Monthly Archives: February 2017

Sanford Research scientists recently published a review article in an issue of Stem Cells Translational Medicine focused on the study of and utility of adult-derived stem cells.

Earlier this month, Sanford began enrolling participants in the Safety and Efficacy of Adult Adipose-Derived Stem Cell Injections into Partial Thickness Rotator Cuff Tears clinical trial. The trial uses stromal vascular fraction, a mixture of cells and nutrients isolated from a patient's own body that contain adipose-derived stem cells, as a potential therapy for partial-thickness rotator cuff tears. Sanford scientists and clinicians are exploring the application of this type of stem cells for other conditions.

The team put together the review after recognizing that the medical and general communities have limited knowledge about the various types of stem cells and how they could be used in medicine.

The article, "Fat and Furious: Harnessing the Full Potential of Adipose-Derived Stromal Vascular Fraction," is a review of the various types of stem cells found in humans and how they can be used in medical applications. The researchers emphasized the difference between the SVF isolated from adipose tissue and the pure adipose-derived stem cells that have been purified and maintained in a culture dish. Understanding those differences can help dictate appropriate therapies and regulations, particularly in countries where the SVF could be less regulated than other stem cells. It's also important to understand how SVF composition varies in healthy versus disease states.

"Continued research into the application of SVF and adipose derived stem cells has the potential to transform treatments and therapy options," said Daniel Kota, assistant research scientist for Sanford Research. "But it all starts with putting scientists on the same page -- tracking results following transfusions, using appropriate nomenclature and examining regulations."

Stem Cells Translational Medicine publishes papers in the evolving field of translational medicine, with a focus on helping speed emerging discoveries into clinical trials.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Sanford Health. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Here is the original post:
Researchers take broad look at stem cells - Science Daily

Bobby Paultauf and his band will play the throwdown.

Those in the Redding, Easton area are probably aware of what happened to Joel Barlow High School student Zach Standen in the summer of 2016. Zach was in a devastating auto accident that left him partially paralyzed.

He needs hope and support from as many people as possible. He needs countless medical procedures in order to gain movement to his legs again through stem cell treatment due to a tragic car accident that made him paralyzed.

To help support Standens recovery, local musicians Bobby Paltauf, of the Bobby Paltauf Band, and Grayson Hugh, of Grayson Hugh & the Moon Hawks, will play a benefit show on Saturday, March 11 at the Fairfield Theater Company.

The family has started a GoFundMe account where people are able to donate to this expensive treatment. Lets all get together and help him walk again, Paultaufs mother, Tiffany, wrote in a press release.

Bobby Paltauf is a senior at Joel Barlow High School, where Standen goes.

Lets all get together and support local live music, especially where it benefits the hope of Zach being able to walk again, his mother wrote.

For the concert benefitting Standen, more information can be found on The Bobby Paltauf Band page on Facebook, and tickets are available at http://www.fairfieldtheatre.org.

Standen may be helped by stem cell medical treatments that can be administered in Panama.

The Standen family is in discussions and communication with the Cell Medicine Institute in that country and are pursuing this line of treatment for the young man, who is paralyzed.

We have done much research into stem cell therapy for spinal cord injuries here in the U.S. and Canada, and there just are no clinical trials or clinics that have the experience and track record like this one, the family said in a recent letter. Cell Medicine has been doing this specific treatment since 2006 and has a 60% to 70% success rate of some kind of improvements in most patients within a year.

Each procedure costs $37,200, which includes all medical procedures and ancillary needs. This is not covered by medical insurance.

The family is hoping everyone reading this could go to his GoFundMe page and donate $25, to help Zachs recovery.

To donate, visit: https://www.gofundme.com/stem-cell-therapy-for-zach-standen.

Excerpt from:
'Small Town Throwdown' will benefit Zach Standen - Easton Courier

Scientists have coaxed sound-sensing cells in the ear, called "hair cells," to grow from stem cells. This technique, if perfected with human cells, could help halt or reverse the most common form of hearing loss, according to a new study.

These delicate hair cells can be damaged by excessive noise, ear infections, certain medicines or the natural process of aging. Human hair cells do not naturally regenerate; so as they die, hearing declines.

More than 20 million Americans have significant hearing loss resulting from the death or injury of these sensory hair cells, accounting for about 90 percent of hearing loss in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the new study, scientists at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that they isolated stem cells from a mouse ear, discovered how to get them to multiply in a laboratory setting, and then converted them into hair cells. Their previous efforts, in 2013, produced only 200 hair cells. With a new technique, however, the research team has increased this number to 11,500 hair cells that were grown from one mouse ear. [Inside Life Science: Once Upon a Stem Cell]

Their paper describing the stem cell advance appears today (Feb. 21) in the journal Cell Reports.

