Archive for March, 2017

A longtime product developer is bringing a peptide ingredient to the US market that has been researched for a unique property promoting the growth of bone marrow stem cells.

Called DH Stemogen, the product is the brainchild of Dr Marvin Heuer MD who has a history of product development with sports nutrition company MuscleTech. Dr. Heuer has a background in clinical research, having spent many years in drug development at Glaxo Smith Kline. He also runs a contract research firm, Heuer M.D. Research Inc. and is the CEO of omega-3 supplement manufacturer Blue Ocean Nutrascience.

The new product, called DH Stemogen is based on a Cyclo-{L-ALA-L-GLU(TRP-OH) peptide that was developed by a Russian biochemist.

Its a peptide that is a mimic of a naturally occurring thymic peptide,Dr. Heuer told NutraIngredients-USA. Heuer was promoting the launch of the product at the recent Expo West trade show in Anaheim, CA. At Heuer M.D. Research, as a company we are out looking for novel ingredientsto bring out, hopefully in the nutraceutical area.

We got interested in Prof. Vlad Deigins peptide research, Dr. Heuer said (Deigin is associated with the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.)We looked at this particular compound that he was launching as an ingredient in Russia about a year ago.

The peptide in DH Stemogen targets a particular type of stem cell hematopoietic cells (HSC). Stem cells in general are the building blocks of our bodies. These cells are able to transform themselves into almost any type of cell. There are various sources of stem cells in an adult body. One of the most important of them comprises the bone marrow, where the HSCs are produced. HSCs transform into all the main cell types in our blood, including red blood cells and white blood cells. Dr. Heuer said there is some evidence that those cells are able to reconstruct other body tissues by transforming into the specific tissue type cell such as liver, nervous tissue, kidney and skin.

These properties would seem to make Stemogen a natural for a healthy aging product positioning, Dr. Heuer said. But Deigins research, trending as it does over into disease endpoints, is a little problematical when it comes to supporting US-style structure function claims, he admitted. Other countries dont make the same hard and fast distinctions between dietary ingredients meant for supplement applications and active pharmaceutical agents meant for drugs, he said.

We are going to be very cautious about making structure/function claims,Dr. Heuer said. The product at the moment saysSupport your immune system and Support healthy levels of stem cells in your blood.

We are about to begin a whole profile of research in the U.S. and Canada, he added.

Dr. Heuer said one thing thats unique about the ingredient (and something that he says Deigin has patented) is a structural twist that improves the peptides stability. The criticism of some other novel peptides has been that interesting as their properties might be, once they hit the stomachs gastric fluid they blow apart into their constituent amino groups and all those novel properties are lost.

He has a patent on the way he makes this with a hex ring on the end that protects it in the GI tract and allows it to be absorbed,he said.

Bringing a synthetic analogue of a naturally occurring peptide to market as a dietary ingredient would seem to pose significant regulatory challenges. Dr. Heuer said hes confident there is a way through that thicket. The plan is to start first with a GRAS filing, and Dr. Heuer said he believes that the peptide would fall under the amino acid category in the DHSEA definitions of what constitutes a dietary ingredient.

Certainly there is a precedent of complex peptides being sold on the market, he said.

The rest is here:
Peptide aimed at stem cell genesis debuts on supplement market - NutraIngredients-usa.com

March 15, 2017 by Grove Potter The four images, from left to right, show Keratinocyte-derive neural crest stem cells turning into neurons as shown by typical neuronal morphology. Credit: University at Buffalo.

A discovery, several years in the making, by a University at Buffalo research team has proven that adult skin cells can be converted into neural crest cells (a type of stem cell) without any genetic modification, and that these stem cells can yield other cells that are present in the spinal cord and the brain.

The practical implications could be very significant, from studying genetic diseases in a dish to generating possible regenerative cures from the patient's own cells.

"It's actually quite remarkable that it happens," says Stelios T. Andreadis, PhD, professor and chair of UB's Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, who recently published a paper on the results in the journal Stem Cells.

The identity of the cells was further confirmed by lineage tracing experiments, where the reprogrammed cells were implanted in chicken embryos and acted just as neural crest cells do.

