Monthly Archives: March 2017

US Stem Cell Inc (OTCMKTS: USRM) has enjoyed a prosperous 2017 as a whole so far, when you back up and look at the whole picture. This, a stock that was trading as low as .0019/share starting out in January, went on to fall just a hair shy of the six cent mark, at .0599. That was a run of more than 3,000% and it happened in two main thrusts within the first two months of the calendar year.

Each of those intense surges was followed by a period of sideways and consolidative trading, but each time, they have given way to further moves to the upside. Most recently, the stock came down to below the two-cent area, and has since run back over a nickel on the strength of some encouraging financials, including the first time in the companys history that it recorded a positive cash flow.

But is a solid financial filing worthy of the monumental increases that shares of US Stem Cell Inc (OTCMKTS: USRM) have seen in 2017? The company certainly didnt post 3,000% increases in any statistical category, so what gives? Why has the market dictated USRM surge so high in price this year?

The answer could lie in the extreme high potential of the market space in which the company operates. According to the world-renowned Mayo Clinic, regenerative medicine is a game-changing area of medicine with the potential to fully heal damaged tissues and organs, offering solutions and hope for people who have conditions that today are beyond repair. Regenerative medicine itself isnt new, but advances in developmental and cell biology, immunology, and other fields have unlocked new opportunities. According to some estimates, the global market valuation of the regenerative medicine/cell therapy industry could exceed $100B annually within the next five years.

USRM is working hard to make its mark on the regenerative medicine / cellular therapy industry by marketing cell based therapeutics that prevent, treat, or cure disease by repairing and replacing damaged or aged tissue, cells, and organs and restoring their normal function. The company holds the believe that regenerative medicine / cellular therapeutics will play a large role in positively changing the natural history of diseases, and ultimately lessen patient burdens and reducing the economic impact disease imposes upon society.

Its business includes three divisions (US Stem Cell Training, Vetbiologics, and US Stem Cell Clinic), the development of proprietary cell therapy products, as well as revenue generating physician and patient based regenerative medicine / cell therapy training services, cell collection and cell storage services, the sale of cell collection and treatment kits for humans and animals, and the operation of a cell therapy clinic.

It is perhaps the extreme high potential of a USRM, and its operating space that leads many investors to see the hidden value in this company. The regenerative medicine business has some enormous players that already have a hold over the traditional medicine markets. That paints a target on smaller companies that are working diligently to develop viable regenerative treatments for a wide array of degenerative diseases. It would only take one key breakthrough to make USRM the subject of a buyout.

Perhaps the investment community senses this, and that may explain, at least partially, the meteoric rise of US Stem Cell Inc (OTCMKTS: USRM) in 2017. Were definitely going to want to keep a very close eye on any and all developments coming out of the USRM camp. Well be certain to relay any significant changes along to our readers. Stay up to date on USRM by signing up for our 100% free penny stock newsletter. It takes just a second to submit your email into the box below, so subscribe now!

Go here to see the original:
Do Investors See Hidden Value in US Stem Cell Inc (OTCMKTS: USRM) - Street Register

