Category Archives: Cell Medicine

The Journal of Stem cells and Regenerative Medicine (JSRM) is a fully free access exclusive Online Journal covering areas of Basic Research, Translational work and Clinical studies in the specialty of Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine including allied specialities such as Biomaterials and Nano technology relevant to the core subject. This has also been endorsed by the German Society for Stem Cell Research(GSZ).

The JSRM issues are published regularly and articles pertaining to Stem cells and Regenerative Medicine as well as related fields of research are considered for publication

This Online Journal conceived and run by Clinicians and Scientists, originally started for the student community with reputed members in the advisory/editorial boards, has now been accepted to be the official organ of GSZ is reaching millions of Researchers, Cliniciansand Students all over the world, as it is a FREE Journal

Current activities of JSRM

1. Journal issues: will be published online and to subscribers (FREE) extracts will be sent by email 2. Weekly updates on happenings in the Stem Cell World with email updates to subscribers.

NEWS

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Journal of Stem cells & Regenerative Medicine; JSRM- ISSN Number ...

Two organizations of Filipino medical practitioners - the Philippine Medical Association (PMA) and the Philippine Society for Stem Cell Medicine (PSSCM) - are partnering to come up with ideas to help professionalize and organize the practice of stem cell therapy in the Philippines during their 1st Midyear Convention at the Historic Landmark Manila Hotel on August 12-13, 2013.

With the theme ''Current Status of the Practice of Stem Cell Therapy in the Philippines,'' the convention is expected to take up various issues surrounding stem cell therapy, which, despite the controversies, is increasingly becoming popular for treatment of certain illnesses. Among the scheduled topics for discussion in the convention are Food and Drug Administration Circular on Stem Cell Products, DOH Stem Cell Guidelines, Current Trends on Stem Cell Therapy, Clinical Use of Autologous, Adipose Derived Stem Cells, Photo-Activated Platelet-Rich Plasma for Orthopedic and Rehabilitation Applications, Umbilical Cord Blood and Cord Tissue for Stem Cell Therapy, Stem Cell Therapy in the Philippines other than for Cancer Rejuvenation, and Quality Control in Cell Transplantation.

Administrative Order 2013-0012 issued by the Department of Health (DOH) rules on the practice of stem cell, cell-based therapy, and accreditation of health facilities engaging in the treatment in the Philippines. The Professional Regulation Commission Board of Medicine (PRCBOM) requires foreign doctors wishing to practice stem cell therapy in the country to get a special temporary permit, citing their education, training, and clinical experience.

The PMA, the country's premier medical organization, has 70,000 members in 118 component medical societies, eight specialty divisions, 73 specialty and subspecialty societies, and 39 affiliate societies all over the archipelago, who advocate professional advancement and promote public health. The newly founded PSSCM is composed of physicians doing stem cell therapy and transplant. It is working closely with DOH, PRCBOM, and PMA to regulate the practice of Stem Cell therapy and protect patients.

We congratulate the Philippine Medical Association, headed by its President Dr. Leo O. Olarte, and the Philippine Society for Stem Cell Medicine, led by Dr. Rey Melchor F. Santos, in their coordinative efforts to educate and inform the public on the status of stem cell treatment as a novel medical approach in the Republic of the Philippines. CONGRATULATIONS AND MABUHAY!

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Editorial: Philippine Society for Stem Cell Medicine and Philippine Medical Association 1st Midyear Convention to be ...

Manila: A Philippine-based group has aired concern over the dangers of stem cell treatment as it warned of the possibility that materials being used for such procedures could have been extracted from hapless donors, particularly human foetuses.

Dr Leo Olarte, spokesman of the Philippine Society for Stem Cell Medicine, said they were alarmed over reports coming locally and from abroad that some stem cell materials were being taken from the unborn.

At the same time he called on the Department of Health to carefully watch stem cell treatment practitioners. The Catholic Church, he said, should unite with health practitioners and put an end to such practices.

Olarte was quoted as saying in reports that allogenic stem cells from aborted foetuses of humans were being exported to the Philippines.

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We cannot stand by and merely watch how they exploit people in poverty just to profit while allowing others who are economically well off to benefit from this, he said.

He said there were reports that human stem cells from foetuses and female egg cells were being used in anti-ageing procedures and other medical treatments.

Olarte is also concerned over the sale of supposedly stem cell products that come in the form of injectibles and even soaps.

Dont patronise those products. An example is the stem cell soap. It is unfair that stem cell therapy becomes a quackery, he said.

Earlier, Department of Health Secretary Enrique Ona led a national convention participated in by doctors to discuss the truth behind stem cell therapy.

