TAMPA, Fla. – Graft-versus-host-disease (GVHD) is the leading cause of non-relapse associated death in patients who receive stem cell transplants. In a new study published as the cover story in Science Translational Medicine, Moffitt Cancer Center researchers show that a novel treatment can effectively inhibit the development of GVHD in mice and maintain the infection- and tumor-fighting capabilities of the immune system.
In-vitro gametogenesis is an experimental technique that allows scientists to grow embryos in a lab by reprograming adult cells to become sperm and egg cells.
Antibiotic use represents a special challenge, in which too much of a good thing can be dangerous to public health as a whole. The fight against a common, costly, hospital-acquired infection known as Clostridium difficile, or C. diff offers an illuminating case study in the area of so-called antibiotic stewardship.
NYU Langone Medical Center has announced that internationally recognized surgeon and scientist Diane M. Simeone, MD, will join its Perlmutter Cancer Center on March 1 to serve as associate director for translational research and to lead its newly established pancreatic cancer center.
The first FDA-approved clinical trial of its kind in the United States using a person’s own fat-derived adult stem cells to treat shoulder injuries is available at Sanford Health.
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Affimed N.V., a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering and developing highly targeted cancer immunotherapies, today announced an exclusive strategic clinical development and commercialization collaboration to evaluate Affimed’s TandAb technology in combination with
MD Anderson’s natural killer cell (NK) product.
Researchers have developed a synthetic version of a cardiac stem cell. These synthetic stem cells offer therapeutic benefits comparable to those from natural stem cells and could reduce some of the risks associated with stem cell therapies.
Using human embryonic stem cells to create a type of cardiac cells known as sinotrial (SA) node pacemaker cells, researchers have developed a biological pacemaker that overcomes many of the limitations of electrical pacemakers.
Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM) and the Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute (ISCI) at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine have begun testing to see whether adult stem cells derived from bone marrow benefit children with the congenital heart defect hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS).
Miqin Zhang, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Washington, is looking for ways to help the body heal itself when injury, disease or surgery cause large-scale damage to one type of tissue in particular: skeletal muscle.
Denis Evseenko, MD, PhD, of Keck Medicine of USC receives a $2.5 million grant from CIRM to develop an off-the-shelf therapy for osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis affects tens of millions of Americans, with that number expected to grow exponentially due to obesity and longer lifespans.
Delivery of stem cells to damaged tooth roots using a collagen-derived biomaterial is effective at regenerating dental pulp-like tissue and shows promise as a potential therapy for restoring natural tooth function in a rodent model.
A ‘living bandage’ made from stem cells, which could revolutionise the treatment and prognosis of a common sporting knee injury, has been trialled in humans for the first time by scientists at the Universities of Liverpool and Bristol.
In a Cancer Research paper, researchers: 1) identify a biomarker enzyme associated with aggressive glioma brain tumors, 2) reveal the regulatory mechanism for that enzyme, and 3) demonstrate potent efficacy, using a mouse model of glioma, for a small molecule inhibitor they have developed.
Johns Hopkins scientists report success in using a cocktail of cell-signaling chemicals to further wind back the biological clock of human embryonic stem cells (ESCs), giving the cells the same flexibility researchers have prized in mice ESCs.
Scientists from the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine, University Health Network, have developed the first functional pacemaker cells from human stem cells, paving the way for alternate, biological pacemaker therapy.
A team of scientists at the Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI) discovered a new bone-forming growth factor, Osteolectin (Clec11a), which reverses osteoporosis in mice and has implications for regenerative medicine.
Blood-forming stem cells are able to count and store memories of the number of times that they divide, findings which could have major implications for disease research, scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have found.
Leukemia researchers at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre have developed a 17-gene signature derived from leukemia stem cells that can predict at diagnosis if patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) will respond to standard treatment.
The fate of stem cells is determined by series of choices that sequentially narrow their available options until stem cells’ offspring have found their station and purpose in the body. Their decisions are guided in part by TET proteins rewriting the epigenome, the regulatory layer of chemical flags that adorn the genome and influence gene activity, report researchers at La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology and UC San Diego.
Researchers from the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute and the Cedars-Sinai Department of Medicine are expanding their ongoing evaluation of a novel cell-based therapeutic candidate into the area of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). This work will be supported by a recently-awarded $7.3 million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center announced promising results from an early trial in which patients with high-risk acute myeloid leukemia received genetically engineered immune cells. Of the 12 AML patients who received this experimental T-cell therapy after a transplant put their disease in remission, all are still in remission after a median follow-up of more than two years.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a novel strategy to reprogram cells from one type to another in a more efficient and less biased manner than previous methods.
The Mayo Clinic Center for Regenerative Medicine is a co-sponsor of the 2016 World Stem Cell Summit. More than 1,200 attendees are expected at the 12th annual event in West Palm Beach, Florida.
It may be possible to safely prevent one of the most common – and costly to treat – infections contracted by hospitalized patients undergoing bone marrow transplantation for the treatment of blood cancers, according to a study from the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The researchers will present their findings at this week’s 58th Annual American Society of Hematology Meeting and Exposition in San Diego.