NewsMar 19, 2017 | Original Story from the National Phenotypic Screening Centre

Research teams based the Universities of Dundee and Edinburgh are looking to partner with the pharmaceutical industry to better understand the biological processes that could allow the development of new drugs to support tissue regeneration or repair. The National Phenotypic Screening Centre (NPSC) at the University of Dundee and the Medical Research Council (MRC) Centre for Regenerative Medicine (CRM) at the University of Edinburgh have signed a memorandum of understanding that commits them to work more closely together as they strive to translate novel biological discoveries into new stem cell therapies. Regenerative medicine therapies to treat a range of debilitating diseases (including blindness, liver disease, Parkinsons disease, arthritis and many others) are actively being developed around the world. Many of them are and are based on one of two approaches: implantation of stem-cell-derived cells or the use of drugs to selectively activate and mobilize the bodys own stem cells in order to replace damaged or diseased tissues. Understanding the stem cells in tissues and their supporting environment (the stem cell niche) is critical to both approaches. The UK Regenerative Medicine Platform funded Engineering and exploiting the stem cell niche Hub, led by the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine (CRM) at the University of Edinburgh, is dedicated to further understanding of the biology of stem cell niches and to exploit this knowledge therapeutically to improve organ regeneration through endogenous repair and cell transplantation. Finding new drugs which can activate endogenous regenerative pathways requires the development of cell-based assays that are able to reproduce thecomplexbehaviour (the phenotype) of the cells and tissues in patients. The National Phenotypic Screening Centre (NPSC) specialises in developing such complex assays so they can be systematically screened using large libraries of drug-like molecules to uncover agents that can alter cell and tissue behaviour. Close collaboration between thetwocentres, which together represent government investment amounting to around 35M, will allow novel biological discoveries from CRM to benefit from the expertise and industrial drug screening infrastructure provided by the NPSC, leading to the start-points for new therapies. An in-depth understanding of cell and tissue function will facilitate the search to find molecules that improve key tissue regeneration processes that could eventually be used as drugs for regenerative repair. Professor Stuart Forbes, Director of the Centre for Regenerative Medicine and co-director of the Niche Hub, said, Stem cell medicine is coming of age, this is a great opportunity for Scottish Universities to partner with industry to ensure we can translate excellent science to new therapies that can help patients with chronic disease. Dr Paul Andrews, Director of Operations at the NPSC, said, We are very excited to be able to sign this agreement which will help cement our growing relationship with the excellent scientists that are within the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine and the wider UK Regenerative Medicine Hub network. UKRMP DirectorDr Rob Buckle said, This MOU between the Niche Hub and NPSC extends the growth of the UKRMP by encouraging further interactions with the wider UK research community which will help to open up new opportunities and approaches to help deliver the great promise of regenerative medicine. This article has been republished from materials provided by the National Phenotypic Screening Centre. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

Like what you just read? You can find similar content on the communities below.

To personalize the content you see on Technology Networks homepage, Log In or Subscribe for Free

Go here to read the rest:
Scottish Universities Collaborate to Develop New Drugs for Tissue ... - Technology Networks

Sonny Lacks is known for his smile. Wide and welcoming, it's a feature that others tell him he shares with his mother.

He wishes he knew that for himself, but he was only 4 when she died.

On a recent Monday afternoon, Sonny and his older brother, Lawrence, sat at a dining room table in Baltimore and examined sketches of what will be their mother's tombstone. They've never had enough money for one. Finally, after all these years, a gift will allow their mother to be remembered as they want her to be.

Lawrence looked at the images but said little. He doesn't like talking about the mother he lost when he was 16.

"Don't know why; I never could," he said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his moist eyes. "I just can't."

The course of their lives changed in 1951 when their mother visited what was then Johns Hopkins Hospital, just 20 minutes down the road from where her boys now live. It was there that doctors discovered her strange illness and removed mysterious cells from her body.

The sons are one legacy of Henrietta Lacks a poor woman from the tobacco fields of south-central Virginia. The other is this: Her cells are still multiplying ferociously nearly six decades after her death. They have led to medical miracles such as the vaccine for polio and have produced millions of dollars in revenue for others.

The family's great loss has become the world's great gain.

___

Henrietta Lacks, died in 1951 at 31, but millions have been helped by study of the cells that killed her.

Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant on Aug. 1, 1920, in Roanoke. The boys aren't sure how she became Henrietta, which was shortened to Hennie after her mother's death when the girl was 4.

Hennie and her nine siblings were sent to live with aunts, uncles and cousins in the tiny farming town of Clover, about four hours west of Norfolk.

Hennie landed with her grandfather, who also was raising one of her first cousins, David. They lived in what was called the "home-house," a two-story cabin built of hand-hewn logs and pegs that once was the slave quarters of their ancestors.

It looks toward the family cemetery, where the white relatives Hennie's great-grandfather and great-uncles were plantation owners are buried behind a row of boxwoods. The bushes separate their resting places from those of the family's black members, many of whom are in unmarked graves in a meadow.