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Philippine-based group warns on stem cell medicine

Keynote Message of Secretary Enrique T. Ona

Philippine Society for Stem Cell Medicine

1st National Convention The Truth and Fallacies about Stem Cell Therapy

January 16, 2013, Pandanggo Hall, Manila Hotel

The establishment of the Philippine Society for Stem Cell Medicine composed of physicians with interest in stem cell therapy is opportune, with the increasing demand for the use of stem cells as therapy in oncology, end organ diseases and regenerative medicine, here now in the Philippines and worldwide. I congratulate the founding members, led by Dr. Jose Sabili, your Chairman and Dr Rey Melchor Santos, your President for recognizing the need to organize and professionalize the practice of stem cell therapy in this country.

This two-day national convention, with the theme The Truth and Fallacies about Stem Cell Therapy is very timely as we in the Department of Health and the medical profession try to clear the air of misinformation and half-truths regarding this popular mode of treatment. We owe it to our patients and the general public to ensure that proper information and guidance regarding this novel medical approach is available. To protect themselves and their loved ones, the public must know the most current and accurate information about stem cells and its various applications, including some of which are purely experimental. We must ensure that only safe and ethical uses of stem cells are being used in the Philippines.

Today, we see the proliferation of centers offering stem cell treatments for medical and aesthetic purposes. Some stem cell programs here have expert personnel and clinical facilities and advanced laboratory equipment and technologies, reputed to be more advanced than other institutions abroad. We are concerned, however, that other facilities might not have the minimum capabilities especially trained personnel staff and equipment needed to perform stem cell therapies safely and effectively.

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Keynote Message of Secretary Enrique T. Ona: Stem Cell Medicine 1st National Convention

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hillsidepets.com - Call us today at (480) 391-7297. At Hillside Animal Hospital, we are committed to providing the best quality patient care available. We are a full service animal hospital and specialize in General Veterinary Care, Surgical, and Stem Cell Medicine. In addition our facility is equipped with Ultrasound, Digital X-Ray, Endoscopy, and Laprascopic Equipment. Our office is located in Scottsdale, AZ and serves the surrounding communities of Paradise Valley and Fountain Hills.From:HillsideAHViews:0 0ratingsTime:01:35More inPets Animals

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When cosmetic surgeon Allan Wu first heard the woman's complaint, he wondered if she was imagining things or making it up. A resident of Los Angeles in her late sixties, she explained that she could not open her right eye without considerable pain and that every time she forced it open, she heard a strange clicka sharp sound, like a tiny castanet snapping shut. After examining her in person at The Morrow Institute in Rancho Mirage, Calif., Wu could see that something was wrong: Her eyelid drooped stubbornly, and the area around her eye was somewhat swollen. Six and a half hours of surgery later, he and his colleagues had dug out small chunks of bone from the woman's eyelid and tissue surrounding her eye, which was scratched but largely intact. The clicks she heard were the bone fragments grinding against one another.

About three months earlier the woman had opted for a relatively new kind of cosmetic procedure at a different clinic in Beverly Hillsa face-lift that made use of her own adult stem cells. First, cosmetic surgeons had removed some the woman's abdominal fat with liposuction and isolated the adult stem cells withina family of cells that can make many copies of themselves in an immature state and can develop into several different kinds of mature tissue. In this case the doctors extracted mesenchymal stem cellswhich can turn into bone, cartilage or fat, among other tissuesand injected those cells back into her face, especially around her eyes. The procedure cost her more than $20,000, Wu recollects. Such face-lifts supposedly rejuvenate the skin because stem cells turn into brand-new tissue and release chemicals that help heal aging cells and stimulate nearby cells to proliferate.

During the face-lift her clinicians had also injected some dermal filler, which plastic surgeons have safely used for more than 20 years to reduce the appearance of wrinkles. The principal component of such fillers is calcium hydroxylapatite, a mineral with which cell biologists encourage mesenchymal stem cells to turn into bonea fact that escaped the woman's clinicians. Wu thinks this unanticipated interaction explains her predicament. He successfully removed the pieces of bone from her eyelid in 2009 and says she is doing well today, but some living stem cells may linger in her face. These cells could turn into bone or other out-of-place tissues once again.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of clinics across the country offer a variety of similar, untested stem cell treatments for both cosmetic and medical purposes. Costing between $3,000 and $30,000, the treatments promise to alleviate everything from wrinkles to joint pain to autism. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved any of these treatments and, with a limited budget, is struggling to keep track of all the unapproved therapies on the market. At the same time, pills, oils, creams and moisturizers that allegedly contain the right combination of ingredients to mobilize the body's resident stem cells, or contain chemicals extracted from the stem cells in plants and animals, are popping up in pharmacies and online. There's Stem Cell 100, for example, MEGA STEM and Apple Stem Cell Cloud Cream. Few of these cosmetics have been properly tested in published experiments, yet the companies that manufacture them say they may heal damaged organs, slow or reverse natural aging, restore youthful energy and revitalize the skin. Whether such cosmetics may also produce unintended and potentially harmful effects remains largely unexamined. The increasing number of untested and unauthorized stem cell treatments threaten both people who buy them and researchers hoping to conduct clinical trials for promising stem cell medicine.

