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it talks about how a mixed race woman was diagnosed with HIV and they used stem cells to cure her. the put the stem cells into her blood stream. and she did get cured, she was able to get off of her HIV medications after 3 years. and then 4 months after not being on her meds she was HIV free. this shows how stem cells are very useful and will help save many peoples lives. -bella

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Woman Becomes Third Person to Be Cured of HIV After Researchers Use New Stem Cell Method

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Researchers report a third person, a woman of mixed race, has been cured of HIV after receiving an umbilical cord blood stem cell transplant

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It talks about how while Stem Cell Therapy can be a good thing, it is also dangerous and risky when it is unproven. scientists think that it could one day lead to a lot of cures for viruses and diseases.

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Researchers hope stem cells will one day be effective in the treatment of many medical conditions and diseases. But unproven stem cell treatments can be unsafe-so get all of the facts if you're considering any treatment.

Stem cells have been called everything from cure-alls to miracle treatments. But don't believe the hype. Some unscrupulous providers offer stem cell products that are both unapproved and unproven. So beware of potentially dangerous procedures-and confirm what's really being offered before you consider any treatment.

The facts: Stem cell therapies may offer the potential to treat diseases or conditions for which few treatments exist. Sometimes called the body's "master cells," stem cells are the cells that develop into blood, brain, bones, and all of the body's organs. They have the potential to repair, restore, replace, and regenerate cells, and could possibly be used to treat many medical conditions and diseases.

But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is concerned that some patients seeking cures and remedies are vulnerable to stem cell treatments that are illegal and potentially harmful. And the FDA is increasing its oversight and enforcement to protect people from dishonest and unscrupulous stem cell clinics, while continuing to encourage innovation so that the medical industry can properly harness the potential of stem cell products.

To do your part to stay safe, make sure that any stem cell treatment you are considering is either:

FDA-approved, or;

Being studied under an Investigational New Drug Application (IND), which is a clinical investigation plan submitted and allowed to proceed by the FDA.

And see the boxed section below for more advice.
Stem Cell Uses and FDA Regulation

The FDA has the authority to regulate stem cell products in the United States.

Today, doctors routinely use stem cells that come from bone marrow or blood in transplant procedures to treat patients with cancer and disorders of the blood and immune system.

With limited exceptions, investigational products must also go through a thorough FDA review process as investigators prepare to determine the safety and effectiveness of products in well-controlled human studies, called clinical trials. The FDA has reviewed many stem cell products for use in these studies.

As part of the FDA's review, investigators must show how each product will be manufactured so the FDA can make sure appropriate steps are being taken to help assure the product's safety, purity, and strength (potency). The FDA also requires sufficient data from animal studies to help evaluate any potential risks associated with product use. (You can learn more about clinical trials on the FDA's website.)

That said, some clinics may inappropriately advertise stem cell clinical trials without submitting an IND. Some clinics also may falsely advertise that FDA review and approval of the stem cell therapy is unnecessary. But when clinical trials are not conducted under an IND, it means that the FDA has not reviewed the experimental therapy to help make sure it is reasonably safe. So be cautious about these treatments.
About FDA-approved Products Derived from Stem Cells
The only stem cell-based products that are FDA-approved for use in the United States consist of blood-forming stem cells (hematopoietic progenitor cells) derived from cord blood.

These products are approved for limited use in patients with disorders that affect the body system that is involved in the production of blood (called the "hematopoietic" system). These FDA-approved stem cell products are listed on the FDA website. Bone marrow also is used for these treatments but is generally not regulated by the FDA for this use.

Safety Concerns for Unproven Stem Cell Treatments

All medical treatments have benefits and risks. But unproven stem cell therapies can be particularly unsafe.

For instance, attendees at a 2016 FDA public workshop discussed several cases of severe adverse events. One patient became blind due to an injection of stem cells into the eye. Another patient received a spinal cord injection that caused the growth of a spinal tumor.

Other potential safety concerns for unproven treatments include:

Administration site reactions,

The ability of cells to move from placement sites and change into inappropriate cell types or multiply,

Failure of cells to work as expected, and

The growth of tumors.

Note: Even if stem cells are your own cells, there are still safety risks such as those noted above. In addition, if cells are manipulated after removal, there is a risk of contamination of the cells.

FDA Actions on Unapproved Stem Cell Products

When stem cell products are used in unapproved ways-or when they are processed in ways that are more than minimally manipulated, which relates to the nature and degree of processing-the FDA may take (and has already taken) a variety of administrative and judicial actions, including criminal enforcement, depending on the violations involved.

In August 2017, the FDA announced increased enforcement of regulations and oversight of stem cell clinics. To learn more, see the statement from FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D., on the FDA website.

And in March 2017, to further clarify the benefits and risks of stem cell therapy, the FDA published a perspective article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The FDA will continue to help with the development and licensing of new stem cell therapies where the scientific evidence supports the product's safety and effectiveness.

Advice for People Considering Stem Cell Therapies

Know that the FDA plays a role in stem cell treatment oversight. You may be told that because these are your cells, the FDA does not need to review or approve the treatment. That is not true.

Stem cell products have the potential to treat many medical conditions and diseases. But for almost all of these products, it is not yet known whether the product has any benefit-or if the product is safe to use.

If you're considering treatment in the United States:

Ask if the FDA has reviewed the treatment. Ask your health care provider to confirm this information. You also can ask the clinical investigator to give you the FDA-issued Investigational New Drug Application number and the chance to review the FDA communication acknowledging the IND. Ask for this information before getting treatment-even if the stem cells are your own.

Request the facts and ask questions if you don't understand. To participate in a clinical trial that requires an IND application, you must sign a consent form that explains the experimental procedure. The consent form also identifies the Institutional Review Board (IRB) that assures the protection of the rights and welfare of human subjects. Make sure you understand the entire process and known risks before you sign. You also can ask the study sponsor for the clinical investigator's brochure, which includes a short description of the product and information about its safety and effectiveness.

If you're considering treatment in another country:

Learn about regulations that cover products in that country.

Know that the FDA does not have oversight of treatments done in other countries. The FDA typically has little information about foreign establishments or their stem cell products.

Be cautious. If you're considering a stem cell-based product in a country that may not require regulatory review of clinical studies, it may be hard to know if the experimental treatment is reasonably safe.

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Stem cells have been called everything from cure-alls to miracle treatments. But don't believe the hype. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is concerned that some patients may be vulnerable to stem cell treatments that are illegal and potentially harmful. Here's what to know before you consider stem cell treatment.

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New organs? Not yet, but stem cell research is getting closer

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New organs? Not yet, but stem cell research is getting closer

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This article talks about how we can use stem cells to possibly regrow limbs in the future and how right now more than 100 scientists, engineers, and doctors are starting whats called the USC stem cell initiative. They are also already treating patients with colorectal cancer, spinal cord injury, vision problems, HIV/AIDS and Alzheimer’s disease.

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Kidney (Image by Lori O'Brien/Andy McMahon Lab, illustration by Mira Nameth)

If you lose a limb, it's lost for life. If you damage a kidney, you won't grow a new one. And if you have a heart attack, the scars are there to stay.

But regenerative medicine is poised to change all of this. Building new tissue is within sight, and USC scientists are among the field's pioneers.

More than 100 scientists, engineers and doctors are united under what's called the USC Stem Cell initiative. They're already moving stem cells out of the lab and toward patient care. The potential is exciting: USC researchers have contributed to clinical trials of stem cell approaches to treating colorectal cancer, spinal cord injury, vision problems, HIV/AIDS and Alzheimer's disease. They've also used stem cells to uncover important insights about kidney disease, ALS, arthritis, Zika virus, birth defects and a wide variety of injuries.

Major funders and USC donors have provided hundreds of millions of dollars to support the work. That investment and vote of confidence enables USC Stem Cell scientists to collaborate with other leading universities, biotech companies and key partners to translate their laboratory discoveries into patient cures.

It hasn't been easy. Scientists are evaluating some stem cell-based therapies through clinical trials, but so far, few treatments have made it to patients. Beyond scientific inspiration, taking treatments from lab bench to patient bedside requires immense amounts of time, money and, sometimes, a bit of luck. It also means working together with other scientists across boundaries.