The hundreds of acres surrounding the home-house were, and still are, known as Lacks Town. Those living in nearly every dwelling dotting the tobacco fields were, and still are, kin.

Growing up, the cousins scared each other with tales about the cemetery and phantom dogs and pigs that roamed Lacks Town Road, which runs alongside the house and up a half-mile to where cousin Sadie Grinnan was born in 1928.

Sadie remembers Hennie as the most beautiful thing, with honey-colored skin, a round face and a smile that made boys act like fools.

Sadie said she was surprised when Hennie and David, who went by "Day," started acting like a couple; they'd been raised like brother and sister.

But Lawrence was born to them in 1935 and Elsie four years later. Elsie was as striking as her mother but was born different, what some called "deaf and dumb."

Hennie and Day married in 1941, and the family left their life of farming tobacco to join the flood of blacks making their way to Baltimore and Washington, D.C., where wartime prosperity awaited in the shipyards and steel mills.

They were headed, they thought, to an easier life.

Sadie moved to Baltimore in the mid-1940s and often caught the No. 26 trolley to Turner Station, where Hennie had settled in as a housewife in the brick apartments built for the workers swelling the waterfront.

But Hennie missed the country and often piled the kids onto a bus for trips back to Clover.

Whether in Virginia or Maryland, she loved being a mom. Sadie watched her braid Elsie's long, brown hair and fret about the way the girl ran wild and darted off if they weren't looking.

Hennie could be as strict as she was sweet. After Sonny came along in 1947 and Deborah two years later, Lawrence was in charge of hand-washing the babies' diapers. If they weren't clean enough, Mama made him do it again.

About the time their fifth child, Joe, was born in 1950, Hennie and Day decided it was best to put Elsie in Crownsville State Hospital, once known as The Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland.

It broke Hennie's heart, "but she would visit her all the time," Sadie said.

___

A statue of Jesus dominates the original entrance to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The tradition is for those passing to rub the foot or touch the robe. Members of the Lacks family say they remember rubbing the toe when they arrived with Henrietta Lacks for cervical cancer treatment in the early 1950s.

A few months later, Hennie shared a secret. She'd started bleeding even though it wasn't her time of the month. And one morning she took a bath and discovered something. She told Sadie: "I feel a lump."

Dr. Howard Jones was the gynecologist on duty Feb. 1, 1951, in the outpatient center at Johns Hopkins when Henrietta Lacks came in.

Jones, who with his wife would later found the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine in Norfolk, examined her and saw something so peculiar it would stay with him for decades: A glistening, smooth growth that resembled purple Jell-O.

It was about the size of a quarter at the lower right of her cervix, and it bled easily when touched.

Jones thought it might be an infection and tested Lacks for syphilis, but the results came back negative. He ordered a biopsy cutting away a small portion of the tissue and within 48 hours had the diagnosis: cancer.

When Lacks returned for treatment eight days later, a second doctor sliced off another sliver of her tumor. Following the practice of the day, Lacks was not told.

Radium capsules were packed around her cervix to kill the cancer cells, and she later was released from the hospital.

At home, Lacks didn't tell anyone about her illness.

She continued to take care of her babies, two still in diapers; visit Elsie when someone would drive her to Crownsville; and cook her husband his favorite foods, such as white pinto beans.

She regularly returned to Johns Hopkins for treatment, but the cancer cells were swarming faster than the radium could kill them. It was becoming difficult for her to hide the pain. Cousins would enter the house and hear her upstairs, wailing, "Oh, Lord, oh, Lord, I can't get no ease! Jesus, help me, Jesus!"

On Aug. 8, shortly after her 31st birthday, she was readmitted to Johns Hopkins for what would be the last time.

Just after midnight on Oct. 4, 1951, Henrietta Lacks died. Doctors performed an autopsy that revealed firm white lumps studding her body, her chest cavity, lungs, liver and kidney. Her bladder appeared to be one solid tumor.

The cells seemed uncontrollable.

Sonny's only memory of his mother is from her funeral in Clover.

