificial oocytes in the clinic," he says, cautioning that his study showed that the artificial mouse eggs were often of low quality. He worries that such eggs might create genetically abnormal embryos, and potentially abnormal offspring. In the study, only 3.5% of the early embryos created from artificial eggs gave rise to pups - compared with 60% of eggs that were matured inside a mouse.

But debate over the ethics of such a technology should begin now, says Azim Surani, a pioneer in the field at the University of Cambridge, UK. "This is the right time to involve the wider public in these discussions, long before and in case the procedure becomes feasible in humans," he says.

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Mouse eggs made from skin cells in a dish

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K.Hayashi, Kyushu Univ. In a tour de force of reproductive biology, scientists in Japan have transformed mouse skin cells into eggs in a dish, and used those eggs to birth fertile pups. The report marks the first creation of eggs entirely outside a mouse.

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Scientists have taken a step towards a radical new treatment for heart attacks with a stem cell therapy that can partially repair damage to the organ.

The treatment uses heart cells which are created in the lab from the skin of a donor who is chosen to be a good genetic match for the recipient.

Tests in monkeys showed that injections of freshly-made heart cells were quickly incorporated into damaged areas of the heart and helped the organ to pump more vigorously.

But monkeys that had the procedure also developed unusual heart rhythms, leading the researchers to concede that far more work is needed before the treatment can be considered safe enough for human trials.

Heart attacks are one of the leading causes of death in the developed world. In the UK alone, hospitals deal with nearly 200,000 cases each year. While 70% of patients survive, many are left with tissue damage that stops their hearts from working properly.

One idea scientists have had to treat heart attack survivors is to take skin cells from the patient and convert them into pumping heart cells. The hope is that, when injected into the heart, these cells take hold and help the heart pump more effectively. The advantage is that the heart cells will not be rejected by the immune system, but the procedure is time consuming and expensive to do for individual patients.

In the latest work, researchers in Japan took a different tack. They induced heart attacks in five macaques and then treated the damage with heart cells created from the skin of a donor monkey. The donor was selected to be a close genetic match, but the recipients still need drugs to stop their bodies rejecting the cells.

Yuji Shiba and others at Shinshu University injected the monkeys with 400m lab-made heart cells and found that they replaced about 16% of the damaged tissue. The new cells were wired up with healthy ones in the heart and over 12 weeks started to help the organ to pump more strongly. Tests revealed, however, that all of the monkeys developed unusual heart rhythms after the therapy. Details appear in the journal Nature.

The scientists are now trying to understand the precise cause of the abnormal heart rhythms, but Shiba told the Guardian: "I think we can manage the post-transplant arrhythmia."

Sam Boateng, who studies the mechanisms of heart failure at Reading University, said the work was exciting because it was a step towards the possibility of repairing a damaged heart following a heart attack.

"Currently, the only long term option for these patients is heart transplantation, but there are not enough donors to meet the current demand," he said.

But he added that many challenges remain. "Ideally, immune rejection would be eliminated if the cells could be derived from the same patient, but this is costly and time consuming at a time when the patient requires immediate treatment. Another concern is that the incomplete integration of the transplanted cells could result in irregular heart beats which can be deadly," he said.

Sian Harding, director of the British Heart Foundation cardiovascular regenerative medicine centre at Imperial College London, said the Japanese team's work was a significant step forward. "They strengthen the case that a bank of pre-prepared matched [cells] could be used to treat patients, without relying on the long process of reprogramming and differentiating the patient's own cells."

"The arrhythmias were seen in a previous similar study, but in neither study did they prove fatal and both suggested that they would decrease with time. Clinical strategies for preventing sudden cardiac death from arrhythmia, such as implantable cardiodefibrillators, may therefore be necessary as adjunct therapy for some months after implantation," she added.
Topics

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Cells grown from skin could provide radical new treatment for heart attacks

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Scientists have taken a step towards a radical new treatment for heart attacks with a stem cell therapy that can partially repair damage to the organ. The treatment uses heart cells which are created in the lab from the skin of a donor who is chosen to be a good genetic match for the recipient.

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fda hearing: how should stem cell clinics be regulated? - cnn

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How should stem cell clinics be regulated?

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Here's a look at which stem-cell-based products and therapies are approved in the United States and which are not.

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- Most studies, doctors and scientist believe that white blood cells help kill or fight infections.

- It is believed that the tumour cell "Hijack" can spread white blood cells.