Stem cells have been derived from adult cells before, but not without adding genes to alter the cells. The new process yields neural crest cells without addition of foreign genetic material. The reprogrammed neural crest cells can become smooth muscle cells, melanocytes, Schwann cells or neurons.

"In medical applications this has tremendous potential because you can always get a skin biopsy," Andreadis says. "We can grow the cells to large numbers and reprogram them, without genetic modification. So, autologous cells derived from the patient can be used to treat devastating neurogenic diseases that are currently hampered by the lack of easily accessible cell sources."

The process can also be used to model disease. Skin cells from a person with a genetic disease of the nervous system can be reprogrammed into neural crest cells. These cells will have the disease-causing mutation in their chromosomes, but the genes that cause the mutation are not expressed in the skin. The genes are likely to be expressed when cells differentiate into neural crest lineages, such as neurons or Schwann cells, thereby enabling researchers to study the disease in a dish. This is similar to induced pluripotent stem cells, but without genetic modification or reprograming to the pluripotent state.

The discovery was a gradual process, Andreadis says, as successive experiments kept leading to something new. "It was one step at a time. It was a very challenging task that took almost five years and involved a wide range of expertise and collaborators to bring it to fruition," Andreadis says. Collaborators include Gabriella Popescu, PhD, professor in the Department of Biochemistry in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB; Song Liu, PhD, vice chair of biostatistics and bioinformatics at Roswell Park Cancer Institute and a research associate professor in biostatistics UB's School of Public Health and Health Professions; and Marianne Bronner, PhD, professor of biology and biological engineering, California Institute of Technology.

Andreadis credits the persistence of his then-PhD student, Vivek K. Bajpai, for sticking with it.

"He is an excellent and persistent student," Andreadis says. "Most students would have given up." Andreadis also credits a seed grant from UB's office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development's IMPACT program that enabled part of the work.

The work recently received a $1.7 million National Institutes of Health grant to delve into the mechanisms that occur as the cells reprogram, and to employ the cells for treating the Parkinson's-like symptoms in a mouse model of hypomyelinating disease.

"This work has the potential to provide a novel source of abundant, easily accessible and autologous cells for treatment of devastating neurodegenerative diseases. We are excited about this discovery and its potential impact and are grateful to NIH for the opportunity to pursue it further," Andreadis said.

The research is described in the journal Stem Cells under the title "Reprogramming Postnatal Human Epidermal Keratinocytes Toward Functional Neural Crest Fates."

Explore further: Embryonic gene Nanog reverses aging in adult stem cells

More information: Vivek K. Bajpai et al, Reprogramming Postnatal Human Epidermal Keratinocytes Toward Functional Neural Crest Fates, STEM CELLS (2017). DOI: 10.1002/stem.2583

Journal reference: Stem Cells

Provided by: University at Buffalo

The fountain of youth may reside in an embryonic stem cell gene named Nanog.

Caltech scientists have converted cells of the lower-body region into facial tissue that makes cartilage, in new experiments using bird embryos. The researchers discovered a "gene circuit," composed of just three genes, that ...

Scientists at the University of Newcastle, UK, have used a combination of small molecules to turn cells isolated from human skin into Schwann cells - the specialised cells that support nerves and play a role in nerve repair. ...

Johns Hopkins stem cell biologists have found a way to reprogram a patient's skin cells into cells that mimic and display many biological features of a rare genetic disorder called familial dysautonomia. The process requires ...

(Phys.org)A team of researchers affiliated with New York and Dalhousie Universities, in the U.S. and Canada respectively, has found a possible intermediate cell type that might help understand the evolutionary process ...

German researchers succeed in obtaining brain and spinal cord cells from stem cells of the peripheral nervous system.

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The evolution of land animals has been shaped by barriers such as oceans and mountains which have divided them and sent them down different genetic paths.

A discovery, several years in the making, by a University at Buffalo research team has proven that adult skin cells can be converted into neural crest cells (a type of stem cell) without any genetic modification, and that ...

(Phys.org)A trio of researchers with Anglia Ruskin University in the U.K. and the Australian National University has found that the male fiddler crab uses its oversized claw to get the attention of a prospective mate and ...