She was buried in an unmarked grave near the home-house, and he remembers how rain poured from the sky, as though heaven were weeping for Hennie.

___

Lawrence Lacks, 75, the oldest son of Henrietta Lacks lives in Baltimore, where most of the Lacks family still lives. Lacks was a teenager when his mother died in 1951 of cervical cancer.

Back in Baltimore, cousins came to help the widowed Day, who was trying to pull shifts at the shipyard and manage his three youngest children. Visits to Elsie became rarer.

Lawrence helped out, but he soon left to join the Army. Two relatives, one the family would later describe as evil, moved in to care for his brothers and sister.

Sonny recalls being beaten for no reason and having little food, maybe a biscuit, each day. The cabinets were locked so the kids wouldn't try to get more.

As they grew older, the children spent summers in Clover, plucking and stringing tobacco as their mom had done. They kept the abuse to themselves. Stoic, like their mom.

After his Army stint, Lawrence returned to Baltimore, married and took in his brothers and sister when their dad became ill. Elsie died at Crownsville in 1955; the family learned years later that she had been abused and may have had holes drilled in her head during experiments.

No one in the family talked about Hennie. Lawrence and his father didn't want to, and the younger kids didn't ask. Part of the Clover upbringing was that children didn't bother grown-ups with a lot of questions.

Henrietta's children had children of their own, and they, too, didn't ask about Grandma. It was as though she hadn't existed.

Then, in the early 1970s, the family got a call.

Researchers wanted Sonny and other family members to give blood samples so more could be learned about their mother's genetic makeup. The family wanted to know why.

Part of their mother, they were told, was alive and growing more than 20 years after her death.

Tissue from their mother's second biopsy in 1951 had been given to Johns Hopkins researcher Dr. George Gey, who for years had been trying unsuccessfully to grow human cells outside the body in his search for a cancer cure.

Technicians expected Lacks' cells to do what previous samples had done: nothing, or perhaps live a few days then die. Instead, the cells multiplied in petri dishes, spreading and piling atop one another. Uncontrollable.

On the day Lacks died, Gey appeared on a television program called "Cancer Can Be Conquered." He held Lacks' cells in a bottle close to the camera and discussed his scientific breakthrough: the first human cell line ever grown.

Gey called the cells "HeLa" the first two letters of Henrietta Lacks' first and last names and gave samples to other researchers around the country. Cancer cells work enough like normal cells that doctors could test and probe them and unlock their secrets.

Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School infected HeLa cells with the polio virus and studied the reaction. By 1955, he had created a vaccine that helped nearly eradicate the crippling disease.

Companies used HeLa to test cosmetics. Researchers put flasks of HeLa near atomic test sites to measure the effects of radiation on human cells. Scientists sent HeLa into space with white mice to determine what happened to human flesh at zero gravity. HeLa helped scientists discover genetic mapping.

The cells multiplied so rapidly that they often contaminated other laboratory samples. In the 1970s, Soviet researchers thought they had discovered a virus that caused cancer, but it turned out HeLa cells had permeated the Iron Curtain.

The revelation led to improvements in the way labs handle cells and cultures.

Other cell lines were being born, but HeLa cells had become the gold standard. They shipped and stored well, and were incredibly robust. Jones said most cells can duplicate themselves in a culture in 36 hours; HeLa doubles in 24. The chromosomes in most cells shorten with each duplication until the cells can't divide anymore. Not HeLa.

Doctors still aren't sure why. Jones, 99, said recently: "They are still that unique."

___

David Sonny Lacks, 62, right, and Lawrence Lacks, 75, both of Baltimore, talk about their mother, Henrietta Lacks, who died in 1951. Sonny doesnt remember his mother but is told he has her smile. Lawrence doesnt like to talk about her; she died when he was 16.

Over the years, the Lacks family became used to the occasional phone calls from reporters and researchers.

They told what little they knew to Rolling Stone and Jet magazines and to the BBC.

What family members couldn't get used to was what had happened to Hennie.

They were angry at Johns Hopkins because they felt the hospital removed her cells without her permission.

