Nucleostemin and lens regeneration

Kobe, Japan - It is known that in the newt, regeneration of differentiated cells occurs in response to various types of injury. It is also known that the gene for nucleostemin (NS) encodes a GTP-binding protein which is found in the nucleolus of stem cells and cancer cells at high concentrations. Accumulation of nucleostemin in the nucleolus of pigmented...

Therapeutic ES Cells

Nara, Japan - Liver cirrhosis afflicts numerous members of population, being the result of excessive fibrosis which ends in hepatic decompensation and death. To date little is available in terms of therapeutic solutions for advanced cirrhosis. Accordingly, the use of stem cells for this indication is promising. In a recent paper (Moriya et al. Embryonic stem cells develop into...

Wednesday March 14th, 2007 @ 15:40:27 EST 2 Comments

Stem Cells Getting Old

Iowa City, IA- Although autologous bone marrow is currently investigated clinically for numerous indications, one of the fears is that old stem cells may lose regenerative ability with age, and as a result be less effective as opposed to other stem cell sources such as cord blood. A recent publication (Zheng et al. Impact of aging on rat bone marrow-derived stem cell chondrogenesis. J...

Mesenchymal stem cells to liver

Hangzhou, China - The ability of bone marrow derived mesenchymal cells to differentiate into various lineages is well-known. A recent paper (Chen et al. Hepatocytes induced by conditioned culture medium of hepatocytes. J Cell Biochem. 2007 Mar 5;) describes a novel protocol for inducing differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells into hepatocytes. Essentially, mesenchymal stem cells were...

Cord Blood Transplants Without Immune Suppression

Tempe, Arizona - The current use of cord blood as a substitute for bone marrow in individuals lacking an appropriate donor has made a tremendous impact on treatment of various hematological malignancies. Cord blood has several advantages to bone marrow, including reduced HLA matching requirements (4/6 is acceptable, wherease bone marrow has to be 6/6), widespread...

Giving Hematopoiesis a Hand

New York, NY - Despite the introduction of various types of mutation-specific kinase inhibitors into the field of hematology/oncology, the only curative approach for many of the leukemias still resides in bone marrow or hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Drawbacks of this approach are the need for myeloablation of the recipient, followed by post transplant immune suppression to...

Saturday March 3rd, 2007 @ 21:57:55 EST 1 Comment

A new method of transfecting stem cells

Victoria, Australia - Anyone working with genetic modification of cells knows that transfection can be pretty difficult task depending on the cell population of study. Issues with transfection arise when cells are very fragile, or when the specific cell type for one reason or another does not allow efficient integration of the transgene. In a recent paper (Wagstaff et al...

Mesenchymal "Islets"

Seoul, Korea - The search for ways of generating islets for treatment of Type 1 Diabetes is very intense with groups claiming to have generating islets from a wide variety of stem cells. In a recent study (Kim et al. Generation of insulin-producing human mesenchymal stem cells using recombinant adeno-associated virus.Yonsei Med J. 2007 Feb 28;48(1):109-19.) investigators transfected...

Thursday March 1st, 2007 @ 09:56:48 EST 1 Comment

Obviousness in Biotechnology

[Watch the Video] The case of KSR v Teleflex addressess the issue of obviousness, which is fundamental for the biotech industry in general, and especially for companies operating in the area of stem cells. This video clip overviews some aspects of the case. More details can be found in the StemCellPatents.com Journal Article entitled Friday February 23rd, 2007 @ 21:19:37 EST