"Regenerative medicine is still a relatively young field, and it's still early days," says Andy McMahon, director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC. "When it comes to that final phase of translating stem cell discoveries into clinical therapies for patients, it won't be individual universities working in isolation. It will be multi-institutional collaborations with our neighbors that will transform medicine over the course of the 21st century."

The Kidney in Miniature

So far, scientists haven't been able to create complete adult human kidneys-they're too complex.

At USC, though, McMahon's lab is coaxing stem cells to organize themselves into simplified, mini versions of this elaborate organ.

Each healthy human kidney is made up of a million cellular filters called nephrons, which pull wastes out of blood, among other responsibilities. McMahon and his colleagues are making tiny organs (scientists dub them "organoids") composed of a single nephron-a convenient size for testing potential drugs.

With help from USC's Chang Stem Cell Engineering Facility, McMahon's lab has successfully produced organoids carrying the same genetic mutation that causes polycystic kidney disease, the most common genetic cause for kidney failure. Because kidney organoids develop cysts similar to those seen in the disease, scientists can observe how the disease progresses and develop therapies that may halt or reverse symptoms.

Zhongwei Li, an assistant professor of medicine, and stem cell biology and regenerative medicine, is also hard at work growing kidney organoids. There are only 18,000 donor kidneys available each year for more than 400,000 patients who need them, Li explains. He ultimately wants to create organs for transplantation using special stem cellsprogenitor cells that could develop and organize themselves into kidney tissue.

"USC is a perfect place to study the kidney," says Li, an assistant professor of medicine, and stem cell biology and regenerative medicine.

Healing Hearts

If you worry about dying in an earthquake, shark attack or lightning strike, don't waste your energy. You're far more likely to die of heart disease. Every year, about 610,000 people in the U.S. die of heart disease. That's one in four deaths. And heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide.

Cardiac tissue that has died after a heart attack doesn't come back-it just forms a scar. Studies have shown that doctors can safely inject stem cells into damaged heart tissue, but there's no clear sign that these injections restore the heart.

At USC, two stem cell researchers are tackling heart repair from other directions.

In the lab of Henry Sucov, researchers aim to harness the heart's innate ability to heal. They're studying a regenerative type of heart muscle cell called a mononuclear diploid cardiomyocyte. Newborns have large numbers of these cells, but adults have relatively few, so the adult body has trouble regenerating heart tissue after injury.

When they looked for these cells in mice, they found that some mice had more of these cells than other mice did. They traced that variation to a gene called Tnni3k. Their research suggests that blocking the gene might boost numbers of regenerative cells.

If scientists can create prescription drugs to modulate the activity of the gene, these medications could encourage more regenerative cells to develop in the heart, says Sucov, a professor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine, integrative anatomical sciences, and biochemistry and molecular biology. "This could improve the potential for regeneration in adult hearts, as a preventive strategy for those who may be at risk for heart failure."

In Megan McCain 's lab at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, researchers are building human heart tissue. They not only study how the heart tissue works, but also use it to test how it responds to potential drugs.

The work poses problems that call for the mindset of an engineer. It turns out that heart muscle cells don't fully mature in the typical laboratory environment for growing cells-a petri dish filled with warm, nutritious liquid. To develop properly, heart muscle cells need to get some exercise by contracting in the rhythm of a beating heart. To do this, they need structure and resistance, which the lab's researchers provide in the form of a tiny scaffold called a chip.

This "heart on a chip" reproduces natural human heart tissue on a small scale in the lab.

Ultimately, McCain hopes the technology contributes to precision medicine. Scientists could test medications on a patient's own heart tissue on a chip. Eventually, this could enable doctors to customize dosing and choose drugs that pose the fewest side effects to each patient.

Stronger Bones

According to common wisdom, bones heal. In reality, every year about 5 million people in the U.S. sustain fractures that fail to mend. From elderly people undergoing total hip or knee replacements to soldiers injured by explosions or gunshots, many patients have bone defects that are too severe to repair. To complicate matters, everything from diabetes to the normal aging process can undermine bone's ability to heal.

USC researchers hope to one day use stem cells to build new bone in patients with severe or non-healing injuries. Jay R. Lieberman, who chairs the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the Keck School, teamed up with Gage Crump and Francesca Mariani, two faculty members from the Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, to advance the science.

The team has made a promising start in the lab. They discovered that healing bone requires a special type of repair cell, which they named an ossifying chondrocyte. Now the researchers are studying a substance that stimulates these repair cells to fix bone.

Unlocking Genetic Diabetes

Nearly 10 percent of Americans, or 30 million people, have a form of diabetes. Diabetes happens when glucose levels rise in the blood. Insulin, a hormone made by the pancreas, helps the body pull glucose from blood and into the cells where it's needed. But sometimes the pancreas doesn't make enough insulin or the body can't use insulin well.

Oftentimes, in diabetes, the special cells in the pancreas that make insulin-called beta cells-are attacked by the immune system or wear out. Researchers worldwide are looking at ways to rebuild them.

At Children's Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA), researcher Senta Georgia aims to use stem cells to help patients with genetic forms of diabetes.

Her lab is focusing on a young CHLA patient with a rare genetic disease known as enteric anendocrinosis. The disease causes chronic diarrhea because patients lack certain gastrointestinal cells that produce hormones, and they eventually lose their beta cells as well, causing diabetes.

With the help of USC's Chang Stem Cell Engineering Facility, Georgia's team took stem cells derived from the patient's skin and edited the cells' genome to fix the genetic mutation behind the problem. They then used these genetically corrected stem cells to generate new insulin-producing cells.
The goal is to eventually transplant these insulin-producing cells back into the patient to reverse the diabetes-providing a tailor-made cell replacement therapy.

"We hope that this study can create a precedent for how to generate new insulin cells for patients with genetic forms of diabetes," says Georgia, assistant professor of pediatrics and stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

Fresh Faces

"Our faces are our identities, and the first thing you see when you look at someone is his or her face," says Yang Chai, director of the Center for Craniofacial Molecular Biology at the Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC. But when someone has a cleft lip or other facial deformity or trauma, it can be devastating.

Chai aims to find treatments for some of the most common craniofacial birth defects and injuries. To do that, he has tapped into a rich source of stem cells: the pulpy interior of the teeth.

Fueled by a $12 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), he's working with researchers from the Keck School of Medicine and institutions from Stanford to City of Hope on the project.

They've already used these stem cells to generate the unique, high-density bone that makes up the skull. If these stem cells can effectively repair four-centimeter holes in the skulls of animals, the research project will advance the treatment into a clinical trial for patients with bone deficiencies due to injuries, dental problems or birth defects.

One birth defect USC scientists are tackling is called craniosynostosis. The rare-but-serious problem occurs when sections of a baby's skull fuse together at joints called sutures, restricting the developing brain and disrupting vision, sleep, eating and IQ. To treat this condition, growing children must undergo repeated skull-expanding surgeries-which are as dangerous and painful as they sound.

Chai is one of at least a dozen USC stem cell researchers working to help these children. His lab has already identified a critical stem cell population that normally resides in the skull sutures, and discovered how to manipulate these stem cells to form new sutures in mice.

"This is something that truly has to be done through a collaborative effort," Chai says. "USC provides the best environment for collaborative research, which has led to NIH funding and publications as the result of these collaborations. These collaborative studies will fundamentally change the way to provide health care to our patients."

Mentioned in this article: Andrew P. McMahon, PhD, FRS, Jay R. Lieberman, MD, Francesca Mariani, PhD, Gage Crump, PhD, Megan McCain, PhD, Yang Chai, DDS, PhD, Senta Georgia, PhD, Zhongwei Li, PhD

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Growing hope: New organs? Not yet, but stem cell research is getting closer

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If you lose a limb, it's lost for life. If you damage a kidney, you won't grow a new one. And if you have a heart attack, the scars are there to stay. But regenerative medicine is poised to change all of this.

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Steam cell Solution to dementia and Alzheimer: 

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Steam cell Solution to dementia and Alzheimer: 

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The article which genetic engineering and biotech news provides is how dementia and Alzheimers may be stoped or solved. Scientist in UCLA believe that one injection or steam cells will heal the part of the brain that causes Alzheimer’s and dementia. Almost 5 million Americans have dementia or Alzheimer’s so hopefully steam cells can solve this condition.

