Feature Channels: Stem Cells

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• UCLA stem cell scientists identify and characterize articular cartilage stem/progenitor cells at different stages of human growth, from 5th week development to 60 years of age. • Biological “road map” created for tracking proper development of cartilage stem/progenitor cells. • Novel stem cell based therapy for cartilage damage and osteoarthritis possible within three years.

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Donated umbilical cord blood contains stem cells that can save the lives of leukemia and lymphoma patients. A multi-center study has found that growing cord blood stem cells in a laboratory before transplantation significantly improves survival.

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Adding bortezomib (Velcade) to standard preventive therapy for graft-versus-host-disease (GVHD) results in improved outcomes for patients receiving stem-cell transplants from mismatched and unrelated donors, according to researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

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A new study, published in Cell Stem Cell, identifies a molecular pathway that can be activated to prompt hair growth of dormant hair follicles, or blocked to prevent growth of unwanted hair.

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Using a powerful gene-hunting technique for the first time in mammalian brain cells, researchers at Johns Hopkins report they have identified a gene involved in building the circuitry that relays signals through the brain. The gene is a likely player in the aging process in the brain, the researchers say. Additionally, in demonstrating the usefulness of the new method, the discovery paves the way for faster progress toward identifying genes involved in complex mental illnesses such as autism and schizophrenia — as well as potential drugs for such conditions.

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Researchers have identified a new tool that could help facilitate future stem cell therapy for the more than 700,000 Americans who suffer a heart attack each year.

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Plant breeders hunting for genes to combat new diseases or adapt to changes in climate can plumb the vast diversity of crops and their wild relatives using envelopes of seed banked in cold storage, but cattle breeders are limited to herds here and now. A new $500,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture grant is funding research on a new, stem cell-based system that could capture global herd diversity in a subzero vault.

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Scientists and surgeons at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre have discovered a promising new approach to treating colorectal cancer by disarming the gene that drives self-renewal in stem cells that are the root cause of disease, resistance to treatment and relapse.

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For the first time, scientists have succeeded in transforming human stem cells into functional lung and airway cells. The advance, reported by Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers, has significant potential for modeling lung disease, screening drugs, studying human lung development, and, ultimately, generating lung tissue for transplantation. The study was published today in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

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Researchers in the Cedars-Sinai Regenerative Medicine Institute have designed and tested a novel, minute-long procedure to prepare human amniotic membrane for use as a scaffold for specialized stem cells that may be used to treat some corneal diseases. This membrane serves as a foundation that supports the growth of stem cells in order to graft them onto the cornea. This new method, explained in a paper published this month in the journal PLOS ONE, may accelerate research and clinical applications for stem cell corneal transplantation.

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• Prostate cancer stem cells evolve into different cells as prostate cancer progresses becoming a moving target for therapy. • Scientists must be prepared for the continual evolution of the stem cell as tumors adapt and become resistant to new and more potent therapies. • With this knowledge, researchers can now design therapies that target the elements of the cancer stem cells that remain unchanged.

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Dr. Hanna Mikkola and researchers at UCLA’s Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research have identified a novel progenitor cell and a related cell communication pathway key to growth of a healthy placenta.The team’s discovery gives scientists a “tool box” for understanding the developmental hierarchy of progenitor cells that initiate growth of the placenta, and greatly increases the knowledge of what might cause pregnancy complications.

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The recent identification of brown fat stem cells in adult humans may lead to new treatments for heart and endocrine disorders, according to a new University of Utah study published in the journal Stem Cells.

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Diseases affecting the kidneys represent a major and unsolved health issue worldwide. The kidneys rarely recover function once they are damaged by disease, highlighting the urgent need for better knowledge of kidney development and physiology.

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Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have used genetic engineering of human induced pluripotent stem cells to specifically and precisely parse the roles of a key mutated protein in causing familial Alzheimer’s disease (AD), discovering that simple loss-of-function does not contribute to the inherited form of the neurodegenerative disorder.

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Scientists from the New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute and Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) have used stem cells created from the skin of patients with a rare form of diabetes—Wolfram syndrome—to elucidate an important biochemical pathway for beta-cell failure in diabetes. The findings were published in Diabetes.

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UCLA is participating in a multi-site clinical trial testing stem-cell therapy to improve blood flow in angina patients. The clinical trial evaluates treatment for patients who haven’t responded to other FDA-approved procedures for angina. The procedure uses the latest technology to map the heart in 3-D and guides the doctor to deliver injections of a patient’s own stem-cells or a placebo to targeted sites in the heart muscle.

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A specialized type of brain cell that tamps down stem cell activity ironically, perhaps, encourages the survival of the stem cells’ progeny, Johns Hopkins researchers report. Understanding how these new brain cells “decide” whether to live or die and how to behave is of special interest because changes in their activity are linked to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, mental illness and aging.

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A study led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine shines a new light on molecular tools our cells use to govern regulated gene expression.

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Two groups of scientists at the Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI) have made complementary discoveries that break new ground on efforts to turn back the body’s clock on cellular activity, paving the way for a better understanding of stem cells, tissue growth, and regeneration.

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University of Adelaide research using special adult stem cells is promising new hope for better treatments for the devastating genetic disease Hurler’s syndrome.

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For decades, scientists have searched for treatments for myopathies — genetic muscular diseases such as muscular dystrophy and ALS, also called Lou Gehrig’s disease. Now, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Arizona State and Stanford Universities, and the University of Arizona, has discovered a new avenue to search for treatment possibilities.

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A stem cell therapy previously shown to reduce inflammation in the critical time window after traumatic brain injury also promotes lasting cognitive improvement, according to preclinical research at UTHealth in Houston.