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White blood cells that usually help fight infections could be co-opted by cancer cells to help tumours spread, a US study has found.

Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory found that neutrophils - the most common type of white blood cell - can be 'hijacked' by cancer cells and used to aid the spread of breast tumours to the lungs in mice.

The study, which was published in Science Translational Medicine, also shows a possible way of preventing this process, which could have implications for the development of new cancer treatments.

"[The research] shows a potential way to stop particular immune cells from helping tumours spread" - Dr Ilaria Malanchi, Francis Crick Institute

Neutrophils are important components of the immune system that help destroy potentially harmful invaders, such as bacteria.

One way that the cells do this is by releasing meshes of DNA when they detect a threat. These form dense web-like structures outside the cell called NETs.

These NETs are studded with tiny toxic molecules that can break down and digest the invaders.

Using imaging techniques in mice with breast cancer, the researchers showed that cancer cells caused neutrophils to release their NETs "even when no infection or invader was present," said lead researcher Professor Mikala Egeblad.

The NETs, Egeblad added, encouraged breast cancer cells to spread in the mice, possibly by creating small holes in tissues that the cancer cells can squeeze through.

In an attempt to prevent this process the researchers treated the mice with tiny particles carrying molecules that can break down DNA.

The experimental nanoparticle treatment reduced the spread of breast cancer to the lungs in the mice.

Dr Ilaria Malanchi, from the Francis Crick Institute, part-funded by Cancer Research UK, described the study as "elegant," adding that it "shows a potential way to stop particular immune cells from helping tumours spread."

This promising discovery, Malanchi said, could have relevance for treating patients.

"The researchers found aggressive breast cancer cells trick neutrophils into producing DNA traps, which help the cancer cells spread to the lungs in mice.

"Importantly, they also identified a possible way to target this neutrophil activity using nanoparticles, which could be developed into a new treatment.

"But further research is needed to see if this approach will work in cancer patients."

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Tumour cells may 'hijack' white blood cells to help spread

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White blood cells that usually help fight infections could be co-opted by cancer cells to help tumours spread, a US study has found. Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory found that neutrophils - the most common type of white blood cell - can be 'hijacked' by cancer cells and used to aid the spread of breast tumours to the lungs in mice.

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Onions... Onions

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Onions are low in calories and high in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. This pungent vegetable has previously been cited for its health benefits, including lowering risk of certain cancers and helping with depression. But now, a new study has found that a compound found in onions has anti-ovarian cancer effects.

A new study reveals that a compound found in onions has anti-ovarian cancer effects.

The research comes from Kumamoto University in Japan and is published in Scientific Reports.

According to the team, a 2014 review from the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is the most common type of ovarian cancer. With a 5-year survival rate of approximately 40 percent, effective treatments for the illness are needed.

Although new cases of EOC ranks 10th among female malignancies, the team says the number of deaths due to this type of ovarian cancer ranks fifth in the United States.

About 80 percent of patients with EOC have a relapse after initial chemotherapy treatment. As such, the researchers looked into the effects that a natural compound in onions - called onionin A, or ONA - has on EOC.

After examining the effects of ONA on a preclinical model of EOC in cells, the researchers found that the growth of EOCs slowed down after the team introduced ONA.

They also discovered that ONA inhibited pro-tumor activities of myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSC), which the researchers say are linked with the suppression of the anti-tumor immune response of host lymphocytes.

Furthermore, they found that ONA enhanced anti-cancer drugs' effects by boosting their anti-proliferation ability.

First study to report anti-ovarian cancer effect of ONA

In further experiments on an ovarian cancer mouse model, the researchers used oral doses of ONA. Results showed that the mice had longer lifespans and showed diminished ovarian cancer tumor development.

The researchers say their study demonstrates that ONA slows progression of ovarian cancer tumors by interrupting myeloid cells' pro-tumor activity.

They add:

"We found that ONA reduced the extent of ovarian cancer cell proliferation induced by co-culture with human macrophages. In addition, we found that ONA directly suppressed cancer cell proliferation.

Thus, ONA is considered useful for the additional treatment of patients with ovarian cancer owing to its suppression of the pro-tumor activation of [tumor-associated macrophages] and direct cytotoxicity against cancer cells."

The investigators did not observe side effects in animals, and they say with more testing, an oral ONA supplement could help cancer patients.