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GEN - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News

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UCLA researchers report that a one-time injection of an experimental stem cell therapy can repair brain damage and improve memory function in mice with conditions that replicate human strokes and dementia. The team published its study " Patient-derived glial enriched progenitors repair functional deficits due to white matter stroke and vascular dementia in rodents" in Science Translational Medicine.

"Subcortical white matter stroke (WMS) accounts for up to 30% of all stroke events. WMS damages primarily astrocytes, axons, oligodendrocytes, and myelin. We hypothesized that a therapeutic intervention targeting astrocytes would be ideally suited for brain repair after WMS. We characterize the cellular properties and in vivo tissue repair activity of glial enriched progenitor (GEP) cells differentiated from human-induced pluripotent stem cells, termed hiPSC-derived GEPs (hiPSC-GEPs)," write the investigators.

"hiPSC-GEPs are derived from hiPSC-neural progenitor cells via an experimental manipulation of hypoxia inducible factor activity by brief treatment with a prolyl hydroxylase inhibitor, deferoxamine. This treatment permanently biases these cells to further differentiate toward an astrocyte fate. hiPSC-GEPs transplanted into the brain in the subacute period after WMS in mice migrated widely, matured into astrocytes with a prorepair phenotype, induced endogenous oligodendrocyte precursor proliferation and remyelination, and promoted axonal sprouting. hiPSC-GEPs enhanced motor and cognitive recovery compared to other hiPSC-differentiated cell types.

"This approach establishes an hiPSC-derived product with easy scale-up capabilities that might be effective for treating WMS."

The two most common causes of dementia are Alzheimer's disease and white matter strokes (small strokes that accumulate in the connecting areas of the brain).

"It's a vicious cycle: The two leading causes of dementia are almost always seen together and each one accelerates the other," said S. Thomas Carmichael, MD, PhD, senior author of the study and interim director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA.

An estimated five million Americans have dementia. "And with the aging population, that number is going to skyrocket," noted Carmichael.

Currently, there are no therapies capable of stopping the progression of white matter strokes or enhancing the brain's limited ability to repair itself after they occur. The new study identifies a cell therapy that can stop the progressive damage caused by the disease and stimulate the brain's own repair processes.

The cells used in the therapy are a specialized type of glial cells. Carmichael and his collaborators evaluated the effects of their glial cell therapy by injecting it into the brains of mice with brain damage similar to that seen in humans in the early to middle stages of dementia.

"Upon injection, our cell therapy traveled to damaged areas of the brain and secreted chemicals called growth factors that stimulated the brain's stem cells to launch a repair response," said Irene Llorente, PhD, the paper's first author and an assistant research professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Activating that repair process not only limited the progression of damage, but it also enhanced the formation of new neural connections and increased the production of myelin.

"Understanding the role that glia play in repairing white matter damage is a critically important area of research that needs to be explored," said Francesca Bosetti, a program director at the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, which supported the study. "These preliminary results suggest that glial cell-based therapies may one day help combat the white matter damage that many stroke and vascular dementia patients suffer every year."

In the future, if the therapy is shown to be safe and effective through clinical trials in humans, the researchers envision it becoming an "off-the-shelf" product, meaning that the cells would be mass manufactured, frozen and shipped to hospitals, where they could be used as a one-time therapy for people with early signs of white matter stroke.

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New Stem Cell Therapy Opens Doors for Treating Stroke and Dementia

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UCLA researchers report that a one-time injection of an experimental stem cell therapy can repair brain damage and improve memory function in mice with conditions that replicate human strokes and dementia. The team published its study " Patient-derived glial enriched progenitors repair functional deficits due to white matter stroke and vascular dementia in rodents" in Science Translational Medicine.

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this article talked about how stem cells have been able to be grown in a lab and now is being used to make bone marrow. this can help a lot with bone cancer. and apparently that these kinds of transplants have less complications and have a increase in success. And so now researchers are trying to create a more efficient way of making them which would help everyone in the long run

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Hematopoietic stem cells - the precursors to blood cells - have been notoriously difficult to grow in a dish, a critical tool in basic research. Scientists at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have identified the underlying issue and developed a method to keep cultured cells healthy. These findings, they say, are positive news for patients seeking stem cell transplants - and may hint at a new way to ward off aging.

The findings published in the August 12, 2021 online issue of Cell Stem Cell.

In bone marrow transplants, hematopoietic stem cells are infused intravenously to reestablish blood production in patients whose bone marrow or immune system is damaged. The procedure is used to treat diseases such as leukemia, lymphoma, aplastic anemia and immune deficiency disorders. However, donor stem cells are not always available for patients who need them.

"Even for patients who do receive stem cell therapies, transplanting more cells yields fewer complications and increases chances of overarching success," said senior author Robert Signer, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

While other researchers have tried to culture hematopoietic stem cells by recreating the bone marrow environment in a dish, Signer's team instead asked what internal mechanism makes the cells unhealthy to begin with, and could they remedy that process directly?

Lead author Miriama Kruta, PhD, postdoc in Signer's lab at the time of the study, and colleagues found that in the foreign environment of the culture dish, stem cells begin producing excess proteins, causing extreme stress. The state of stress activates the heat shock response, a highly conserved stress reduction pathway regulated by heat shock factor 1 (HSF1). The researchers identified two different small molecules that super-activate the HSF1 gene. By adding these to the culture, the enhanced activity of the heat shock pathway helped rebalance the cells' state of equilibrium or homeostasis.

"Now, we can preserve high-quality stem cells in culture over a prolonged period of time," said Signer. "We hope the increased quality will lead to improved clinical outcomes."

The recovery of protein homeostasis by enhanced HSF1 activation was shown in both mouse and human hematopoietic stem cells. The next step, said Signer, is to test how these small molecules affect the outcome of human stem cells in transplantation systems.

The researchers discovered the heat shock pathway isn't just important in a Petri dish, it also keeps stem cells healthy in their native bone marrow during aging. While HSF1 is inactive in the stem cells of young adults, it is turned on in middle-aged and older adults.

" HSF1 is activated during aging to keep your stem cells fit," said Signer. "Protein damage impairs stem cells during aging and likely contributes to disrupting blood and immune cell production in older people." Signer said super-activating HSF1 might eventually be used to improve stem cell and tissue function in aging to prevent blood disorders and boost immunity in older adults.

Co-authors of the study include: Mary Jean Sunshine, Bernadette A. Chua, Yunpeng Fu, Christopher H. Dillingham, Lorena Hidalgo San Jose, Bijou De Jong and Fanny J. Zhou, all at UC San Diego; and Ashu Chawla at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology.

Funding for this research came, in part, from the National Institutes of Health (grants R01DK116951, R01DK124775, S10 RR027366, P30CA023100), the Blood Cancer Discoveries Grant program (8025-20) through The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research, The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, Scholar Awards from the V Foundation for Cancer Research (V2017-003) and the American Society of Hematology, and the Sanford Stem Cell Clinical Center.

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New Blood: Lab-Grown Stem Cells Bode Well for Transplants, Aging Research

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Hematopoietic stem cells - the precursors to blood cells - have been notoriously difficult to grow in a dish, a critical tool in basic research. Scientists at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have identified the underlying issue and developed a method to keep cultured cells healthy.

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Researchers at John Hopkins are working on making induced-pluripotent Stem cells to create dopamine and potentially cure Parkinson's. They have been trouble doing it with humans, and think that it is due to being able to catch the disease much earlier on than with humans. They think that this technology can be used much like biopsies of tumors in cancerous patients.

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Ted Dawson, M.D., Ph.D., professor of neurology and co-director of NeuroICE explains where we are in using stem cells to treat Parkinson's Disease.

We're creating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from patients with Parkinson's disease with the intent of turning them into dopamine neurons that we can study in a dish and also put into animals. We want to see if human iPS derived neurons grown in culture or in a mouse can lead to disease, and if it can, to study the mechanisms of why cells degenerate and test our hypotheses, drugs and targets in human cells.

If you look at the work that's been done in neurodegenerative diseases in animal models, we've been good at slowing progression of disease, but when we go to humans, the trials fail. So why is that? Perhaps because in mice we're able to intervene very early in the disease, but in humans we're treating late. Maybe the treatment would work if we treated early in humans, but this would require the ability to diagnosis the disease prior to the onset of symptoms. The other possibility is that Parkinson's disease in a mouse is different than a man.

