Archive for November, 2014
2nd International Conference on PredictivePreventive & Personalized Medicine & MolecularDiagnostics – Video
2nd International Conference on PredictivePreventive Personalized Medicine MolecularDiagnostics
2nd International Conference on Predictive, Preventive and Personalized Medicine Molecular Diagnostics will be organized during November 3-5, 2014, at Emba...
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2nd International Conference on PredictivePreventive & Personalized Medicine & MolecularDiagnostics - Video
ND|spinal cord injury|4 – Video
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Clinical Trials for MS and Rheumatoid Arthritis with Umbilical Cord Mesenchymal Stem Cells – Video
Clinical Trials for MS and Rheumatoid Arthritis with Umbilical Cord Mesenchymal Stem Cells
Stem Cell Institute and Medistem Panama founder, Neil Riordan, PhD discusses clinical trials for multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis using umbilical cord tissue-derived mesenchymal...
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Clinical Trials for MS and Rheumatoid Arthritis with Umbilical Cord Mesenchymal Stem Cells - Video
Pain and itch in a dish: Scientists convert human skin cells into sensory neurons
A team led by scientists from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has found a simple method to convert human skin cells into the specialized neurons that detect pain, itch, touch and other bodily sensations. These neurons are also affected by spinal cord injury and involved in Friedreich's ataxia, a devastating and currently incurable neurodegenerative disease that largely strikes children.
The discovery allows this broad class of human neurons and their sensory mechanisms to be studied relatively easily in the laboratory. The "induced sensory neurons" generated by this method should also be useful in the testing of potential new therapies for pain, itch and related conditions.
"Following on the work of TSRI Professor Ardem Patapoutian, who has identified many of the genes that endow these neurons with selective responses to temperature, pain and pressure, we have found a way to produce induced sensory neurons from humans where these genes can be expressed in their 'normal' cellular environment," said Associate Professor Kristin K. Baldwin, an investigator in TSRI's Dorris Neuroscience Center. "This method is rapid, robust and scalable. Therefore we hope that these induced sensory neurons will allow our group and others to identify new compounds that block pain and itch and to better understand and treat neurodegenerative disease and spinal cord injury."
The report by Baldwin's team appears as an advance online publication in Nature Neuroscience on November 24, 2014.
In Search of a Better Model
The neurons that can be made with the new technique normally reside in clusters called dorsal root ganglia (DRG) along the outer spine. DRG sensory neurons extend their nerve fibers into the skin, muscle and joints all over the body, where they variously detect gentle touch, painful touch, heat, cold, wounds and inflammation, itch-inducing substances, chemical irritants, vibrations, the fullness of the bladder and colon, and even information about how the body and its limbs are positioned. Recently these neurons have also been linked to aging and to autoimmune disease.
Because of the difficulties involved in harvesting and culturing adult human neurons, most research on DRG neurons has been done in mice. But mice are of limited use in understanding the human version of this broad "somatosensory" system.
"Mouse models don't represent the full diversity of the human response," said Joel W. Blanchard, a PhD candidate in the Baldwin laboratory who was co-lead author of the study with Research Associate Kevin T. Eade.
A New Identity
For the new study, the team used a cell-reprogramming technique (similar to those used to reprogram skin cells into stem cells) to generate human DRG-type sensory neurons from ordinary skin cells called fibroblasts.
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Pain and itch in a dish: Scientists convert human skin cells into sensory neurons
Advanced CRISPR Cas9 Genetic Engineering – Video
Advanced CRISPR Cas9 Genetic Engineering
The CRISPR Cas9 system has been harnessed to create a simple, RNA programmable method to mediate genome editing in mammalian cells, and can be used to genera...
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Advanced CRISPR Cas9 Genetic Engineering - Video
Hyperbaric Oxygen and Gene therapy HBOT 2014 – Video
Hyperbaric Oxygen and Gene therapy HBOT 2014
Dr. Paul G. Harch lectures on Gene therapy in the treatment of Hyperbaric Oxygen therapy at the 9th Hyperbaric Medicine International Symposium [HBOT2014] Th...
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Health Beat: Gene therapy: From bench to bedside: Blindness
PHILADELPHIA -
In bright daylight, 10-year-old Mark DeVoe has no trouble seeing his friends, but inside, or even in the shade, Mark's eyes sometimes don't work.
"I have trouble seeing like, trees, when the road ends, and when there's like a drop there," Mark said.
At age six, Mark's doctors diagnosed him with the genetic condition choroideremia, which causes people to progressively lose vision until they are completely blind.
"I don't know what it's like to live in darkness, but I've seen it," said Susan DeVoe, Mark's mother.
Susan is a carrier of the blindness gene. Mark's grandfather has the condition.