Jeffrey Corwin, an expert on hair-cell regeneration and a professor of neuroscience at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, who was not part of this new research, called it "a very impressive studyby a dream team of scientists" and "a big advance" in the pursuit of regenerating these sensory hearing cells in humans.

Hair cells grow in bundles in the inner ear, and are so named because they look like hairs. Many hair cells within the ear are involved in balance, not hearing. But in the cochlea, the hearing organ deep in the ear canal, there are two kinds of specialized hair cells: outer hair cells, which amplify pitch and enable humans to discern subtle differences in sound; and inner hair cells, which convert sound into electrical signals sent to the brain. Humans have two cochleae (one in each ear), and each has only about 16,000 hair cells.

In fish, birds, lizards and amphibians, cochlear hair cells that die can be regenerated in as fast as a few days. However, in mammals, for the most part, the cells cannot regenerate except for mice and other small mammals when they are newly born. But since so many species can naturally regenerate hair cells from a stem cell precursor, including some newborn mammals, many researchers have been motivated to find a way to rekindle hair-cell regeneration in adult mammals and, of course, in humans, Corwin said.

The new research was done by a team led by Albert Edge, director of the Tillotson Cell Biology Unit at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and professor of otolaryngology at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

In 2012, Edge's group discovered stem cells in the ear called Lgr5+ cells. These cells are also found in the gut, where they actively regenerate the entire lining of human intestines every eight days. The research team soon found a way to coax the Lgr5+ cells to differentiate into hair cells, instead of intestinal cells. But the process was slow, and the yield was low.

Now, the researchers have increased the yield dramatically by inserting a new step. After removing Lgr5+ cells from mice, the researchers first get them to divide in a special growth medium. This step produced a two-thousandfold increase in Lgr5+ cells, Edge told Live Science. Then, the researchers moved these stem cells into a different kind of growth culture and added certain chemicals to turn the Lgr5+ cells into hair cells. [7 Ways the Mind and Body Change With Age]

These laboratory-grown hair cells appear to have many of the characteristics of actual inner and outer hair cells, although they might not be fully functional, Edge said. The most immediate use for this new technique will be to create a large set of the cells to test drugs and to identify compounds that can heal damaged hair cells or regrow them and restore hearing, Edge said.

Scientists have had difficulty testing drugs on large batches of actual hair cells because there are so few in mammalian ears and they are deep in the cochlea, hard to extract, Edge said.

The researchers have reason to believe the technique to regenerate fully functional hair cells in humans could someday work. As reported in their paper, the team tested the technique on a sample of healthy ear tissue from a 40-year-old patient who underwent a labyrinthectomy (removal of parts of the inner ear) to access a brain tumor. The adult human stem cells isolated from this tissue also multiplied and differentiated into hair cells, although not as robustly as the mouse cells did.

But as Corwin noted about Edge's research, "You can see in their paper that they are perfecting their technique as they go along."

Follow Christopher Wanjek @wanjekfor daily tweets on health and science with a humorous edge. Wanjek is the author of "Food at Work" and "Bad Medicine." His column, Bad Medicine, appears regularly on Live Science.

Read the original post:
Hear This: Scientists Regrow Sound-Sensing Cells - Live Science

February 22, 2017 Micrograph showing a lymph node invaded by ductal breast carcinoma, with extension of the tumour beyond the lymph node. Credit: Nephron/Wikipedia

Working with human breast cancer cells and mice, researchers at Johns Hopkins say they have identified a biochemical pathway that triggers the regrowth of breast cancer stem cells after chemotherapy.

The regrowth of cancer stem cells is responsible for the drug resistance that develops in many breast tumors and the reason that for many patients, the benefits of chemo are short-lived. Cancer recurrence after chemotherapy is frequently fatal.

"Breast cancer stem cells pose a serious problem for therapy," says lead study investigator Gregg Semenza, M.D., Ph.D., the C. Michael Armstrong Professor of Medicine, director of the Vascular Biology Program at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering and a member of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. "These are the cells that can break away from a tumor and metastasize; these are the cells you most want to kill with chemotherapy. Paradoxically, though, cancer stem cells are quite resistant to chemotherapy."

Semenza says previous studies have shown that resistance to chemotherapy arises from the hardy nature of cancer stem cells, which are often found in the centers of tumors, where oxygen levels are quite low. Their survival is made possible through proteins known as hypoxia-inducible factors (HIFs), which turn on genes that help the cells survive in a low-oxygen environment.