Using iPS cells we can test new therapies in human neurons for the first time. One of the reasons there have been tremendous new therapies with cancers is that scientists can biopsy human tumors and use those cells to design drugs. Now stem cells are putting us in a position to be able to study neurodegenerative diseases in a similar way.

For developmental diseases such as Down syndrome and schizophrenia, there's no question in my mind that iPS will change the ways those diseases are studied and treated. With an adult-onset neurodegenerative disorder that takes 50 years to develop in humans, the big question is whether an iPS cell will have Parkinson's disease after growing in a mouse for a few months. We just don't know. But we need to do the experiment.

Lots of people thought Parkinson's was going to be low hanging fruit for stem cell transplantation. But we still don't fully understand the transplantation process and how to optimize it. There needs to be a lot of work done to get to that point. And medical therapy for Parkinson's is so advanced that transplantation right now probably isn't going to be any better than what we can already do. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be forging ahead, using stem cells to discover more about the disease in order to find new drugs as well as refine our ideas about transplantation.

--Interviewed by Maryalice Yakutchik

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Stem Cell Research at Johns Hopkins Medicine: Parkinson's Disease

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Ted Dawson, M.D., Ph.D., professor of neurology and co-director of NeuroICE explains where we are in using stem cells to treat Parkinson's Disease. We're creating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from patients with Parkinson's disease with the intent of turning them into dopamine neurons that we can study in a dish and also put into animals.

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The NYT writes how stem cells could be used to treat things like HIV in the future. This woman was the third person to be cured of HIV, and it was extra special because she is a woman of color. This means the technology is being developed specifically and more closely to people. This new case is a huge deal in science and step in the right direction for biotechnology. The other two cases were treated using a bone marrow transplant, but neither ended well. In the newest case, it was treated with bone marrow stem cells , and she did not receive any side affects.

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She's the third person ever to be cured. Researchers announced that the new approach holds the potential for curing more people of racially diverse backgrounds.

A colored scanning electron micrograph of H.I.V. particles, in yellow, infecting a host cell. The patient received cord blood from a donor with the mutation that blocks H.I.V.'s entry into cells. Credit... Thomas Deerinck, NCMIR/Science Source

A woman of mixed race appears to be the third person ever to be cured of H.I.V., using a new transplant method involving umbilical cord blood that opens up the possibility of curing more people of diverse racial backgrounds than was previously possible, scientists announced on Tuesday.

Cord blood is more widely available than the adult stem cells typically used in bone marrow transplants, and does not need to be matched as closely to the recipient. Most donors in registries are of Caucasian origin, so allowing for only a partial match has the potential to cure dozens of Americans who have both H.I.V. and cancer each year, scientists said.

The woman, who also had leukemia, received cord blood to treat her cancer. It came from a partially matched donor, instead of the typical practice of finding a bone marrow donor of similar race and ethnicity to the patient's. She also received blood from a close relative to give her body temporary immune defenses while the transplant took.

Researchers presented some of the details of the new case on Tuesday at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Denver, Colo.

The sex and racial background of the new case mark a significant step forward in developing a cure for H.I.V., the researchers said.

"The fact that she's mixed race, and that she's a woman, that is really important scientifically and really important in terms of the community impact," said Dr. Steven Deeks, an AIDS expert at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved in the work.

Infection with H.I.V. is thought to progress differently in women than in men, but while women account for more than half of H.I.V cases in the world, they make up only 11 percent of participants in cure trials.

But Dr. Deeks said he did not see the new approach becoming commonplace. "These are stories of providing inspiration to the field and perhaps the road map," he said.

Powerful antiretroviral drugs can control H.I.V., but a cure is key to ending the decades-old pandemic. Worldwide, nearly 38 million people are living with H.I.V., and about 73 percent of them are receiving treatment.

A bone marrow transplant is not a realistic option for most patients. Such transplants are highly invasive and risky, so they are generally offered only to people with cancer who have exhausted all other options.

There have only been two known cases of an H.I.V. cure so far. Referred to as "The Berlin Patient," Timothy Ray Brown stayed virus-free for 12 years, until he died in 2020 of cancer. In 2019, another patient, later identified as Adam Castillejo, was reported to be cured of H.I.V., confirming that Mr. Brown's case was not a fluke.

Both men received bone marrow transplants from donors who carried a mutation that blocks H.I.V. infection. The mutation has been identified in only about 20,000 donors, most of whom are of Northern European descent.

In the previous cases, as the bone marrow transplants replaced all of their immune systems, both men suffered punishing side effects, including graft versus host disease, a condition in which the donor's cells attack the recipient's body. Mr. Brown nearly died after his transplant. Mr. Castillejo's treatment was less intense, but in the year after his transplant, he lost nearly 70 pounds, developed a hearing loss and survived multiple infections, according to his doctors.

By contrast, the woman in the latest case left the hospital by day 17 after her transplant and did not develop graft versus host disease, said Dr. JingMei Hsu, the patient's physician at Weill Cornell Medicine. The combination of cord blood and her relative's cells might have spared her much of the brutal side effects of a typical bone marrow transplant, Dr. Hsu said.

"It was previously thought that graft versus host disease might be an important reason for an H.I.V. cure in the prior cases," said Dr. Sharon Lewin, president-elect of the International AIDS Society, who was not involved in the work. The new results dispel that idea, Dr. Lewin said.

The woman, who is now past middle age (she did not want to disclose her exact age because of privacy concerns), was diagnosed with H.I.V. in June 2013. Antiretroviral drugs kept her virus levels low. In March 2017, she was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia.

In August of that year, she received cord blood from a donor with the mutation that blocks H.I.V.'s entry into cells. But it can take about six weeks for cord blood cells to engraft, so she was also given partially matched blood stem cells from a first-degree relative.

The half-matched "haplo" cells from her relative propped up her immune system until the cord blood cells became dominant, making the transplant much less dangerous, said Dr. Marshall Glesby, an infectious diseases expert at Weill Cornell Medicine of New York and part of the research team.

"The transplant from the relative is like a bridge that got her through to the point of the cord blood being able to take over," he said.

The patient opted to discontinue antiretroviral therapy 37 months after the transplant. More than 14 months later, she now shows no signs of H.I.V. in blood tests, and does not seem to have detectable antibodies to the virus.

It's unclear exactly why stem cells from cord blood seem to work so well, experts said. One possibility is that they are more capable of adapting to a new environment, said Dr. Koen Van Besien, director of the transplant service at Weill Cornell. "These are newborns, they are more adaptable," he said.

Cord blood may also contain elements beyond the stem cells that aid in the transplant.

"Umbilical stem cells are attractive," Dr. Deeks said. "There's something magical about these cells and something magical perhaps about the cord blood in general that provides an extra benefit."

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A Woman Is Cured of H.I.V. Using a Novel Treatment

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She's the third person ever to be cured. Researchers announced that the new approach holds the potential for curing more people of racially diverse backgrounds. A woman of mixed race appears to be the third person ever to be cured of H.I.V., using a new transplant method involving umbilical cord blood that opens up the possibility of curing more people of diverse racial backgrounds than was previously possible, scientists announced on Tuesday.

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this article talked about how the stem cells work and what they do. it talked about the 3 different stem cells and how they have been used in the past.

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You've heard about stem cells in the news, and perhaps you've wondered if they might help you or a loved one with a serious disease. You may wonder what stem cells are, how they're being used to treat disease and injury, and why they're the subject of such vigorous debate.

Here are some answers to frequently asked questions about stem cells.

What are stem cells?

Stem cells are the body's raw materials - cells from which all other cells with specialized functions are generated. Under the right conditions in the body or a laboratory, stem cells divide to form more cells called daughter cells.

These daughter cells become either new stem cells or specialized cells (differentiation) with a more specific function, such as blood cells, brain cells, heart muscle cells or bone cells. No other cell in the body has the natural ability to generate new cell types.

Why is there such an interest in stem cells?

Researchers hope stem cell studies can help to:

Increase understanding of how diseases occur. By watching stem cells mature into cells in bones, heart muscle, nerves, and other organs and tissue, researchers may better understand how diseases and conditions develop.