"Watching my father go blind was devastating. I was a little girl. You know, you count on daddy to do things, and daddy couldn't do them," she recalled.
Dr. Jean Bennett is one of two U.S. researchers preparing to test a gene therapy for choroideremia in humans.
"I think gene therapy holds a huge promise for developing treatments for blinding diseases," said Bennett, ophthalmologist and molecular geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania.
Researchers will use a virus, carrying a normal choroideremia gene and inject the virus just under the retina. The gene should begin to work in a few weeks.
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Health Beat: Gene therapy: From bench to bedside: Blindness
Gene linked to tamoxifen-resistant breast cancers
After mining the genetic records of thousands of breast cancer patients, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have identified a gene whose presence may explain why some breast cancers are resistant to tamoxifen, a widely used hormone treatment generally used after surgery, radiation and other chemotherapy.
The gene, called MACROD2, might also be useful in screening for some aggressive forms of breast cancers, and, someday, offering a new target for therapy, says Ben Ho Park, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of oncology in the Kimmel Cancer Center's Breast Cancer Program and a member of the research team.
The drug tamoxifen is used to treat estrogen receptor-positive breast cancers. Cells in this type of breast cancer produce protein receptors in their nuclei which bind to and grow in response to the hormone estrogen. Tamoxifen generally blocks the binding process of the estrogen-receptor, but some estrogen receptor-positive cancers are resistant or become resistant to tamoxifen therapy, finding ways to elude its effects. MACROD2 appears to code for a biological path to tamoxifen resistance by diverting the drug from its customary blocking process to a different way of latching onto breast cancer cell receptors, causing cancer cell growth rather than suppression, according to a report by Park and his colleagues published online Nov. 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Specifically, the team's experiments found that when the gene is overexpressed in breast cancer cells -- producing more of its protein product than normal -- the cells become resistant to tamoxifen.
One piece of evidence for the gene's impact was demonstrated when the Johns Hopkins scientists blocked MACROD2's impact in breast cancer cell cultures by using an RNA molecule that binds to the gene to "silence," or turn off, the gene's expression. But the technique only partially restored the cells' sensitivity to tamoxifen.
To conduct the study, the scientists examined two well-known databases of breast cancer patients' genetic information, The Cancer Genome Atlas and the Molecular Taxonomy of Breast Cancer International Consortium study. Patients who had MACROD2 overexpressed in primary breast cancers at the original breast cancer site had significantly worse survival rates than those who did not, according to an analysis of the patient databases.
With this in mind, the Johns Hopkins scientists suggest that clinicians may be able to look at MACROD2 activity to help them identify aggressive breast cancers at early stages of growth.
The team's analysis also found that MACROD2 overexpression was present in the majority of metastases in patients with tamoxifen-resistant tumors and in tumor cells that had spread from their original site in the breast. The latter finding, says Park, suggests that tamoxifen resistance caused by the gene might be a process that develops over time as women take the drug.
Finding a small group of a patient's cancer cells that overexpress MACROD2, he explained, means those cells are likely to be the "survivors" of early treatment with tamoxifen that go on to multiply and cause metastatic tumors. "The resultant cells -- or the vast majority of them -- are now all overexpressing MACROD2, and are the cells that are aggressive and will cause trouble," he adds.
Park and his team cautioned that there may be other genetic factors that control tamoxifen resistance, and that nothing in their study should suggest that tamoxifen use should be avoided.
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Gene linked to tamoxifen-resistant breast cancers
ND|spinal cord injury|11 – Video
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Can Learning the Piano Rehab Partial Spinal Cord Injury Patients? | Thad Starner | TEDxPeachtree – Video
Can Learning the Piano Rehab Partial Spinal Cord Injury Patients? | Thad Starner | TEDxPeachtree
This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Google Glass Tech Lead Thad Starner #39;s childhood interactions with residents at the nursing home where...
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Can Learning the Piano Rehab Partial Spinal Cord Injury Patients? | Thad Starner | TEDxPeachtree - Video
UCLA Researchers Identify Protein Key To The Development Of Blood Stem Cells
November 25, 2014
Provided by Peter Bracke, UCLA
Understanding the self-replication mechanisms is critical for improving stem cell therapies for blood-related diseases and cancers
Led by Dr. Hanna Mikkola, a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research, UCLA scientists have discovered a protein that is integral to the self-replication of hematopoietic stem cells during human development.
The discovery lays the groundwork for researchers to generate hematopoietic stem cells in the lab that better mirror those that develop in their natural environment. This could in turn lead to improved therapies for blood-related diseases and cancers by enabling the creation of patient-specific blood stem cells for transplantation.