In this new study, described Feb. 21 in Cell Reports, Semenza and his colleagues conducted gene expression analysis of multiple human breast cancer cell lines grown in the laboratory after exposure to chemotherapy drugs, like carboplatin, which stops tumor growth by damaging cancer cell DNA. The team found that the cancer cells that survived tended to have higher levels of a protein known as glutathione-S-transferase O1, or GSTO1. Experiments showed that HIFs controlled the production of GSTO1 in breast cancer cells when they were exposed to chemotherapy; if HIF activity was blocked in these lab-grown cells, GSTO1 was not produced.

Semenza notes that GSTO1 and related GST proteins are antioxidant enzymes, but GSTO1's role in chemotherapy resistance did not require its antioxidant activity. Instead, following exposure to chemotherapy, GSTO1 binds to a protein called the ryanodine receptor 1, or RYR1, that triggers the release of calcium, which causes a chain reaction that transforms ordinary breast cancer cells into cancer stem cells.

To more directly assess the role of GSTO1 and RYR1 in the breast tumor response to chemotherapy, the researchers injected human breast cancer cells into the mammary gland of mice and then treated the mice with carboplatin after tumors had formed. In addition to using normal breast cancer cells in the experiments, the team also used cancer cells that had been genetically engineered to lack either GSTO1 or RYR1. Loss of either GSTO1 or RYR1, the researchers report, decreased the number of cancer stem cells in the primary tumor, blocked metastasis of cancer cells from the primary tumor to the lungs, decreased the duration of chemotherapy required to induce remission and increased the duration of time after chemotherapy was stopped that the mice remained tumor-free.

Although the study showed that blocking the production of GSTO1 may improve the efficacy of chemotherapy drugs, such as carboplatin, GSTO1 is only one of many proteins that are produced under the control of HIFs in breast cancer cells that have been exposed to chemotherapy. The Semenza lab is working to develop drugs that can block the action of HIFs, with the hope that HIF inhibitors will make chemotherapy more effective.

Explore further: Toughest breast cancer may have met its match

More information: Haiquan Lu et al. Chemotherapy-Induced Ca2+ Release Stimulates Breast Cancer Stem Cell Enrichment, Cell Reports (2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2017.02.001

Triple-negative breast cancer is as bad as it sounds. The cells that form these tumors lack three proteins that would make the cancer respond to powerful, customized treatments. Instead, doctors are left with treating these ...

Working with mice, Johns Hopkins researchers report they have identified chemical signals that certain breast cancers use to recruit two types of normal cells needed for the cancers' spread. A description of the findings ...

Working with human breast cancer cells and mice, scientists at The Johns Hopkins University say new experiments explain how certain cancer stem cells thrive in low oxygen conditions. Proliferation of such cells, which tend ...

Chemotherapy is a key part of the standard treatment regimen for triple-negative breast cancer patients whose cancer lacks expression of estrogen and progesterone receptors and the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 ...

Existing chemotherapy approaches treat cancer by targeting cells that are actively multiplying and have a high metabolic rate. However, cancer stem cells can escape this targeting, leading to chemotherapy-resistant cancer ...

Conventional, high-dose chemotherapy treatments can cause the fibroblast cells surrounding tumors to secrete proteins that promote the tumors' recurrence in more aggressive forms, researchers at Taipei Medical University ...

Chemotherapy has long been standard treatment for many cancers, but its clinical benefits can also come with well-documented side effects. Doctors say the challenge is knowing which patients will experience these side effects, ...

Working with human breast cancer cells and mice, researchers at Johns Hopkins say they have identified a biochemical pathway that triggers the regrowth of breast cancer stem cells after chemotherapy.

In order for cancer to spread, malignant cells must break away from a tumor and through the tough netting of extracellular matrix, or ECM, that surrounds it. To fit through the holes in this net, those cancerous cells must ...

How we think and fall in love are controlled by lightning-fast electrochemical signals across synapses, the dynamic spaces between nerve cells. Until now, nobody knew that cancer cells can repurpose tools of neuronal communication ...

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have uncovered a novel genetic mechanism of thyroid cancer, as well as a marker that may predict response to a particular class of drugs, not just in patients ...

Treating multiple myeloma (MM) with myxoma virus (MYXV) eliminated a majority of malignant cells in preclinical studies, report investigators at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and elsewhere in an article ...

Please sign in to add a comment. Registration is free, and takes less than a minute. Read more

Read more:
Scientists identify chain reaction that shields breast cancer stem cells from chemotherapy - Medical Xpress