Generate healthy cells to replace cells affected by disease (regenerative medicine). Stem cells can be guided into becoming specific cells that can be used in people to regenerate and repair tissues that have been damaged or affected by disease.

People who might benefit from stem cell therapies include those with spinal cord injuries, type 1 diabetes, Parkinson's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, stroke, burns, cancer and osteoarthritis.

Stem cells may have the potential to be grown to become new tissue for use in transplant and regenerative medicine. Researchers continue to advance the knowledge on stem cells and their applications in transplant and regenerative medicine.

Test new drugs for safety and effectiveness. Before using investigational drugs in people, researchers can use some types of stem cells to test the drugs for safety and quality. This type of testing will most likely first have a direct impact on drug development for cardiac toxicity testing.

New areas of study include the effectiveness of using human stem cells that have been programmed into tissue-specific cells to test new drugs. For the testing of new drugs to be accurate, the cells must be programmed to acquire properties of the type of cells targeted by the drug. Techniques to program cells into specific cells are under study.

For instance, nerve cells could be generated to test a new drug for a nerve disease. Tests could show whether the new drug had any effect on the cells and whether the cells were harmed.

Where do stem cells come from?

There are several sources of stem cells:

Embryonic stem cells. These stem cells come from embryos that are 3 to 5 days old. At this stage, an embryo is called a blastocyst and has about 150 cells.

These are pluripotent (ploo-RIP-uh-tunt) stem cells, meaning they can divide into more stem cells or can become any type of cell in the body. This versatility allows embryonic stem cells to be used to regenerate or repair diseased tissue and organs.

Adult stem cells. These stem cells are found in small numbers in most adult tissues, such as bone marrow or fat. Compared with embryonic stem cells, adult stem cells have a more limited ability to give rise to various cells of the body.

Until recently, researchers thought adult stem cells could create only similar types of cells. For instance, researchers thought that stem cells residing in the bone marrow could give rise only to blood cells.

However, emerging evidence suggests that adult stem cells may be able to create various types of cells. For instance, bone marrow stem cells may be able to create bone or heart muscle cells.

This research has led to early-stage clinical trials to test usefulness and safety in people. For example, adult stem cells are currently being tested in people with neurological or heart disease.

Adult cells altered to have properties of embryonic stem cells. Scientists have successfully transformed regular adult cells into stem cells using genetic reprogramming. By altering the genes in the adult cells, researchers can reprogram the cells to act similarly to embryonic stem cells.

This new technique may allow use of reprogrammed cells instead of embryonic stem cells and prevent immune system rejection of the new stem cells. However, scientists don't yet know whether using altered adult cells will cause adverse effects in humans.

Researchers have been able to take regular connective tissue cells and reprogram them to become functional heart cells. In studies, animals with heart failure that were injected with new heart cells experienced improved heart function and survival time.

Perinatal stem cells. Researchers have discovered stem cells in amniotic fluid as well as umbilical cord blood. These stem cells have the ability to change into specialized cells.

Amniotic fluid fills the sac that surrounds and protects a developing fetus in the uterus. Researchers have identified stem cells in samples of amniotic fluid drawn from pregnant women for testing or treatment - a procedure called amniocentesis.

Why is there a controversy about using embryonic stem cells?

Embryonic stem cells are obtained from early-stage embryos - a group of cells that forms when eggs are fertilized with sperm at an in vitro fertilization clinic. Because human embryonic stem cells are extracted from human embryos, several questions and issues have been raised about the ethics of embryonic stem cell research.

The National Institutes of Health created guidelines for human stem cell research in 2009. The guidelines define embryonic stem cells and how they may be used in research, and include recommendations for the donation of embryonic stem cells. Also, the guidelines state that embryonic stem cells from embryos created by in vitro fertilization can be used only when the embryo is no longer needed.

Where do these embryos come from?

The embryos being used in embryonic stem cell research come from eggs that were fertilized at in vitro fertilization clinics but never implanted in women's uteruses. The stem cells are donated with informed consent from donors. The stem cells can live and grow in special solutions in test tubes or petri dishes in laboratories.

Why can't researchers use adult stem cells instead?

Although research into adult stem cells is promising, adult stem cells may not be as versatile and durable as are embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells may not be able to be manipulated to produce all cell types, which limits how adult stem cells can be used to treat diseases.

Adult stem cells are also more likely to contain abnormalities due to environmental hazards, such as toxins, or from errors acquired by the cells during replication. However, researchers have found that adult stem cells are more adaptable than was first thought.

What are stem cell lines and why do researchers want to use them?

A stem cell line is a group of cells that all descend from a single original stem cell and are grown in a lab. Cells in a stem cell line keep growing but don't differentiate into specialized cells. Ideally, they remain free of genetic defects and continue to create more stem cells. Clusters of cells can be taken from a stem cell line and frozen for storage or shared with other researchers.

What is stem cell therapy (regenerative medicine) and how does it work?

Stem cell therapy, also known as regenerative medicine, promotes the repair response of diseased, dysfunctional or injured tissue using stem cells or their derivatives. It is the next chapter in organ transplantation and uses cells instead of donor organs, which are limited in supply.

Researchers grow stem cells in a lab. These stem cells are manipulated to specialize into specific types of cells, such as heart muscle cells, blood cells or nerve cells.

The specialized cells can then be implanted into a person. For example, if the person has heart disease, the cells could be injected into the heart muscle. The healthy transplanted heart muscle cells could then contribute to repairing the injured heart muscle.

Researchers have already shown that adult bone marrow cells guided to become heart-like cells can repair heart tissue in people, and more research is ongoing.

Have stem cells already been used to treat diseases?

Yes. Doctors have performed stem cell transplants, also known as bone marrow transplants. In stem cell transplants, stem cells replace cells damaged by chemotherapy or disease or serve as a way for the donor's immune system to fight some types of cancer and blood-related diseases, such as leukemia, lymphoma, neuroblastoma and multiple myeloma. These transplants use adult stem cells or umbilical cord blood.

Researchers are testing adult stem cells to treat other conditions, including a number of degenerative diseases such as heart failure.

What are the potential problems with using embryonic stem cells in humans?

For embryonic stem cells to be useful, researchers must be certain that the stem cells will differentiate into the specific cell types desired.

Researchers have discovered ways to direct stem cells to become specific types of cells, such as directing embryonic stem cells to become heart cells. Research is ongoing in this area.

Embryonic stem cells can also grow irregularly or specialize in different cell types spontaneously. Researchers are studying how to control the growth and differentiation of embryonic stem cells.

Embryonic stem cells might also trigger an immune response in which the recipient's body attacks the stem cells as foreign invaders, or the stem cells might simply fail to function as expected, with unknown consequences. Researchers continue to study how to avoid these possible complications.

What is therapeutic cloning, and what benefits might it offer?

Therapeutic cloning, also called somatic cell nuclear transfer, is a technique to create versatile stem cells independent of fertilized eggs. In this technique, the nucleus is removed from an unfertilized egg. This nucleus contains the genetic material. The nucleus is also removed from the cell of a donor.

This donor nucleus is then injected into the egg, replacing the nucleus that was removed, in a process called nuclear transfer. The egg is allowed to divide and soon forms a blastocyst. This process creates a line of stem cells that is genetically identical to the donor's cells - in essence, a clone.

Some researchers believe that stem cells derived from therapeutic cloning may offer benefits over those from fertilized eggs because cloned cells are less likely to be rejected once transplanted back into the donor and may allow researchers to see exactly how a disease develops.

Has therapeutic cloning in people been successful?

No. Researchers haven't been able to successfully perform therapeutic cloning with humans despite success in a number of other species.

However, in recent studies, researchers have created human pluripotent stem cells by modifying the therapeutic cloning process. Researchers continue to study the potential of therapeutic cloning in people.

Show references

See more In-depth

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Answers to your questions about stem cell research

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Get answers about where stem cells come from, why they're important for understanding and treating disease, and the ethics of using them.

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The New Secret Chicken Recipe? Animal Cells. -Isaac

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The New Secret Chicken Recipe? Animal Cells. -Isaac

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With the new advancements in stem cell research, scientists are starting to successfully grow chicken breasts. While they are still a ways off from being mass-produced they taste identical to real chicken as several studies have shown. They also relieve the ethical and environmental concerns of eating meat. This could be the next step forward in how we eat our food and goodbye to animal cruelty found in factory farms.

