News Posts
Skin Stem Cells for Nerve Regeneration
Milan, Italy - One approach to nervous system repair after injury involves implantation of "guide tubes", which has the name implies, preferentially induces regenerating neural cells to migrate into a desired direction. The question, of course, is what type of neural progenitors should one use in conjunction with such guide tubes. Embryonic stem cells have the disadvantage of potentially...
Embryonic to Mesenchymal Stem Cell Differentiation
Madison, Wisconsin - ES cells are very useful since they can be genetically modified to overexpress specific genes, or alternatively, specific genes can be deleted. In a recent publication (Trivedi et al. Simultaneous generation of CD34 primitive hematopoietic cells and CD73 mesenchymal stem cells from human embryonic stem cells...
Chromatin Modification for Hematopoietic Stem Cell Expansion
Chicago, Illinois - The ability to expand autologous hematopoietic stem cells ex vivo, while retaining hematopoietic reconstitutive activity in vivo would allow cell therapy for many types of leukemias and cancers in patients lacking donors. Unfortunately, to date, there has been very little success at ex vivo expansion of hematopoietic stem cells that can successful re-establish...
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Education by fat
Suita-shi, Japan - It is known that adipose tissue contains several interesting stem cell types. Although clinical trials are currently ongoing using adipose derived stem cells, little work is being performed using adipose stem cells to "educate" other types of stem cells. In a recent paper(Yamada Y et al. A novel approach for myocardial regeneration with educated cord blood cells...
CAR cells drive hematopoiesis
Kyoto, Japan - It is an established fact that administration of bone marrow hematopoietic cells systemically leads to their homing to the recipient bone marrow due in part to constitutive secretion of the cytokine SDF-1, otherwise known as CXCL12, by the bone marrow stroma. It is also known that tissue injury, whether by a pathological...
Clearing the genetic slate for curing diabetes
Braunschweig, Germany – It is known that a wide variety of agents that are involved epigenetic manipulation of cells are potential candidates for use in “transdifferentiation” or alteration of cellular phenotype. Histone deacetylases are critically involved in maintaining chromatin packing, and thereby transcriptionally silencing various parts of the genome. It is known that...
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Cord Blood Differentiation to Muscle
The possibility of stem cell treatment for muscular degenerative diseases has prompted numerous investigations. Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a dehabilitating disorder that afflicts approximately 1 in 35,000 boys. This disease is caused by a mutation in the dystrophin gene, whose protein product is found at high amounts in the cardiac and skeletal muscles and plays a role in sarcolemmal...
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In vitro cord blood immune suppression
Chicago, IL - The ability to use allogeneic cord blood transplants, without immune suppression is under great discussion. On the one hand, it is a fact that administration of allogeneic cord blood does not elicit GVHD when administered to non-immune suppressed patients (type "Bhattacharya N" and "cord blood" in pubmed for example papers). On the other hand...
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Inflammation Puts Immune System in a TRANCE
Munster, Germany – The concept of immunological tolerance is paramount to stem cell therapeutic applications. Specifically, the ability to induce tolerance would allow for use of allogeneic stem cell therapeutics using "off-the shelf" cell lines that are well characterized and standardized for induction of specific biological activities. Tolerance induction is maintained by many...
Curing Cancer By Differentiation
Milan, Italy - It is believed that out of a 1000 cancer cells, less than 1, or maybe even less than that are actual "tumor stem cells", and that this population is responsible for dividing and maintaining the tumor mass. The question has been, how to target this very small population. A recent paper (Piccirillo et al. Bone morphogenetic proteins inhibit the tumorigenic potential of...