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pieceinthepuzzlehumanity This Is The Right One -
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torgothegreat God Delusion
Scientists turn skin cells into beating heart muscle:
Scientists have for the first time succeeded in taking skin cells from patients with heart failure and transforming them into healthy, beating heart tissue that could one day be used to treat the condition.
The researchers, based in Haifa, Israel, said there were still many years of testing and refining ahead. But the results meant they might eventually be able to reprogram patients’ cells to repair their own damaged hearts.
“We have shown that it’s possible to take skin cells from an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young - the equivalent to the stage of his heart cells when he was just born,” said Lior Gepstein from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, who led the work.
The researchers, whose study was published in the European Heart Journal on Wednesday, said clinical trials of the technique could begin within 10 years.
Heart failure is a debilitating condition in which the heart is unable to pump enough blood around the body. It has become more prevalent in recent decades as advances medical science mean many more people survive heart attacks.
At the moment, people with severe heart failure have to rely on mechanical devices or hope for a transplant.
Researchers have been studying stem cells from various sources for more than a decade, hoping to capitalize on their ability to transform into a wide variety of other kinds of cell to treat a range of health conditions.
There are two main forms of stem cells - embryonic stem cells, which are harvested from embryos, and reprogrammed “human induced pluripotent stem cells” (hiPSCs), often originally from skin or blood.
Gepstein’s team took skin cells from two men with heart failure - aged 51 and 61 - and transformed them by adding three genes and then a small molecule called valproic acid to the cell nucleus.
They found that the resulting hiPSCs were able to differentiate to become heart muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes, just as effectively as hiPSCs that had been developed from healthy, young volunteers who acted as controls for the study.
The team was then able to make the cardiomyocytes develop into heart muscle tissue, which they grew in a laboratory dish together with existing cardiac tissue.
Within 24 to 48 hours the two types of tissue were beating together, they said.
In a final step of the study, the new tissue was transplanted into healthy rat hearts and the researchers found it began to establish connections with cells in the host tissue.
“We hope that hiPSCs derived cardiomyocytes will not be rejected following transplantation into the same patients from which they were derived,” Gepstein said. “Whether this will be the case or not is the focus of active investigation.”
Experts in stem cell and cardiac medicine who were not involved in Gepstein’s work praised it but also said there was a lot to do before it had a chance of becoming an effective treatment.
“This is an interesting paper, but very early and it’s really important for patients that the promise of such a technique is not over-sold,” said John Martin a professor of cardiovascular medicine at University College London.
“The chances of translation are slim and if it does work it would take around 15 years to come to clinic.”
Nicholas Mills, a consultant cardiologist at Edinburgh University said the technology needs to be refined before it could be used for patients with heart failure, but added: “These findings are encouraging and take us a step closer to … identifying an effective means of repairing the heart.”
ikenbot
Damaged human heart muscle cannot be regenerated. Scar tissue grows in place of the damaged muscle cells. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim are seeking to restore complete cardiac function with the help of artificial cardiac tissue. They have succeeded in loading cardiac muscle cells onto a three-dimensional scaffold, created using the silk produced by a tropical silkworm.
Despite these promising results, clinical application of the fibre is not currently on the agenda. “Unlike in our study, which we carried out using rat cells, the problem of obtaining sufficient human cardiac cells as starting material has not yet been solved,” says Felix Engel, Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research. It is thought that the patient’s own stem cells could be used as starting material to avoid triggering an immune reaction. However, exactly how the conversion of the stem cells into cardiac muscle cells works remains a mystery.
(image from Wired)
aamukherjee
Umbilical Cord Stem Cells Converted into Brain Support Cells For the first time ever, stem cells from umbilical cords have been converted into other types of cells, which may eventually lead to new treatment options for spinal cord injuries and multiple sclerosis, among other nervous system diseases. “This is the first time this has been done with non-embryonic stem cells,” says James Hickman, a University of Central Florida bioengineer and leader of the research group. ”We’re very excited about where this could lead because it overcomes many of the obstacles present with embryonic stem cells.” Stem cells from umbilical cords do not pose an ethical dilemma because the cells come from a source that would otherwise be discarded. Another major benefit is that umbilical cells generally have not been found to cause immune reactions, which would simplify their potential use in medical treatments.
alchymista
A skeletal muscle stem cell (light green cell near center) moving towards the muscle-tendon junction in an isolated mouse muscle. DNA is highlighted in blue.
Image by Viola F. Gnocchi, King’s College London.
Animal study raises the prospect of using freshly grown dopamine-producing cells to treat people with Parkinson’s
Brain cells that die off in Parkinson’s disease have been grown fromstem cells and grafted into monkeys’ brains in a major step towards new treatments for the condition.
US researchers say they have overcome previous difficulties in coaxing human embryonic stem cells to become the neurons killed by the disease. Tests showed the cells survive and function normally in animals and reverse movement problems caused by Parkinson’s in monkeys.
The breakthrough raises the prospect of transplanting freshly grown dopamine-producing cells into human patients to treat the disease.
Original paper here.
Beauty of Science: Neural Stem Cells Galore
Latin: Cellula Nervosa Precursoria
We all know at this point that Neurons are quite photogenic once you get it under the right lighting and scope, but what about their earlier years when they were just neural stem cells? Here’s a post I’ve been meaning to put together highlighting the beauty of the neural stem cell in swarms.
Neural stem cells (NSCs) are the self-renewing, multipotent cells that generate the main phenotypes of the nervous system.
In other words they’re the cells that form up from the start in your nervous system to turn into different types of neural related cells.
(via ikenbot)
Scientists Produce First Endangered-Species Stem Cells
Scripps Research scientists produce first stem cells from endangered species. Cells could make it possible to improve reproduction and genetic diversity for some species, possibly saving them from extinction, or to bolster the health of endangered animals in captivity.
Stem cells are quickly becoming an important tool for human medical treatments, and researchers are betting they will also be a useful tool for zoo animals. They are working to create stem cell lines from zoo animals, for use in treating animal diabetes and other ailments as well as helping the animals reproduce.
The scientists have already created a “frozen zoo,” which contains different types of cells from every animal there, and now they are putting together a “stem cell zoo.”
“There are only two animals in it,” study researcher Inbar Friedrich Ben-Nun, of The Scripps Research Institute, said in a statement, “but we have the start of a new zoo, the stem cell zoo.”
Stem cells are prized, because they can be turned into any type of cell in the body, a characteristic called pluripotency. The cells can even be turned into sperm or egg cells, and used in assisted reproduction to make more individuals of the species.
Image Credit: San Diego Zoo
(via ikenbot)