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The New Secret Chicken Recipe? Animal Cells.

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Here’s an early taste of the laboratory-grown meat that companies are racing to bring to market, and a look at the questions it raises about how we feed ourselves.

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This article went over how stem cells serve as replacements for dying cells, for example red blood cells. Red blood cells are very important because they deliver oxygen and other nutrients throughout your body. Also, stem cells can become any type of cell, that is how your body grows from an embryo to a fetus with trillions of specialized cells. They need to specialize to make up tissues that function very differently, including those in the brain, skin, muscle and other organs.
-Ezra

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Inside your body, red blood cells are constantly on the move. They deliver oxygen to every tissue in every part of your body. These blood cells also cart away waste. So their work is crucial to your survival. But all that squeezing through tiny vessels is tough on red blood cells. That's why they last only about four months.

Where do their replacements come from? Stem cells.

These are a very special family of cells. When most other cells divide, the daughter cells look and act exactly like their parents. For example, a skin cell can't make anything but another skin cell. The same is true for cells in the intestine or liver.

Not stem cells. Stem cells can become many different types. That is how an embryo grows from a single fertilized egg into a fetus with trillions of specialized cells. They need to specialize to make up tissues that function very differently, including those in the brain, skin, muscle and other organs. Later in life, stem cells also can replace worn-out or damaged cells - including red blood cells.

The remarkable abilities of stem cells make them very exciting to scientists. One day, experts hope to use stem cells to repair or replace many different kinds of tissues, whether injured in accidents or damaged by diseases. Such stem cell therapy would allow the body to heal itself. Scientists have found a way to put specialized cells to work repairing damage, too. Together, these cell-based therapies might one day make permanent disabilities a thing of the past.

One unusual type of stem cell offers special promise for such therapeutic uses. For the recent development of this cell type, Shinya Yamanaka shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in medicine.
Meet the family
Blood stem cells live inside your bones, in what is called marrow. There, they divide over and over. Some of the new cells remain stem cells. Others form red blood cells. Still others morph into any of the five types of white blood cells that will fight infections. Although blood stem cells can become any one of these specialized blood cells, they cannot become muscle, nerve or other types of cells. They are too specialized to do that.

Another type of stem cell is more generalized. These can mature into any type of cell in the body. Such stem cells are called pluripotent (PLU ree PO tint). The word means having many possibilities. And it's not hard to understand why these cells have captured the imaginations of many scientists.

Until recently, all pluripotent cells came from embryos. That's why scientists called them embryonic stem cells. After an egg is fertilized, it divides in two. These two cells split again, to become four cells, and so on. In the first few days of this embryo's development, each of its cells is identical to all the others. Yet each cell has the potential to develop into any specialized cell type.

When the human embryo reaches three to five days old, its cells start to realize their potential. They specialize. Some will develop into muscle cells or bone cells. Others will form lung cells - or maybe the cells lining the stomach. Once cells specialize, their "many possibilities" suddenly become limited.

By birth, almost all of a baby's cells will have specialized. Each cell type will have its own distinctive shape and function. For example, muscle cells will be long and able to contract, or shorten. Red blood cells will be small and plate-shaped, so they can slip through blood vessels with ease.

Hidden among all of these specialized cells are pockets of adult stem cells. (Yes, even newborns have "adult" stem cells.) Unlike embryonic stem cells, adult stem cells cannot transform into any and every cell type. However, adult stem cells can replace several different types of specialized cells as they wear out. One type of adult stem cell is found in your marrow, making new blood cells. More types are found in other tissues, including the brain, heart and gut.

Among naturally occurring stem cells, the embryonic type is the most useful. Adult stem cells just aren't as flexible. The adult type also is relatively rare and can be difficult to separate from the tissues in which it is found. Although more versatile, embryonic stem cells are both difficult to obtain and controversial. That's because harvesting them requires destroying an embryo.

Fortunately, recent discoveries in stem cell research now offer scientists a third - and potentially better - option.
The search for answers
In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka discovered that specialized cells - like those in skin - could be converted back into stem cells. Working at Kyoto University in Japan, this doctor and scientist induced - or persuaded - mature cells to become stem cells. He did this by inserting a specific set of genes into the cells. After several weeks, the cells behaved just like embryonic cells. His new type of stem cells are called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iP stem cells (and sometimes iPS cells).

Yamanaka's discovery represented a huge leap forward. The iP stem cells offer several advantages over both embryonic and adult stem cells. First, iP stem cells are able to become any cell type, just as embryonic stem cells can. Second, they can be made from any starting cell type. That means they are easy to obtain. Third, in the future, doctors would be able to treat patients with stem cells created from their own tissues. Such cells would perfectly match the others, genetically. That means the patient's immune system (including all of its white blood cells) would not attack the introduced cells. (The body often mounts a life-threatening attack against transplanted organs that come from other people because they don't offer such a perfect match. To the body, they seem foreign and a potentially dangerous "invader.")

Scientists the world over learned of the technique developed by Yamanaka (who now works at the Gladstone Institutes - which is affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco). Many of these researchers adopted Yamanaka's procedure to create their own induced pluripotent stem cells. For the first time, researchers had a tool that could allow them to make stem cells from people with rare genetic diseases. This helps scientists learn what makes certain cell types die. Experts can also expose small batches of these diseased cells to different medicines. This allows them to test literally thousands of drugs to find out which works best.

And in the future, many experts hope induced stem cells will be used to replace adult stem cells and the cells of tissues that are damaged or dying.
Therapies take patients - and patience
Among those experts is Anne Cherry, a graduate student at Harvard University. Cherry is using induced stem cells to learn more about a very rare genetic disease called Pearson syndrome. A syndrome is a group of symptoms that occur together. One symptom of Pearson syndrome is that stem cells in bone marrow cannot make normal red blood cells. This condition typically leads to an early death.

Cherry has begun to study why these stem cells fail.

She started by taking skin cells from a girl with the disease. She placed the cells in a test tube and added genes to turn them into stem cells. Over several weeks, the cells began to make proteins for which the inserted genes had provided instructions. Proteins do most of the work inside cells. These proteins turned off the genes that made the cells act like skin cells. Before long, the proteins turned on the genes to make these cells behave like embryonic stem cells.

After about three months, Cherry had a big batch of the new induced stem cells. Those cells now live in Petri dishes in her lab, where they are kept at body temperature (37° Celsius, or 98.6° Fahrenheit). The scientist is now trying to coax the induced stem cells into becoming blood cells. After that, Cherry wants to find out how Pearson syndrome kills them.

Meanwhile, the patient who donated the skin cells remains unable to make blood cells on her own. So doctors must give her regular transfusions of blood from a donor. Though life-saving, transfusions come with risks, particularly for someone with a serious disease.

Cherry hopes to one day turn the girl's induced stem cells into healthy new blood stem cells - and then return them to the girl's body. Doing so could eliminate the need for further transfusions. And since the cells would be the girl's own, there would be no risk of her immune system reacting to them as though they were foreign.
Sight for sore eyes
At University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, Iqbal Ahmad is working on using stem cells to restore sight to the blind. A neuroscientist - someone who studies the brain and nervous system - Ahmad has been focusing on people who lost sight when nerve cells in the eye's retina died from a disease called glaucoma (glaw KOH muh).

Located inside the back of the eye, the retina converts incoming light into electrical signals that are then sent to the brain. Ahmad is studying how to replace dead retina cells with new ones formed from induced pluripotent stem cells.

The neuroscientist starts by removing adult stem cells from the cornea, or the clear tissue that covers the front of the eye. These stem cells normally replace cells lost through the wear and tear of blinking. They cannot become nerve cells - at least not on their own. Ahmad, however, can transform these cells into iP stem cells. Then, with prodding, he turns them into nerve cells.

To make the transformation, Ahmad places the cornea cells on one side of a Petri dish. He then places embryonic stem cells on the other side. A meshlike membrane separates the two types of cells so they can't mix. But even though they can't touch, they do communicate.

Cells constantly send out chemical signals to which other cells respond. When the embryonic stem cells "speak," the eye cells "listen." Their chemical messages persuade the eye cells to turn off the genes that tell them to be cornea cells. Over time, the eye cells become stem cells that can give rise to different types of cells, including nerve cells.