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It was once thought that each cell in a person's body possesses the same DNA code and that the particular way the genome is read imparts cell function and defines the individual. For many cell types in our bodies, however, that is an oversimplification. Studies of neuronal genomes published in the past decade have turned up extra or missing chromosomes, or pieces of DNA that can copy and paste themselves throughout the genomes.

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One challenge in using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) – which are reprogrammed regular cells – is that they retain traces of their former identities. Dr. Jacob Hanna has now created iPSCs that are completely reset to the earliest possible state, and is able to keep them there. Potential applications include custom-grown transplant organs.

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Early stem cell transplants for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma do not improve overall survival in high-risk patients. But early transplantation does appear to benefit very high-risk patients, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Research from Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey demonstrates that using zebrafish to identify self-renewing tumor stem cells in prostate cancers may be more beneficial than using traditional experimental models when aiming to predict response to therapy.

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A study, led by researchers at the Cedars-Sinai Regenerative Medicine Institute and published in Science Translational Medicine, is believed to be one of the first in which a specific form of Lou Gehrig’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, was replicated in a dish, analyzed and “treated,” suggesting a potential future therapy all in a single study.

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Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have, for the first time, taken chimpanzee and bonobo skin cells and turned them into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), a type of cell that has the ability to form any other cell or tissue in the body.

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A UCLA study is the first to identify a biological clock able to gauge the age of most human tissues. Some parts of the anatomy, like a woman’s breasts, age faster than the rest of the body.

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Scientists report in Nature they have found a novel and unexpected molecular switch that could become a key to slowing some of the ravages of getting older as it prompts blood stem cells to age.

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Johns Hopkins scientists have developed new drugs that — at least in a laboratory dish — appear to halt the brain-destroying impact of a genetic mutation at work in some forms of two incurable diseases, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and dementia.

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Applications of stem cells in developing thyroid function. This is an important area to treat anyone with thyroid deficiency, whether congenital or acquired. Chinnaiyan, explores how genes and mutations can cause cancer, and how genome sequencing can be used to diagnose and treat cancer.

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Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have identified a protein expressed by human bone marrow stem cells that guides and stimulates the formation of blood vessels. Their findings, which could help improve the vascularization of engineered tissues, were reported online on October 12 in the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology.

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For the first time, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have isolated and characterized the progenitor cells that eventually give rise to malignant hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) tumors – the most common form of liver cancer. The researchers found ways to identify and isolate the HCC progenitor cells (HcPC) long before actual tumors were apparent.

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New research has shown that the stomach naturally produces more stem cells than previously realized, likely for repair of injuries from infections, digestive fluids and the foods we eat.

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Johns Hopkins researchers, working with elderly mice, have determined that combining gene therapy with an extra boost of the same stem cells the body already uses to repair itself leads to faster healing of burns and greater blood flow to the site of the wound.

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Two patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) have received stem cell injections to their spinal cords at the Univ. of Michigan Health System – the first two to receive the experimental injections in Michigan as part of a national clinical trial.

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Stem cell scientists have moved one step closer to producing blood-forming stem cells in a Petri dish by identifying a key regulator controlling their formation in the early embryo, shows research published online today in Cell.

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University at Buffalo translational researchers are developing a richer understanding of atherosclerosis in humans, revealing a key role for stem cells that promote inflammation.

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Reprogramming adult stem cells so that they are like embryonic stem cells has the potential to change medicine; however, the reprogramming process is inefficient and impractical. Now, Dr. Yaqub Hanna has found that removing one protein changes everything, raising the efficiency of this reprogramming from one percent or less to 100 percent.

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We often think of human cells as tiny computers that perform assigned tasks, where disease is a result of a malfunction. But in the current issue of Science, researchers at The Mount Sinai Medical Center offer a radical view of health — seeing it more as a cooperative state among cells, while they see disease as result of cells at war that fight with each other for domination.

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A new study from researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center found that a subset of immune cells provide a niche where cancer stem cells survive.

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Mayo Clinic researchers have found a way to resynchronize cardiac motion following a heart attack using stem cells. Scientists implanted engineered stem cells, also known as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, into damaged regions of mouse hearts following a heart attack.

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A Cedars-Sinai team of researchers led by principal investigator Dan Gazit, PhD, DMD, has been awarded a $5.18 million grant from California’s stem cell research agency to advance stem cell technologies in segmental bone defects, a complex medical problem caused by large portions of bone tissue loss.

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Like volunteers handing out cups of energy drinks to marathon runners, specially engineered “helper cells” transplanted along with stem cells can dole out growth factors to increase the stem cells’ endurance, at least briefly, Johns Hopkins researchers report. Their study, published in the September issue of Experimental Neurology, is believed to be the first to test the helper-cell tactic, which they hope will someday help to overcome a major barrier to successful stem cell transplants.

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Stem cell scientists at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre have discovered the gene GATA3 has a role in how blood stem cells renew themselves, a finding that advances the quest to expand these cells in the lab for clinical use in bone marrow transplantation, a procedure that saves thousands of lives every year.

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By studying the planarian flatworm, a master of regenerating missing tissue and repairing wounds, the lab of Whitehead Institute Member Peter Reddien has identified an unexpected source of position instruction: the muscle cells in the planarian body wall. This is the first time that such a positional control system has been identified in adult regenerative animals.

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Scientists have long believed that healthy brain cells, once damaged by radiation designed to kill brain tumors, cannot regenerate. But new Johns Hopkins research in mice suggests that neural stem cells, the body’s source of new brain cells, are resistant to radiation, and can be roused from a hibernation-like state to reproduce and generate new cells able to migrate, replace injured cells and potentially restore lost function.

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The invasion of brain-tumor cells into surrounding tissue requires the same protein molecule that neurons need to migrate into position as they differentiate and mature, according to new research from the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine and published August 7 in the online journal PLOS ONE.