They conclude their study by noting it is the first to report an anti-ovarian cancer effect of ONA.

In a previous study, the same research team found that ONA suppressed the pro-tumor activation of host myeloid cells.

Medical News Today previously investigated the health benefits of onions. Because they are a strong source of the antioxidant vitamin C, onions help to combat the formation of free radicals known to cause cancer.

Learn how gut bacteria boost effectiveness of a common chemotherapy drug.

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Onion compound suppresses ovarian cancer cell proliferation

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Onions are low in calories and high in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. This pungent vegetable has previously been cited for its health benefits, including lowering risk of certain cancers and helping with depression. But now, a new study has found that a compound found in onions has anti-ovarian cancer effects.

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Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi was awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday for discoveries related to the degrading and recycling of cellular components.

The Karolinska Institute honoured Ohsumi for "brilliant experiments" in the 1990s on autophagy, the machinery with which cells recycle their content.

Autophagy "self eating" is a process for degrading and recycling cellular components <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NobelPrize?src=hash">#NobelPrize</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Medicine?src=hash">#Medicine</a> <a href="https://t.co/glNWLPjxHe">pic.twitter.com/glNWLPjxHe</a>
&mdash; @NobelPrize

The organelle autophagosome engulfs cellular contents and fuses with the lysosome, where the contents are degraded. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NobelPrize?src=hash">#NobelPrize</a> 2016 <a href="https://t.co/FBNpB5ksow">pic.twitter.com/FBNpB5ksow</a>
&mdash; @NobelPrize

Ohsumi studied thousands of yeast mutants and identified 15 genes that are essential for autophagy. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NobelPrize?src=hash">#NobelPrize</a> <a href="https://t.co/WbheUJIDPA">pic.twitter.com/WbheUJIDPA</a>
&mdash; @NobelPrize

Disrupted autophagy has been linked to various diseases, including Parkinson's, diabetes and cancer, the institute said.

Ohsumi's work has led to a better understanding of how the human body adapts to starvation, infection and other conditions.

Though the concept has been known for more than 50 years, its "fundamental importance in physiology and medicine was only recognized after Yoshinori Ohsumi's paradigm-shifting research in the 1990s," Karolinska said in its citation.

Ohsumi was born in 1945 in Fukuoka. He is currently a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

It was the 107th award in the medicine category since the first Nobel Prizes were handed out in 1905.

Ohsumi generated an enormous interest in autophagy and is now one of the most intensely studied areas of biomedical research <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NobelPrize?src=hash">#NobelPrize</a> <a href="https://t.co/sRp3IylW8m">pic.twitter.com/sRp3IylW8m</a>
&mdash; @NobelPrize

Last year's prize was shared by three scientists who developed treatments for malaria and other tropical diseases.

The announcements continue with physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. The economics and literature awards will be announced next week.

Each prize is worth the equivalent of about $1.224 million Cdn (eight million kronor).

​

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Japanese scientist wins 2016 Nobel Prize in Medicine | CBC News

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Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi was awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday for discoveries related to the degrading and recycling of cellular components. The Karolinska Institute honoured Ohsumi for "brilliant experiments" in the 1990s on autophagy, the machinery with which cells recycle their content.

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-Conor Yule
-Stem cell therapy combined with chemo is a very effective treatment for multiple sclerosis. Though it has risks.

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A group of Japanese scientists has successfully  turned mice skin cells into baby mice without using egg cells. This technology skips over the method of fertilizing egg cells.
It is the first time something like this has ever been achieved.

I find this really cool, but strange at the same time.

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A group of Japanese scientists from Kyushu University has successfully turned mouse skin cells into baby mice without the use of egg cells.

The technology skips over the usual method of fertilizing egg cells with sperm and instead uses a method to grow the cells with the necessary chromosomal pairs needed for life to begin.

This is the first time something like this has ever been achieved and not a lot of the mouse cells from the lab led to live births, according to the study first reported in Nature.

But it has some interesting potential ramifications. Though it's early days here and we're just talking mice for now, theoretically, the technique could help older women who no longer produce eggs to have their own, biological offspring. It could even allow two men to make a baby without a donor egg.

The study builds on the work of Shinya Yamanaka, who won a Nobel prize in 2007 for his work in stem cell research. Yamanaka showed he could program adult skin cells to make pluripotent stem cells, which could be used to make any other types of cells for use in the body - a crucial discovery in that it meant it was not necessary to destroy human embryos to grow stem cells to help with diseases like Parkinsons.

