News Posts
CD133 on Lung Cancer Stem Cells
Rome, Italy - The targeting of drugs to tumors has historically been a difficult task for reasons such as poor vasculature and high interstitial pressure. More recent studies have described that not all tumor cells in a tumor mass are the same. Specifically some cells in the tumor mass have very high proliferative and self-renewal potential whereas others do not. These cells, which some call...Wednesday December 5th, 2007 @ 04:03:39 EST
Brain Endothelium for Expanding Hematopoietic Stem Cells
Baltimore, MD - Expansion of human hematopoietic stem cells in the absence of differentiation would allow for development of autologous bone marrow transplants in a safe and reproducible manner. The problem is that to date, no protocol for expanding human hematopoietic stem cells has really been able to translate properly into the clinic. In a recent paper (Cheng X et al. Human brain...Wednesday December 5th, 2007 @ 03:50:20 EST
No blood from muscle?
Villejuif, France - The concept of cellular plasticity has attracted many followers, as well as many critics. On the one hand, papers used to be published suggesting various forms of transdifferentiation, for example neurons becoming blood cells, or hematopoietic stem cells becoming cardiomyocytes. On the other hand, some scientists...Friday November 30th, 2007 @ 03:45:30 EST
Liver Failure Regeneration: Its the quality of the injury that matters
Houston, Texas- There are numerous clinical examples of adult stem cells helping people or animals with liver failure. One of the ways in which mesenchymal stem cells help in liver failure is by their ability to produce IL-10 in response to stellate cell generated IL-6, and...Thursday November 29th, 2007 @ 21:57:03 EST
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Treg cells causing "alternative activation" of monocytes
London, UK - In immunology, the notion that T cells are activated by antigen presenting cells has been around for decades. At one time, it was believed that T cells are activated by "immune RNA" generated from antigen presenting cells, this immune RNA being able to "instruct" the T cell to go after specific antigens. Afterwards, the major histocompatibility molecules were demonstrated to...Thursday November 29th, 2007 @ 21:33:08 EST
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PSGL-1 and generation of tolerogenic dendritic cells
Madrid, Spain - The advancement of allogeneic stem cell research into the clinic has always been dependent on immunology. In other words, allogeneic stem cell therapy is dependent on ability of the clinician to manipulate the recipient immune system so that the allogeneic cells do not get rejected (host versus graft), nor that the recipient gets attacked by the cells administered (graft...Tuesday November 27th, 2007 @ 11:10:10 EST
Bone marrow stem cells in pulmonary hypertension
New Orleans, Louisiana - Adult stem cells have been used clinically in treatment of heart failure, liver failure, and advanced peripheral artery disease. One exciting possible use of stem cells is in the treatment of...Tuesday November 27th, 2007 @ 03:13:15 EST
A New Age in Regenerative Medicine
Kyoto, Japan - In a recent paper Takahashi K et al. Induction of Pluripotent Stem Cells from Adult Human Fibroblasts by Defined Factors.Cell. 2007 Nov 20 generation of an "inducible pluripotent stem cell" or iPS from human skin was announced. Here is a video...Sunday November 25th, 2007 @ 14:00:31 EST
Embryonic Stem Cells from Skin
[Watch the Video] This is a video describing the recent paper in Cell in which skin fibroblasts were retrodifferentiated to cells that "looked and felt" like embryonic stem cells. This is a major breakthrough in our knowledge of cell dedifferentiation and ability to use distinct, chemically-defined factors to coax an old cell into becoming a young cell again.Sunday November 25th, 2007 @ 13:50:29 EST
Rapamycin turns stops Th17 but promotes Treg
Frederick, Maryland - Although mesenchymal stem cells are currently used in an allogeneic manner clinically, the question of whether they are truly tolerogenic is still debated. Other stem cell types such as CD34 or embryonic stem cells may possess different levels of...Monday November 19th, 2007 @ 17:02:10 EST