The findings are reported online ahead of print in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
Researchers have long been stymied in their efforts to make cell-based therapies for blood and immune diseases more broadly available, because of an inability to generate and expand human hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in lab cultures. They have sought to harness the promise of pluripotent stem cells (PSCs), which can transform into almost any cell in the human body, to overcome this roadblock. HSCs are the blood-forming cells that serve as the critical link between PSCs and fully differentiated cells of the blood system. The ability of HSCs to self-renew (replicate themselves) and differentiate to all blood cell types, is determined in part by the environment that the stem cell came from, called the niche.
In the five-year study, Mikkola, Dr. Sacha Prashad and Dr. Vincenzo Calvanese, members of Mikkolas lab and lead authors of the study, investigated a HSC surface protein called GPI-80. They found that it was produced by a specific subpopulation of human fetal hematopoietic cells that were the only group that could self-renew and differentiate into various blood cell types. They also found that this subpopulation of hematopoietic cells was the sole population able to permanently integrate into and thrive within the blood system of a recipient mouse.
Mikkola and colleagues further discovered that GPI-80 identifies HSCs during multiple phases of human HSC development and migration. These include the early first trimester of fetal development when newly generated human hematopoietic stem cells can be found in the placenta, and the second trimester when HSCs are actively replicating in the fetal liver and the fetal bone marrow.
We found that whatever HSC niche we investigated, we could use GPI-80 as the best determinant to find the stem cell as it was being generated or colonized different hematopoietic tissues, said Mikkola, associate professor of molecular, cell and development biology at UCLA and also a member of the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. Moreover, loss of GPI-80 caused the stem cells to differentiate into mature blood cells rather than HSCs. This essentially tells us that GPI-80 must be present to make HSCs. We now have a very unique marker for investigating how human hematopoietic cells develop, migrate and function.
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UCLA Researchers Identify Protein Key To The Development Of Blood Stem Cells
Stem Cell Therapy at EmCell clinic: Dr. Khalil Fadel story – Video
Stem Cell Therapy at EmCell clinic: Dr. Khalil Fadel story
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Stem Cell Therapy at EmCell clinic: Dr. Khalil Fadel story - Video
Leah Still to undergo stem cell therapy
CINCINNATI -- The daughter of a Cincinnati Bengal who has already been through so much has another big day ahead of her.
Leah Still -- Devon Stills daughter -- will undergo a stem cell transplant procedure on Tuesday. The stem cell treatment is an effort to regenerate her bone marrow and stem cells.
Still flew to Philadelphia Monday to be with Leah. They went shopping at a mall.
The smile you have after shutting down the mall, literally. This girl had security and the... http://t.co/HHWtLhf4pf pic.twitter.com/QFRMJsdlCX
Still tweeted another photo Tuesday while they waited for her treatment to begin.
Selfies in the hospital to pass time by as we wait for the stem cells http://t.co/q6JZOIyi9q pic.twitter.com/ogB0J0Gitg
Leah was diagnosed with stage 4 neuroblastoma in June. She had surgery to remove a tumor from her abdomen in September, followed by chemotherapy to try to remove the cancer from her bone marrow.
She has already been treated with a round of chemotherapy and radiation.
Devon Still said the family hopes that will be her only round of chemo and radiation but that it depends on how her results come back. He said it will take four to six weeks to determine if more treatments are necessary.
Follow Devon Still's updates on Twitter at @Dev_Still71
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Leah Still to undergo stem cell therapy
UCLA Researchers Unlock Protein Key to Harnessing Regenerative Power of Blood Stem Cells
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Newswise In a study led by Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research member, Dr. John Chute, UCLA scientists have for the first time identified a unique protein that plays a key role in regulating blood stem cell replication in humans.
This discovery lays the groundwork for a better understanding of how this protein controls blood stem cell growth and regeneration, and could lead to the development of more effective therapies for a wide range of blood diseases and cancers.
The study was published online November 21, 2014 ahead of print in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are the blood-forming cells that have the remarkable capacity to both self-renew and give rise to all of the differentiated cells (fully developed cells) of the blood system. HSC transplantation provides curative therapy for thousands of patients annually. However, little is known about the process through which transplanted HSCs replicate following their arrival in human bone marrow. In this study, the authors showed that a cell surface protein called protein tyrosine phosphatase-sigma (PTP-sigma) regulates the critical process called engraftment, meaning how HSCs start to grow and make health blood cells after transplantation.
Mamle Quarmyne, a graduate student the lab of Dr. Chute and first author of the study, demonstrated that PTP-sigma is produced (expressed) on a high percentage of mouse and human HSCs. She showed further that genetic deletion of PTP-sigma in mice markedly increased the ability of HSCs to engraft in transplanted mice.