Regenerative medicine company jCyte has completed enrollment in a phase I/IIa trial studying the safety of its stem cell therapy for retinitis pigmentosa. Early results are promising.
Scientists report in Nature Medicine using human pluripotent stem cells to grow human intestinal tissues that have functioning nerves in a laboratory, and then using these to recreate and study a severe intestinal nerve disorder called Hirschsprung’s disease.
The World Stem Cell Summit & RegMed Capital Conference has invited five faculty members from the Nova Southeastern University (NSU) Cell Therapy Institute to present on their research related to advancing new approaches to cancer immunotherapy and regenerative medicine at the organization’s 12th annual meeting.
The prospect of creating artery “banks” available for cardiovascular surgery, bypassing the need to harvest vessels from the patient, could transform treatment of many common heart and vascular ailments. But it’s a big leap from concept to reality.
In October, we mourned those who died of breast cancer and celebrated all of the women (and men) who have survived. What many of those survivors worry about, though, is that their breast cancer may come back. It has puzzled scientists and health care providers that cancer can suddenly reappear, often with a vengeance, months or years after treatment is over.
A computer scientist at Washington University in St. Louis has developed a way to coax cells to do natural things under unnatural circumstances, which could be useful for stem cell research, gene therapy and biofuel production.Michael Brent, the Henry Edwin Sever Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, has designed an algorithm, called NetSurgeon, that recommends genes to surgically remove from a cell’s genome to force it to perform a normal activity in a different environment or circumstance.
Results of a cellular therapy clinical trial for traumatic brain injury (TBI) using a patient’s own stem cells showed that the therapy appears to dampen the body’s neuroinflammatory response to trauma and preserve brain tissue, according to researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).
To get a head start on healing burn wounds, biomedical engineers at Michigan Technological University turn to the body's natural network. They combine engineered stem cell sheets with split thickness skin grafts to do so.
Cedars-Sinai regenerative medicine investigators have received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to test a combination stem cell-gene therapy they developed to stall the progression of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The approval allows 18 ALS patients to receive a new investigational drug in a few months when the study begins.
A study published in Scientific Reports describes a potential new strategy that may be utilized to correct hypospadias, a birth defect which occurs when boys are born with a urinary opening on the underside of the penis, found in up to one in every 200 boys. Current treatment involves surgical reconstruction with a graft using tissue taken from the inside of a child’s cheek. This approach is associated with multiple complications and sometimes requires repeated surgeries.
Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have confirmed that mutation-caused dysfunction in a process cells use to transport molecules within the cell plays a previously suspected but underappreciated role in promoting the heritable form of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but also one that might be remedied with existing therapeutic enzyme inhibitors.
For years, scientists have studied how stem cells might be used to treat many diseases, including osteoporosis. One consistent challenge has been observing and monitoring the process through which stem cells transform. Now, using an established scientific method, University of Missouri researchers are able to watch how human fat cells transform into bone tissue cells; in the process the research team has uncovered information about osteoporosis in older women.
An international collaboration of government, university, and industry resources showed the promise of using RNA as a safe way to both make and modify induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSCs) from patient cells for clinical applications in regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, and personalized medicine.
There generally are two approaches used to indirectly assess proarrhythmic risk, but some researchers believe that human induced pluripotent stem-cell derived (hiPSC)-cardiomyocytes offer an opportunity to change the paradigm.
The underlying cause of male infertility is unknown for 30 percent of cases. In a pair of new studies, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine determined that the reproductive homeobox (RHOX) family of transcription factors — regulatory proteins that activate some genes and inactivate others — drive the development of stem cells in the testes in mice. The investigators also linked RHOX gene mutations to male infertility in humans.
Cystinosis is a rare disease that usually strikes children before they are two years old and can lead to end stage kidney failure before their tenth birthday. Current treatments are limited, which is why the CIRM Board today approved $5.2 million for research that holds the possibility of a safe, effective, one-time life-long treatment.
To prevent heart failure and restore heart function, researchers will work to create a bioengineered, human heart-tissue patch that is large, standardized and highly functional. This preclinical work will be supported by a seven-year grant just awarded by the NHLBI.
The promise of stem cells to treat cardiovascular disease may soon be a step closer to clinical application as scientists from three institutions seek to perfect and test three-dimensional “heart patches” in a large animal model — the last big hurdle before trials in human patients.
Cells use specific proteins that help the cell remember what collection of genes needs to be turned on again after cell division. Removing these transcriptional bookmarks may be a key to better reprogramming of human fibroblasts to create induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs.
"After chemo, PI3K helps the cell shut down and weather the storm. Then when the chemo is gone, PI3K helps cancer stem cells start back up again," says University of Colorado Cancer Center investigator, Antonio Jimeno, MD, PhD.
In a World View opinion column published in Nature, a Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine researcher calls for animal-human embryo research to proceed – but only with strong animal protections in place.