The next part of the process was to produce mature sex cells from these pluripotent stem cells - something the lead scientist in the study Katsuhiko Hayashi had tried to do back in 2012 while at the University of Kyoto. But that proved to be a lot harder. Until now, the scientists have only been able to produce something resembling egg and sperm cells and that didn't work for making babies.

The scientists in this study found they could make mature egg cells from mouse skin if they encased it in cells taken from a part of a mouse fetus where it develops ovaries or testis. While that part of the operation helped to shape the stem cells into something more like an ovary, it could prove problematic down the line for those who might oppose using the cells of human embryos in the process of making humans from skin cells.

However, Hayashi says he's now working on some sort of artificial reagent to replace the fetal cells.

But we likely won't be getting any humans this way anytime soon if regulators have anything to do with it - Hayashi and his team are not allowed to even make an attempt as Japanese law forbids fertilizing engineered human cells, even for research.

And gene-editing on humans is even a thorny subject in the U.S. Where gene modification was once the wild west and some techniques supposedly produced now fully adult humans - though it's not clear what happened to them - Federal regulators do not currently allow genetic modification of embryos.

While that's different from actually growing embryos from your own skin cells, it dips into unfamiliar territory and will surely be up for fierce debate - particularly if it requires the use of embryonic cells to get us there.

But the process still has a long way to go. Just 3.5 percent of the cells in the Japanese study produced live births. Compare that to other fertility methods like in vitro fertilization (IVF), which has a roughly 30 percent success rate or in vitro maturation (IVM), which is successful about 40 percent of the time.

Still, the idea that we are on the brink of creating humans from skin is mind-boggling and though the scientists working on this technology in Japan can't continue with human cells, someone is bound to pick it up and figure out how to do it, eventually.

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Scientists made babies from mouse skin cells

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A group of Japanese scientists from Kyushu University has successfully turned mouse skin cells into baby mice without the use of egg cells. The technology skips over the usual method of fertilizing egg cells with sperm and instead uses a method to grow the cells with the necessary chromosomal pairs...

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- Researchers have found that an onion compound could be used to treat patients of ovarian cancer
-

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According to a new study, a natural compound found in onions may help treat the most common type of ovarian cancer. Researchers from Kumamoto University in Japan studied the effects of a natural onion compound, onionin A (ONA), on a preclinical model of epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) both in vivo and in vitro.

Previously, researchers found that ONA suppressed pro-tumour activation of host myeloid cells.

According to a 2014 review of cancer medicines from the World Health Organisation, EOC is the most common type of ovarian cancer and has a five-year survival rate of about 40 per cent, researchers said.

It has a relatively low lifetime risk that is less than one per cent, but that can increase up to 40 per cent if there is a family history of the disease.

A majority of patients (80 per cent) experience a relapse after their initial treatment with chemotherapy; therefore, a more effective line of treatment is needed.

The group's in vitro experiments showed that EOCs, which usually proliferate in the presence of pro-tumour M2 macrophages, showed inhibited growth after introduction of ONA.

This was thought to be due to ONA influence on STAT3, a transcription factor known to be involved in both M2 polarisation and cancer cell proliferation.

The team also found that ONA inhibited the pro-tumour functions of myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSC), which are associated with the suppression of the anti-tumour immune response of host lymphocytes, by using preclinical sarcoma model.

ONA was also found to enhance the effects of anti-cancer drugs by strengthening their anti-proliferation capabilities.

Moreover, experiments on an ovarian cancer murine model that investigated the effects of orally administered ONA resulted in longer lifespans and inhibited ovarian cancer tumour development.

This was considered to be a result of ONA's suppression of M2 polarised macrophages, researchers said.

The study shows that ONA reduces the progression of malignant ovarian cancer tumours by interfering with the pro-tumour function of myeloid cells.

ONA appears to activate anti-tumour immune responses by nullifying the immunosuppressive function of myeloid cells. It has the potential to enhance existing anti-cancer drugs while also having little to no cytotoxic effects on normal cells, researchers said.

No side effects in animals have been observed. With a little more testing, an oral ONA supplement could greatly benefit cancer patients, they said.

First Published: Oct 23, 2016 16:54 IST

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Ovarian cancer: An onion compound could help in treating patients

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According to a new study, a natural compound found in onions may help treat the most common type of ovarian cancer. Researchers from Kumamoto University in Japan studied the effects of a natural onion compound, onionin A (ONA), on a preclinical model of epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) both in vivo and in vitro.