When Ahmad's team implanted the nerve cells into the eyes of laboratory mice and rats, they migrated to the retina. There, they began replacing the nerve cells that had died from glaucoma. One day, the same procedure may restore vision to people who have lost their sight.
Another approach
In using a body's own cells to repair injury or to treat disease, stem cells aren't always the answer. Although stem cells offer tremendous advances in regenerating lost tissue, some medical treatments may work better without them. That's thanks to the chemical communication going on between all cells all of the time. In some situations, highly specialized cells can act as a conductor, directing other cells to change their tune.

In 2008, while working at the University of Cambridge in England, veterinary neurologist Nick Jeffery began a project that used cells taken from the back of the nose. But Jeffery and his team were not out to create stem cells. Instead, the scientists used those nasal cells to repair damaged connections in the spinal cord.

The spinal cord is basically a rope of nerve cells that ferry signals to and from the brain and other parts of the body. Injuring the spinal cord can lead to paralysis, or the loss of sensation and the inability to move muscles.

Like Ahmad, some researchers are using stem cells to replace damaged nerve cells. But Jeffery, now at Iowa State University in Ames, doesn't think such techniques are always necessary to aid recovery from spinal injuries. "Stem cell transplantation," points out Jeffery's colleague, neuroscientist Robin Franklin, "is to replace a missing cell type." In a spinal injury, the nerve cells aren't missing. They're just cut off.

Nerve cells contain long, wirelike projections - called axons - that relay signals to the next cell. When the spine is injured, these axons can become severed, or cut. Damaging an axon is like snipping a wire - the signal stops flowing. So the Cambridge scientists set out to see if they could restore those signals.

Jeffery and his fellow scientists work with dogs that have experienced spinal injuries. Such problems are common in some breeds, including dachshunds. The team first surgically removed cells from the dogs' sinuses - or the hollow spaces in the skull behind the nose. These are not stem cells. These particular cells instead encourage nerve cells in the nose to grow new axons. These cells help the pooches maintain their healthy sense of smell.

The scientists grew these sinus cells in the lab until they had reproduced to large numbers. Then the researchers injected the cells into the spinal cords of two out of every three doggy patients. Each treated dog received an injection of its own cells. The other dogs got an injection of only the liquid broth used to feed the growing cells.

Over several months, the dogs' owners repeatedly brought their pets back to the lab for testing on a treadmill. This allowed the scientists to evaluate how well the animals coordinated their front and hind feet while walking. Dogs that had received the nasal cells steadily improved over time. Dogs that received only the liquid did not.

This treatment did not result in a perfect cure. Nerve cells did reconnect several portions of the spinal cord. But nerve cells that once linked to the brain remained disconnected. Still, these dog data indicate that nasal cells can aid in recovering from a spinal cord injury.

Such new developments in cellular research suggest that even more remarkable medical advancements may be just a few years away. Yamanaka, Cherry, Ahmad, Jeffery, Franklin and many other scientists are steadily unlocking secrets to cellular change. And while you can't teach an old dog new tricks, scientists are finding out that the same just isn't true of cells anymore.

cornea The clear covering over the front of the eye.

embryo A vertebrate, or animal with a backbone, in its early stages of development.

gene A section of DNA that carries the genetic instructions for making a protein. Proteins do most of the work in cells.

glaucoma An eye disease that damages nerve cells carrying signals to the brain.

immune cell White blood cell that helps protect the body against germs.

molecule A collection of atoms.

neuron (or nerve cell) The basic working unit of the nervous system. These cells relay nerve signals.

neuroscientist A researcher who studies neurons and the nervous system.

paralysis Loss of feeling in some part of the body and an inability to move that part.

retina The light-sensitive lining at the back of the eye. It converts light into electrical impulses that relay information to the brain.

sinus An opening in the bone of the skull connected to the nostrils.

spinal cord The ropelike collection of neurons that connect the brain with nerves throughout the body.

tissue A large collection of related, similar cells that together work as a unit to perform a particular function in living organisms. Different organs of the human body, for instance, often are made from many different types of tissues. And brain tissue will be very different from bone or heart tissue.

transfusion The process of transferring blood into one person that had been collected from another.
Word Find (click here to enlarge puzzle for printing)

Alison Pearce Stevens is a former biologist and forever science geek who writes about science and nature for kids. She lives with her husband, their two kids and a small menagerie of cuddly (and not-so cuddly) critters.

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Stem cells: The secret to change | Science News for Students

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Inside your body, red blood cells are constantly on the move. They deliver oxygen to every tissue in every part of your body. These blood cells also cart away waste. So their work is crucial to your survival. But all that squeezing through tiny vessels is tough on red blood cells.

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The protein, syndecan-2, helps identify and control stem cells, which may help with the treatment of cancers. Scientists found this out by doing tests on mice and identified stem cells with syndecan-2 would replicate without cancerous cells.
(sorry, accidentally posted this anonymously the first time)

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Two recent discoveries by stem cell scientists at Cedars-Sinai may help make cancer treatment more efficient and shorten the time it takes for people to recover from radiation and chemotherapy.

In the first study, published in the journal Blood, investigators discovered a protein that is expressed by blood stem cells that could aid in identifying, studying and deploying the cells for treatments.

"We show that this protein, syndecan-2, identifies primitive blood stem cells and it regulates stem cell function," said John Chute, MD, director of the Division of Hematology and Cellular Therapy at Cedars-Sinai and senior author of the study.

Blood stem cells are found in small quantities in the bone marrow and in peripheral blood -- the type that travels through the heart, arteries, capillaries and veins. These stem cells are of interest to scientists because they produce all blood cells and immune cells in the body. They are used in the curative treatment of people with leukemia and lymphoma.

This approach faces a major challenge: Hematopoietic stem cells make up less than 0.01% of cells in the bone marrow and peripheral blood, and there is not yet a good way to separate them from other cells. This means that when people receive infusions of bone marrow and peripheral blood cells, they get a tiny number of stem cells that are therapeutic along with a lot of other cells that are not.

To study this phenomenon, investigators at the Chute laboratory led by first author Christina M. Termini, PhD, extracted bone marrow cells from adult mice and ran the samples through a device that can detect hundreds of different types of cells based on the proteins that live on their surfaces.This process revealed that hematopoietic stem cells have a high concentration of syndecan-2, which is part of a family of proteins called heparan sulfate proteoglycans, on the cell surface.

The researchers found this protein plays an important role in how hematopoietic stem cells reproduce. When stem cells that express syndecan-2 were transplanted into mice following irradiation, their cells repopulated. But when stem cells that lacked syndecan-2 were transplanted, the cells stopped replicating.

By transplanting only cells that express syndecan-2, it may be possible to make blood stem cell transplants more efficient and less toxic.
Second Discovery
The second discovery by Chute and his team -- published in the journal Nature Communications -- revealed a mechanism through which the blood vessels in the bone marrow respond to injury, such as from chemotherapy or radiation.

When people receive radiation or chemotherapy as part of their cancer treatment, their blood counts plummet. It typically takes several weeks for these counts to return to normal levels.

Chute and colleages found that when mice receive radiation treatment, the cells that line the inner walls of the blood vessels in the bone marrow produce a protein called semaphorin 3A. This protein tells another protein, called neuropilin 1, to kill damaged blood vessels in the bone marrow.

When the investigators blocked the ability of these blood vessel cells to produce neuropilin 1 or semaphorin 3A, or injected an antibody that blocks semaphorin 3A communication with neuropilin 1, the bone marrow vasculature regenerated following irradiation. In addition, blood counts increased dramatically after one week.

"We've discovered a mechanism that appears to control how blood vessels regenerate following injury," said Chute, senior author of the paper. "Inhibiting this mechanism causes rapid recovery of the blood vessels and blood cells in bone marrow following chemotherapy or irradiation. In principle, targeting this mechanism could allow patients to recover following chemotherapy in one to two weeks, instead of three or four weeks as currently experienced."

Termini, a post-doctoral scientist at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, was the first author on both studies.