When is a skin cream a drug? So far, the FDA has only approved one stem cell treatment: a transplant of bone marrow stem cells for people with the blood cancer leukemia. Among the increasing number of unapproved stem cell treatments, some clearly violate the FDA's regulations whereas others may technically be legal without its approval. In July 2012, for example, the U.S. District Court upheld an injunction brought by the FDA against Colorado-based Regenerative Sciences to regulate just one of the company's several stem cell treatments for various joint injuries as an "unapproved biological drug product." The decision hinged on what constitutes "minimal manipulation" of cells in the lab before they are injected into patients. In the treatment that the FDA won the right to regulate, stem cells are grown and modified in the lab for several weeks before they are returned to patients; in Regenerative Sciences's other treatments, patients' stem cells are extracted and injected within a day or two. Regenerative Sciences now offers the legally problematic treatment at a Cayman Island facility.

Many stem cell cosmetics reside in a legal gray area. Unlike drugs and "biologics" made from living cells and tissues, cosmetics do not require premarket approval from the FDA. But stem cell cosmetics often satisfy the FDA's definitions for both cosmetics and drugs. In September 2012 the FDA posted a letter on its Web site warning Lancme, a division of L'Oral, that the way it describes its Genifique skin care products qualify the creams and serums as unapproved drugs: they are supposed to "boost the activity of genes," for example, and "improve the condition of stem cells." Other times the difference between needing or not needing FDA approval comes down to linguistic nuancethe difference between claiming that a product does something or appears to do something.

Personal Cell Sciences, in Eatontown, N.J., sells some of the more sophisticated stem cellbased cosmetics: an eye cream, moisturizer and serum infused with chemicals derived from a consumer's own stem cells. According to its website and marketing materials, these products help "make skin more supple and radiant," "reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles around the eyes and lips," "improve cellular renewal" and "stimulate cell turnover for renewed texture and tone." In exchange for $3,000, Personal Cell Sciences will arrange for a participating physician to vacuum about 60 cubic centimeters (one quarter cup) of a customer's fat from beneath his or her skin and ship it on ice to American CryoStem Corp. in Red Bank, N.J., where laboratory technicians isolate and grow the customer's mesenchymal stem cells to around 30 million strong. Half these cells are frozen for storage; from the other half, technicians harvest hundreds of different kinds of exuded growth factors and cytokinesmolecules that help heal damaged cells and encourage cells to divide, among other functions. These molecules are mixed with many other ingredientsincluding green tea extract, caffeine and vitaminsto create the company's various "U Autologous" skin care products, which are then sold back to the consumer for between $400 and $800. When the customer wants a refill, technicians thaw some of the frozen cells, collect more cytokines and produce new bottles of cream.

In an unpublished safety trial sponsored by Personal Cell Sciences, Frederic Stern of the Stern Center for Aesthetic Surgery in Bellevue, Wash., and his colleagues monitored 19 patients for eight weeks as they used the U Autologous products on the left sides of their faces. A computer program meant to objectively analyze photos of the volunteers' faces measured an average of 25.6 percent reduction in the volume of wrinkles on the treated side of the face. Analysis of tissue biopsies revealed increased levels of the protein elastin, which helps keep skin taut, and no signs of unusual or cancerous cell growth.

Only skin deep? Supposedly, the primary active ingredients in the U Autologous skin care products are the hundreds of different kinds of cytokines they contain. Cytokines are a large and diverse family of proteins that cells release to communicate with and influence one another. Cytokines can stimulate cell division or halt it; they can suppress the immune system or provoke it; they can also change a cell's shape, modulate its metabolism and force it to migrate from one location to another like a cowboy corralling cattle. Researchers have only named and characterized some of the many cytokines that stem cells secrete. Some of these molecules certainly help repair damaged cells and promote cell survival. Others seem to be involved in the development of tumors. In fact, some recent evidence suggests that the cytokines released by mesenchymal stem cells can trigger tumors by accelerating the growth of dormant cancer cells. Personal Cell Sciences does not pick and choose among the cytokines exuded by its customers' stem cellsinstead, it dumps them all into its skin care products.