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http://www.news-medical.net/news/20161024/Researchers-identify-negative-role-of-oxidation-in-new-blood-cells.aspx

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The venom of a wasp native to Brazil could be used as a weapon to fight cancer, scientists believe.

A toxin in the sting kills cancer cells without harming normal cells, lab studies suggest.

The University of Brazil team say the experimental therapy latches to tumour cells and makes them leak vital molecules.

The work is at an early stage and more studies are needed to check the method will work safely in humans.

Polybia paulista is an aggressive social wasp endemic in south-east Brazil.

Though its sting is largely seen as unwelcome, scientists increasingly believe it could be put to good use.

It contains an important toxin called MP1 which the insect uses to attack prey or defend itself.

And recent studies in mice suggest it may target and destroy cancer cells.

Prof Joao Ruggiero Netto and colleagues set out to discover how, by putting it under the microscope.

They found MP1 interacts with fat molecules that are abnormally distributed on the surface of cancer cells, creating gaping holes that allow molecules crucial for cell function to leak out.

In healthy cells, the same molecules are hidden on the inside. This means healthy tissue should avoid MP1's attack, the scientists say in Biophysical Journal.

Co-researcher Dr Paul Beales, from the University of Leeds, said cancer therapies that attacked the lipid composition of the cell membrane would be an entirely new class of anti-cancer drugs.

"This could be useful in developing new combination therapies, where multiple drugs are used simultaneously to treat a cancer by attacking different parts of the cancer cells at the same time," he said.

Dr Aine McCarthy, science information officer for Cancer Research UK said: "This early stage research increases our understanding of how the venom of the Brazilian wasp can kill cancer cells in the laboratory.

"But while these findings are exciting, much more work is needed in the lab and in clinical trials before we will know if drugs based on this research could benefit cancer patients."

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The venom of a wasp native to Brazil could be used as a weapon to fight cancer, scientists believe. A toxin in the sting kills cancer cells without harming normal cells, lab studies suggest. The University of Brazil team say the experimental therapy latches to tumour cells and makes them leak vital molecules.

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The treatment uses heart cells which are created in the lab from the skin of a donor who is chosen to be a good genetic match for the recipient. In the latest work, researchers in Japan took a different tack. They induced heart attacks in five macaques and then treated the damage with heart cells created from the skin of a donor monkey. The donor was selected to be a close genetic match, but the recipients still need drugs to stop their bodies rejecting the cells.

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Scientists have taken a step towards a radical new treatment for heart attacks with a stem cell therapy that can partially repair damage to the organ.

The treatment uses heart cells which are created in the lab from the skin of a donor who is chosen to be a good genetic match for the recipient.

Tests in monkeys showed that injections of freshly-made heart cells were quickly incorporated into damaged areas of the heart and helped the organ to pump more vigorously.

But monkeys that had the procedure also developed unusual heart rhythms, leading the researchers to concede that far more work is needed before the treatment can be considered safe enough for human trials.

Heart attacks are one of the leading causes of death in the developed world. In the UK alone, hospitals deal with nearly 200,000 cases each year. While 70% of patients survive, many are left with tissue damage that stops their hearts from working properly.

One idea scientists have had to treat heart attack survivors is to take skin cells from the patient and convert them into pumping heart cells. The hope is that, when injected into the heart, these cells take hold and help the heart pump more effectively. The advantage is that the heart cells will not be rejected by the immune system, but the procedure is time consuming and expensive to do for individual patients.

In the latest work, researchers in Japan took a different tack. They induced heart attacks in five macaques and then treated the damage with heart cells created from the skin of a donor monkey. The donor was selected to be a close genetic match, but the recipients still need drugs to stop their bodies rejecting the cells.

Yuji Shiba and others at Shinshu University injected the monkeys with 400m lab-made heart cells and found that they replaced about 16% of the damaged tissue. The new cells were wired up with healthy ones in the heart and over 12 weeks started to help the organ to pump more strongly. Tests revealed, however, that all of the monkeys developed unusual heart rhythms after the therapy. Details appear in the journal Nature.

The scientists are now trying to understand the precise cause of the abnormal heart rhythms, but Shiba told the Guardian: "I think we can manage the post-transplant arrhythmia."