They were bewildered by all the scientific jargon and how researchers took their blood but did not follow up or explain the results, they said. None of the children have developed their mother's aggressive cancer.

They were enraged by biomedical companies that produced the cells like they were printing money and sold them for millions, while many in the family couldn't afford health insurance.

Cousin Sadie Grinnan, now Sadie Sturdivant, 81, lives in Nathalie, near Clover, and is bothered by it, too.

"These other people," she said, "are making billions and billions."

What was hardest for Hennie's children to deal with was that so many people knew so much about their mother, while they knew so little.

"That's what hurts," Sonny said.

Now, he's looking for closure. It began in earnest with the release earlier this year of Rebecca Skloot's book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks."

The book recounts the family's struggle, the science and the ethical implications surrounding the use of the cells.

Sonny's sister Deborah had worked closely with the author but died last May from heart disease. Deborah, who was 59, went to her grave wanting to honor her mother.

Sonny now is determined to fulfill her wish.

___

Henrietta Lacks great-granddaughter Aiyana Rogers, 11, looks at a family photo and a book about Lacks at her grandmother's home in Baltimore on April 12, 2010. Aiyana says shes proud of her great-grandmother. I just like that the world knows her now, she says. And that she is the most important woman in the world.

The family is working with an attorney to get a handle on all things Henrietta. For example, Sonny recently heard that a group in New York is holding a Henrietta Lacks race, and he wondered how people could do that without the family's permission. He and his brothers don't have the time or know-how to answer those kinds of questions.

Lawrence, now 75, rehabilitates houses for a living. Sonny, 62, is a truck driver who often picks up his grandkids in the afternoons. He helps out his younger brother, Joe, who changed his name to Zakariyya Abdul Rahman and goes by Abdul. At 59, Abdul has problems with his legs and can't get around easily.

The family has pooled its money to buy headstones for their father, who died in 2002 and is buried in Baltimore, and for Elsie, whose body was relocated to a grave near her mother's in Clover.

The Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta has volunteered to pay for Hennie's tombstone, and Skloot will buy one for Deborah, who was buried in Baltimore. The author also has established a scholarship fund for the family.

In a ceremony in October, Johns Hopkins will honor the contributions of Henrietta Lacks and others who have participated in scientific research.

Administrators say they think the medical center's role in Lacks' story often has been misrepresented. Dr. Daniel Ford, director of the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at Johns Hopkins, said the hospital's critics are applying modern rules to a different era.

Patient consent, now a medical standard, wasn't even considered in 1951. Ford noted that Lacks' tissue was given away by researcher Gey and that the hospital never patented HeLa cells or sold them commercially.

"Gey's whole goal was to find a human cell line that would reproduce," Ford said. "It would be a platform, a model that scientists could learn human cell function from."

Gey had no idea what would happen.

Over the years, HeLa cells have multiplied to the point that they could weigh more than 20 tons, or 400 times Lacks' adult body weight. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, there are close to 11,000 patents involving HeLa. The cells are so prevalent that they can be ordered by the vial on the Internet.

The family tries to concentrate on all the good that's come from them. On Memorial Day weekend in Lacks Town, they will install their mother's headstone, made of granite with a rose-colored tint that hints of flowers sweet, like Hennie, and growing, like her cells.

Her grandchildren came up with the words that will be carved into the stone:

"In loving memory of a phenomenal woman, wife and mother who touched the lives of many. Here lies Henrietta Lacks (HeLa). Her immortal cells will continue to help mankind forever."

Aiyana Rogers, one of Sonny's granddaughters, flopped down at the dining table in Baltimore where the Lacks brothers talked about the memorial. She brought out a family portrait and Skloot's book, which she has started to read.

Aiyana's intrigued by the science and by the cures, but mostly she's just proud of her great-grandmother.

"I just like that the world knows her now," the 11-year-old said, with a wide, welcoming smile. "And that she is the most important woman in the world."

Go here to read the rest:
Cancer killed Henrietta Lacks then made her immortal - Virginian-Pilot