In a complementary study, she demonstrated that selection of human blood HSCs which did not express PTP-sigma led to a 15-fold increase in HSC engraftment in transplanted immune-deficient mice. Taken together, these studies showed that PTP-sigma suppresses normal HSC engraftment capacity and targeted blockade of PTP-sigma can substantially improve mouse and human HSC engraftment after transplantation.
Chute and colleagues showed further that PTP-sigma regulates HSC function by suppressing a protein, RAC1, which is known to promote HSC engraftment after transplantation.
These findings have tremendous therapeutic potential since we have identified a new receptor on HSCs, PTP-sigma, which can be specifically targeted as a means to potently increase the engraftment of transplanted HSCs in patients, said Chute, senior author of the study and UCLA Professor of Hematology/Oncology and Radiation Oncology. This approach can also potentially accelerate hematologic recovery in cancer patients receiving chemotherapy and/or radiation, which also suppress the blood and immune systems.
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UCLA Researchers Unlock Protein Key to Harnessing Regenerative Power of Blood Stem Cells
Nerve cells 'grown' in a lab could reveal more about how injury affects the body
Previous studieshaveunsuccessfullytried to producenerve cells from embryonic stem cells For the recent study, a team of USresearchers used adult tissue instead They were able to reprogram ordinary skin cells into induced stem cells Scientistsat Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts used a cocktail of proteins called transcription factors that control the activity of genes Study could help reveal the origins of pain and develop better drugs
By Sarah Griffiths for MailOnline
Published: 13:04 EST, 24 November 2014 | Updated: 13:16 EST, 24 November 2014
Pain is a complex and unpleasant sensation, which some people feel more acutely than others - and its origins remain largely a mystery.
Now, scientists have created pain in a dish by converting skin cells into sensitive neurons in a bid to learn more about these sensations.
The lab-created nerve cells respond to a range of different kinds of pain stimulation, including physical injury, chronic inflammation and cancer chemotherapy.
Scientists have created pain in a dish by converting skin cells into sensitive neurons (illustrated) in a bid to learn more about its origins.In the future, the research could be used to develop better pain-relieving drugs
And in the future, the custom-made neurons could be used to investigate the origins of pain and develop better pain-relieving drugs.
The work follows years of unsuccessful attempts to produce nerve cells from embryonic stem cells, which are immature blank slate cells with the potential to become any tissue in the body.
A nociceptor is a receptor of a nerve cell that responds to potentially damaging stimuli by sending signals to the spinal cord and brain.
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Nerve cells 'grown' in a lab could reveal more about how injury affects the body
Scientists create 'pain in a dish'
London: Scientists have created "pain in a dish" by converting skin cells into sensitive neurons.
The laboratory-generated nerve cells respond to a range of different kinds of pain stimulation, including physical injury, chronic inflammation and cancer chemotherapy.
In future they could be used to investigate the origins of pain and develop better pain-relieving drugs.
The work followed years of unsuccessful attempts to produce nerve cells from embryonic stem cells, immature "blank slate" cells with the potential to become any tissue in the body.
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A turning point came with the development of technology that allowed ordinary skin cells to be reprogrammed into "induced" stem cells.
A team led by Dr Clifford Woolf at Harvard Medical School used a cocktail of "transcription factors" - proteins that control the activity of genes - to transform mouse and human skin cells directly into pain-sensing neurons.
The researchers, whose findings are reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience, were able to model pain hypersensitivity experienced by patients who donated skin cells to the study.
Dr Woolf said: "I think the ability to make human pain neurons for the pain field is going to be very important. Furthermore, our failure with embryonic stem cells led us to work with adult tissue samples, making the technology much more clinically relevant since these are easy to collect from patients suffering from different kinds of pain."
The researchers produced "nociceptors", sensory nerve endings that respond to potentially damaging stimuli by sending pain signals to the spinal cord and brain.
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Scientists create 'pain in a dish'
Researchers find stem cells that help nails regenerate
Young guys in large vehicles most likely to survive crash Young guys in large vehicles most likely to survive crash
Driving a large vehicle and being a young male are among the factors that improve a person's chances of surviving a car crash, a new study finds.
Driving a large vehicle and being a young male are among the factors that improve a person's chances of surviving a car crash, a new study finds.
Jogging helps seniors maintain their ability to walk, a new study finds.
Jogging helps seniors maintain their ability to walk, a new study finds.
Researchers have discovered the stem cells that allow your nails to grow back after you lose them.
Researchers have discovered the stem cells that allow your nails to grow back after you lose them.
The holidays can be a challenge for families of children with autism because sensory overload can trigger major meltdowns, an expert says.
The holidays can be a challenge for families of children with autism because sensory overload can trigger major meltdowns, an expert says.
A brain abnormality may be responsible for more than 40 percent of deaths from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), a new study suggests.
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Researchers find stem cells that help nails regenerate