Sam Boateng, who studies the mechanisms of heart failure at Reading University, said the work was exciting because it was a step towards the possibility of repairing a damaged heart following a heart attack.

"Currently, the only long term option for these patients is heart transplantation, but there are not enough donors to meet the current demand," he said.

But he added that many challenges remain. "Ideally, immune rejection would be eliminated if the cells could be derived from the same patient, but this is costly and time consuming at a time when the patient requires immediate treatment. Another concern is that the incomplete integration of the transplanted cells could result in irregular heart beats which can be deadly," he said.

Sian Harding, director of the British Heart Foundation cardiovascular regenerative medicine centre at Imperial College London, said the Japanese team's work was a significant step forward. "They strengthen the case that a bank of pre-prepared matched [cells] could be used to treat patients, without relying on the long process of reprogramming and differentiating the patient's own cells."

"The arrhythmias were seen in a previous similar study, but in neither study did they prove fatal and both suggested that they would decrease with time. Clinical strategies for preventing sudden cardiac death from arrhythmia, such as implantable cardiodefibrillators, may therefore be necessary as adjunct therapy for some months after implantation," she added.
Topics

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Cells grown from skin could provide radical new treatment for heart attacks

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Scientists have taken a step towards a radical new treatment for heart attacks with a stem cell therapy that can partially repair damage to the organ. The treatment uses heart cells which are created in the lab from the skin of a donor who is chosen to be a good genetic match for the recipient.

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 the researchers looked into the effects that a natural compound in onions - called onionin A, or ONA - has on EOC.After examining the effects of ONA on a preclinical model of EOC in cells, the researchers found that the growth of EOCs slowed down after the team introduced ONA.They also discovered that ONA inhibited pro-tumor activities of myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSC), which the researchers say are linked with the suppression of the anti-tumor immune response of host lymphocytes.

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 the researchers looked into the effects that a natural compound in onions - called onionin A, or ONA - has on EOC.After examining the effects of ONA on a preclinical model of EOC in cells, the researchers found that the growth of EOCs slowed down after the team introduced ONA.They also discovered that ONA inhibited pro-tumor activities of myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSC), which the researchers say are linked with the suppression of the anti-tumor immune response of host lymphocytes.

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Scientists have made baby mice with mouse skin cells.
-  A group of Japanese scientists from a university called Kyushu University have successfully found a way to turn mouse skin cells into baby mice without using egg cells

-This is the first time something like this has ever been achieved and not a lot of the mouse cells from the lab have led to live births, according to the study first reported in Nature

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A group of Japanese scientists from Kyushu University has successfully turned mouse skin cells into baby mice without the use of egg cells.

The technology skips over the usual method of fertilizing egg cells with sperm and instead uses a method to grow the cells with the necessary chromosomal pairs needed for life to begin.

This is the first time something like this has ever been achieved and not a lot of the mouse cells from the lab led to live births, according to the study first reported in Nature.

But it has some interesting potential ramifications. Though it's early days here and we're just talking mice for now, theoretically, the technique could help older women who no longer produce eggs to have their own, biological offspring. It could even allow two men to make a baby without a donor egg.

The study builds on the work of Shinya Yamanaka, who won a Nobel prize in 2007 for his work in stem cell research. Yamanaka showed he could program adult skin cells to make pluripotent stem cells, which could be used to make any other types of cells for use in the body - a crucial discovery in that it meant it was not necessary to destroy human embryos to grow stem cells to help with diseases like Parkinsons.

The next part of the process was to produce mature sex cells from these pluripotent stem cells - something the lead scientist in the study Katsuhiko Hayashi had tried to do back in 2012 while at the University of Kyoto. But that proved to be a lot harder. Until now, the scientists have only been able to produce something resembling egg and sperm cells and that didn't work for making babies.

The scientists in this study found they could make mature egg cells from mouse skin if they encased it in cells taken from a part of a mouse fetus where it develops ovaries or testis. While that part of the operation helped to shape the stem cells into something more like an ovary, it could prove problematic down the line for those who might oppose using the cells of human embryos in the process of making humans from skin cells.

However, Hayashi says he's now working on some sort of artificial reagent to replace the fetal cells.

But we likely won't be getting any humans this way anytime soon if regulators have anything to do with it - Hayashi and his team are not allowed to even make an attempt as Japanese law forbids fertilizing engineered human cells, even for research.