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stem cells; leukemia; lymphoma; immune system; osteoporosis; skin cancer; prostate cancer; hypertension

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Stem cell discoveries hold potential to improve cancer treatment: Findings could lead to new ways to fight disease and help patients recover faster

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Two recent discoveries by stem cell scientists at Cedars-Sinai may help make cancer treatment more efficient and shorten the time it takes for people to recover from radiation and chemotherapy. In the first study, published in the journal Blood, investigators discovered a protein that is expressed by blood stem cells that could aid in identifying, studying and deploying the cells for treatments.

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Scientists find frequency to activate stem cells

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Scientists find frequency to activate stem cells

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This is exciting because the research can help with understanding the development of embryos.  This opens up new windows for scientists research on how stem cells know when they need to start working and how embryos develop.
-Fiona C.

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Scientists at Gladstone Institutes have discovered a molecular mechanism that can manipulate random fluctuations, or "noise," when stem cells transform into different other cells in the body.

The discordant transcription through repair (DiTHR) pathway appeared to amplify the noise in gene expression in stem cells, thus increasing their ability to differentiate more efficiently.

The discovery, which specifically involves the DNA-repair protein Apex1, is significant because it shows the molecules' ability to switch expression between active and inactive states without affecting the average level of gene expression. This, in turn, could boost the efficiency of drugs designed to treat various types of illness.

In this study, Gladstone scientists worked on how to alter HIV's ability to persist in a long-lived latent state in patients. They found that altering viral expression noise also reduced HIV persistence.

"It was pretty startling when these same molecules worked in stem cells, and trying to understand how these molecules work turned into a search for fundamental biological mechanism," said Leor Weinberger, Ph.D., director of the Center for Cell Circuitry at Gladstone, in a statement.

Dr. Weinberger had been conducting HIV research for the past years when they made this discovery. He shared that his team was unsure if the noise-enhancing molecules could boost noise without changing gene expression levels, so they tried on a whim to test what would happen if they were to be applied to embryonic stem cells that did not have HIV. They found that the molecules had the same effect on the stem cells as they did on HIV.

"We found that Apex1 directly alters the shape of the DNA double helix in a way that first impedes and then accelerates gene expression. Our findings suggest that the DiThR pathway makes cells more responsive to the signals that guide their fate. That means this mechanism may play a fundamental biological role in the development of embryos," added Ravi Desai, an M.D./Ph.D. student in the UCSF Medical Scientist Training Program in Dr. Weinberger's team.

The noise-enhancing molecules mentioned are naturally found in stem cells, but the big question among the researchers was finding out how this new discovery would affect the transformation process itself. Tests conducted on mouse embryonic stem cells confirmed that stem cells were able to differentiate more efficiently as the "noise" was amplified, largely similar to how a Bunsen burner works. More interestingly, the mechanism also behaved the same way in reverse, showing that a differentiated cell can revert to its pluripotent status.

The research is ongoing. The team said that their goal now is to understand how DiThR is regulated and if there are other associated noise pathways that exist. Finding and harnessing such pathways could very well pave the way to the discovery and creation of effective cellular engineering and stem cell-based therapies.

The study, titled "A DNA-Repair Pathway Controls Transcriptional Noise to Promote CEll-Fate 1 Transitions," was published on July 22, 2021, in the journal Science.

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breakthrough discovery on molecular "noise" could enhance stem cell therapies

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Breakthrough Discovery on Molecular "Noise" Could Enhance Stem Cell Therapies | BioSpace

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Scientists at Gladstone Institutes have discovered a molecular mechanism that can manipulate random fluctuations, or "noise," when stem cells transform into different other cells in the body. The discordant transcription through repair (DiTHR) pathway appeared to amplify the noise in gene expression in stem cells, thus increasing their ability to differentiate more efficiently.

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Scientists use stem cells to create patient specific blood cells!

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Scientists use stem cells to create patient specific blood cells!

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This is exciting because when these blood cells come from the patient's own pluripotent stem cells, they resulting blood cells are compatible with that patient's immune system and wont be rejected. This opens up new possibilities for better treatments for blood diseases by either using these cells to create compatible blood donations or by genetically modifying the person's cells in their body to cure the disease!

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Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital have, for the first time, generated blood-forming stem cells in the lab using pluripotent stem cells, which can make virtually every cell type in the body. The advance, published in the journal Nature, opens new avenues for research into the root causes of blood diseases and to creating immune-matched blood cells for treatment purposes, derived from patients' own cells.

"We're tantalizingly close to generating bona fide human blood stem cells in a dish," says senior investigator George Daley, MD, PhD, who heads a research lab in Boston Children's Hospital's Stem Cell Program and is dean of Harvard Medical School. "This work is the culmination of over 20 years of striving."

Although the cells made from the pluripotent stem cells are a mix of true blood stem cells and other cells known as blood progenitor cells, they proved capable of generating multiple types of human blood cells when put into mice.

"This step opens up an opportunity to take cells from patients with genetic blood disorders, use gene editing to correct their genetic defect and make functional blood cells," says Ryohichi (Rio) Sugimura, MD, PhD, the study's first author and a postdoctoral fellow in the Daley Lab. "This also gives us the potential to have a limitless supply of blood stem cells and blood by taking cells from universal donors. This could potentially augment the blood supply for patients who need transfusions."
Combining two approaches to achieve a breakthrough
Since human embryonic stem (ES) cells were isolated in 1998, scientists have been trying, with little success, to use them to make blood-forming stem cells. In 2007, three groups (including the Daley lab) generated the first induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from human skin cells through genetic reprogramming. iPS cells were later used to generate multiple human cell types, such as neurons and heart cells -- yet blood-forming stem cells remained elusive.

Sugimura, Daley and colleagues combined two previous approaches. First, they exposed human pluripotent stem cells (both ES and iPS cells) to chemical signals that direct stem cells to differentiate into specialized cells and tissues during normal embryonic development. This generated hemogenic endothelium, an early embryonic tissue that eventually gives rise to blood stem cells, although the transition to blood stem cells had never been achieved in a dish.

In the second step, the team added genetic regulatory factors (called transcription factors) to push the hemogenic endothelium toward a blood-forming state. Starting with 26 transcription factors identified as likely candidates, they eventually came down to just five (RUNX1, ERG, LCOR, HOXA5 and HOXA9) that were both necessary and sufficient for creating blood stem cells. They delivered the factors into the cells with a lentivirus, as used in some forms of gene therapy.

Finally, they transplanted the genetically engineered hemogenic endothelial cells into mice. Weeks later, a small number of the animals carried multiple types of human blood cells in their bone marrow and blood circulation. These included red blood cell precursors, myeloid cells (precursors of monocytes, macrophages, neutrophils, platelets and other cells), and T and B lymphocytes. Some mice were able to mount a human immune response after vaccination.

ES cells and iPS cells were similarly good at creating blood stem and progenitor cells when the technique was applied. But the researchers are most interested in iPS cells, which offer the added ability to derive cells directly from patients and model disease.

"We're now able to model human blood function in so-called 'humanized mice,'" says Daley. "This is a major step forward for our ability to investigate genetic blood disease."
What is a blood stem cell?
The researchers' technique produced a mixture of blood stem cells and so-called hematopoietic progenitor cells, which also give rise to blood cells. Their ultimate goal is to expand their ability to make true blood stem cells in a way that's practical and safe, without the need for viruses to deliver the transcription factors, and to introduce gene-editing techniques like CRISPR to correct genetic defects in pluripotent stem cells before blood cells are made.

One challenge in making bona-fide human blood stem cells is that no one's been able to fully characterize these cells.

"It's proved challenging to 'see' these cells," says Sugimura. "You can roughly characterize blood stem cells based on surface markers, but even with this, it may not be a true blood stem cell. And once it starts to differentiate and make blood cells, you can't go back and study it -- it's already gone. A better characterization of human blood stem cells and a better understanding of how they develop would give us clues to making bona-fide human blood stem cells."

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stem cells; immune system; lymphoma; anemia; hypertension; brain tumor; skin cancer; prostate cancer

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Approaching a decades-old goal: Making blood stem cells from patients' own cells: New technique raises possibility of making all types of blood cells to treat disease

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For the first time, researchers have generated blood-forming stem cells in the lab using pluripotent stem cells, which can make virtually every cell type in the body. The advance opens new avenues for research into the root causes of blood diseases and to creating immune-matched blood cells for treatment purposes, derived from patients' own cells.