Based on the available evidence so far, topical creams containing cytokines from stem cells pose far less risk of cancer than living stem cells injected beneath the skin. But scientists do not yet know enough about stem cell cytokines to reliably predict everything they will do when rubbed into the skin; they could interact with healthy skin cells in a completely unexpected way, just as the unintended interplay between calcium hydroxylapatite and stem cells produced bones in the Los Angeles woman's eye. Stern acknowledges that unusual tissue growth is a concern for any treatment based on stem cells and the chemicals they release. "Down the line, we want to continue watching that," he says. Unlike many other clinics, he and his colleagues have been keeping tabs on their patients through regular follow-ups. John Arnone, CEO of American CryoStem and founder of Personal Cell Sciences, says the fact that U Autologous skin care products contain such a diversity of cytokines does not bother him: "I've seen worse things out there. I've been putting this formulation for almost a year on myself prior to the study. I'm the best guinea pig here."

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In the Flesh: The Embedded Dangers of Untested Stem Cell Cosmetics

With millions of people in aggregate suffering from debilitating disease, reduced mobility, or relentless pain associated with various conditions, stem cell medicine is available now through WISE Surgical Solutions LLC by direct flight from some major cities to our Joint Commission International Accredited Johns Hopkins affiliated Punta Pacifica Hospital in Panama.

New York (PRWEB) December 06, 2012

Cathy Nenninger, Chief Executive Officer of WISE Surgical Solutions LLC, shared why this offering is important. When I ran wound centers up and down the east coast, I used to get calls from patients and family members desperate for treatments to help alleviate severe symptoms of ailments such as these. It was heartbreaking that we were not able to provide any type of help or hope to these patients. Granted, while the response and success of stem cell treatment in patients varies greatly and by disease, patients who are in extreme discomfort or experiencing reduced function or quality of life deserve to know that they have options available to them.

A significant element of PROJECT HOPE, continues Ms. Nenninger, is the opportunity for community funding of the treatment. Often, families and communities want to help someone by making donations that will collectively fund a surgery or procedure which in itself can add another chore to the already stressed world of a Care Captain (person seeking help for another); Our goal is to make the process easy. For more information on Project Hope, call (631) 942-6040 or for a quote for service, fill out a medical history form available at http://www.WISESurgicalSolutions.com.

WISE Surgical Solutions LLC is based out of New York and caters to companies and patients seeking quality healthcare at an affordable price inclusive of travel. Offerings include medical, dental and surgical procedures of most types, in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and stem cell medicine. Community & group funding as well as financing options are available for patients. Media relations inquiries can be directed to (631) 909-8538 or emailed to surgsolutions(at)optimum(dot)net.

Cathy M. Nenninger, MBA Wise Surgical Solutions LLC (631) 942-6040 Email Information

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WISE Surgical Solutions LLC Announces Project Hope: Helping People with Debilitating Conditions Including Arthritis ...

Jill Helms, "Forever Young: The New Frontier of Stem Cell Medicine"
The good part about getting older is that we gain some wisdom and patience. The bad part is that our bodies start to wear out. But what if we could revitalize our damaged bits back to a healthy state? Come hear what the field of Regenerative Medicine is striving to achieve, and learn how it all begins with the stem cell. Jill Helms is a professor in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in the department of surgery at Stanford University #39;s School of Medicine. This Classes Without Quizzes lecture was filmed on location at Stanford Reunion Homecoming 2012 by the Stanford Alumni Association.From:StanfordAlumniViews:11 0ratingsTime:54:05More inEducation

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Jill Helms, "Forever Young: The New Frontier of Stem Cell Medicine" - Video

What is Cord Blood Banking? The Medical Potential of Newborn Stem Cells
Learn more at http://www.cordblood.com What is cord blood banking? What cord blood stem cell medicine is being researched? Listen in as leading pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Baumgartner discusses the future potential of regenerative medicine. Cord blood stem cells are being used today to treat blood disorders and certain cancers. Researchers are also investigating therapies that may one day treat cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury (TBI), and hearing loss. At Cord Blood Registry, connecting parents with the most up-to-date information on stem cell therapies and FDA-regulated clinical trials is central to our mission and purpose. For more information about the lifesaving potential of cord blood, sign up for a free CBR information kit http://www.cordblood.com Disclaimer: Ultimate use of cord blood stem cells will be determined by the treating physician who will consider if they are applicable for the condition and should come from the patient or a suitable donor (like an HLA matched sibling). There is no guarantee that treatments being studied in the laboratory or in clinical trials will be available in the future. CBR is the preferred choice of OB/Gyns. Source: blind survey, GfK Market Measures, 04/07, funded by CBR. © 2012 Cord Blood Registry. All rights reserved.From:cordbloodregistryViews:624 4ratingsTime:00:57More inScience Technology

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What is Cord Blood Banking? The Medical Potential of Newborn Stem Cells - Video