And gene-editing on humans is even a thorny subject in the U.S. Where gene modification was once the wild west and some techniques supposedly produced now fully adult humans - though it's not clear what happened to them - Federal regulators do not currently allow genetic modification of embryos.

While that's different from actually growing embryos from your own skin cells, it dips into unfamiliar territory and will surely be up for fierce debate - particularly if it requires the use of embryonic cells to get us there.

But the process still has a long way to go. Just 3.5 percent of the cells in the Japanese study produced live births. Compare that to other fertility methods like in vitro fertilization (IVF), which has a roughly 30 percent success rate or in vitro maturation (IVM), which is successful about 40 percent of the time.

Still, the idea that we are on the brink of creating humans from skin is mind-boggling and though the scientists working on this technology in Japan can't continue with human cells, someone is bound to pick it up and figure out how to do it, eventually.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Scientists made babies from mouse skin cells

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A group of Japanese scientists from Kyushu University has successfully turned mouse skin cells into baby mice without the use of egg cells. The technology skips over the usual method of fertilizing egg cells with sperm and instead uses a method to grow the cells with the necessary chromosomal pairs...

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-Using DNA analysis researchers have discovered a hybrid of cattle and bison once roamed the earth.

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Using DNA analysis, researchers have discovered that an unexpected hybrid of cattle and bison once roamed the Earth.

The 120,000-year-old species was a cross-breed of the aurochs, the ancestor of modern cattle, and the Ice Age steppe bison, ancestors of the modern American bison or buffalo.

"Finding that a hybridisation event led to a completely new species was a real surprise - as this isn't really meant to happen in mammals," Alan Cooper, director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide and leader of the study, said in a release.

It was such a surprise, in fact, that when researchers first noticed a distinctive genetic signal from many bison fossils, they weren't entirely certain it was a different species.

"So we referred to it as the Higgs bison," Cooper said. The name is a reference to the Higgs Boson, a subatomic particle suspected to exist since the 1960s but only confirmed in 2012.

With the help of an international team of bison conservation researchers and paleontologists, the researchers studied ancient DNA extracted from radiocarbon-dated bones in teeth from caves across Europe, the Urals and the Caucasus to confirm their discovery.

The researchers believe the Higgs bison eventually became the ancestor of the modern European bison, previously hunted to extinction in the wild but slowly rebuilding their population thanks to conservation efforts on protected reserves like the Bialowieza forest between Poland and Belarus.

'Helpfully painted pictures'

But it turns out the scientists weren't the first people to come across the Higgs bison. Our ancestors appear to have depicted the beast in great detail on cave walls some 15,000 years ago.

"The dated bones revealed that our new species and the steppe bison swapped dominance in Europe several times, in concert with major environmental changes caused by climate change," said lead author Julien Soubrier from the University of Adelaide.

"When we asked, French cave researchers told us that there were indeed two distinct forms of bison art in Ice Age caves, and it turns out their ages match those of the different species."

The drawings show bison with long horns and large forequarters - likely the steppe bison - and ones with shorter horns and humps - likely the Higgs.

"We'd never have guessed the cave artists had helpfully painted pictures of both species for us."

The study was published today in the journal Nature Communications.

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Meet the Higgs bison, the mysterious bison-cattle hybrid depicted in ancient cave art | CBC News

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DNA research reveals an unexpected hybrid of cattle and bison once roamed the Earth - but while the cheekily dubbed Higgs bison is a new discovery for science, ancient cave art shows our ancestors were quite familiar with the beast.

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MATTHEW (CNN)Swiss surgeons successfully used an experimental technique, which includes harvesting cells from the nasal septum, to repair damaged knee joints in patients. Two years later, these patients report improvements in pain and knee function, according to a study published Thursday in the journal The Lancet."The treatment is safe and feasible," said study co-author, Dr. Ivan Martin.

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MATTHEW (CNN)Swiss surgeons successfully used an experimental technique, which includes harvesting cells from the nasal septum, to repair damaged knee joints in patients. Two years later, these patients report improvements in pain and knee function, according to a study published Thursday in the journal The Lancet."The treatment is safe and feasible," said study co-author, Dr. Ivan Martin.

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-It's cool that they could use cells from different places to heal something else
-MRI scans detected new cartilage in two years

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Rodent and human cultured MSCs can be induced to differentiate exclusively into neurons potentially increasing there usefulness in the treatment of neurological disease
ALEX

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