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From skin to brain: Stem cells without genetic modification - Phys.Org

Scientists have long hoped that stem cells might have the power to treat diseases. But it's always been clear that they could be dangerous too, especially if they're not used carefully.

Now a pair of papers published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine is underscoring both the promise and the peril of using stem cells for therapy.

In one report, researchers document the cases of three elderly women who were blinded after getting stem cells derived from fat tissue at a for-profit clinic in Florida. The treatment was marketed as a treatment for macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness among the elderly. Each woman got cells injected into both eyes.

In a second report, a patient suffering from the same condition had a halt in the inexorable loss of vision patients usually experience, which may or may not have been related to the treatment. That patient got a different kind of stem cell derived from skin cells as part of a carefully designed Japanese study.

The Japanese case marks the first time anyone has given induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to a patient to treat any condition.

"These two reports are about as stark a contrast as it gets," says George Q. Daley, Harvard Medical School's dean and a leading stem cell researcher. He wrote an editorial accompanying the two papers. "It's really striking."

The report about the three women in their 70s and 80s who were blinded in Florida is renewing calls for the Food and Drug Administration to crack down on the hundreds of clinics that are selling unproven stem cell treatments for a wide variety of medical conditions, including arthritis, autism and stroke.

"One of the big mysteries about this particular case and the mushrooming stem cell clinic industry more generally is why the FDA has chosen to effectively sit itself out on the sidelines even as this situation overall grows increasingly risky to patients," says Paul Knoepfler, a University of California, Davis, stem cell researcher who has studied the proliferation of stem cell clinics.

"The inaction by the FDA not only puts many patients at serious risk from unproven stem cell offerings, but also it undermines the agency's credibility," Knoepfler wrote in an email.

In response to a query from Shots, an FDA spokeswoman wrote in an email that the agency is in the process of finalizing four new guidelines aimed at clarifying how clinics could use stem cells as treatments. The agency also noted that it had previously issued a warning to patients.

In the meantime, "consumers are encouraged to contact FDA and the appropriate state authorities in their jurisdictions to report any potentially illegal or harmful activity related to stem cell based products," the FDA email says.

Other researchers say the cases should stand as a warning to patients considering unproved stem cell treatments, especially those tried outside carefully designed research studies.

"Patients have to be wary and tell the difference between the snake oil salesmen who are going to exploit them and the kind of slow, painstaking legitimate clinical trials that are also going on," Daley says.

The New England Journal of Medicine report did not name the Florida clinic, but noted that the treatment was listed on a government website that serves as a clearinghouse for research studies. The sponsor is listed as Bioheart, Inc., which is part of U.S. Stem Cell Inc. in Sunrise, Fla.

Kristen Comella, the scientific director of U.S. Stem Cell, would not discuss the cases. "There were legal cases associated with eye patients that were settled under confidentiality, so I am not permitted to speak on any details of those cases due to the confidentiality clause," Comella said by phone.

She acknowledged, however, that the clinic had been performing the stem cell procedures. They were discontinued after at least two patients suffered detached retinas, she says.

But Comella defended the use of stem cells from fat tissue to treat a wide variety of other health problems.

"We have treated more than 7,000 patients and we've have had very few adverse events reported. So the safety track record is very strong," Comella says. "We feel very confident about the procedures that we do, and we've had great success in many different indications."

According to the New England Journal of Medicine report, The Florida clinic was using adult stem cells, which circulate in various parts of the body, including in fat tissue. While those cells may someday be turn out to be useful for treating disease, none have been proven to work.

The body produces a variety of stem cells. The kind that have generated the most excitement and controversy are human embryonic stem cells, which are derived from early human embryos and can be coaxed to become any kind of cell in the body.

Scientists are also excited about iPS cells, which can be made in the laboratory by turning any cell in the body, such as skin cells, into cells that resemble embryonic stem cells.

Those are the cells that were tested by the Japanese scientists. The stem cells were converted into retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells, which are the cells that are destroyed by macular degeneration.

"This represents a landmark," says Daley. "It's the first time any patient has been treated with cellular derivatives of iPS cells. So it's definitely a world first."

Daley noted that the scientists only treated one of the patient's eyes in case something went wrong, to ensure remaining vision would not be threatened in the other eye.

After at least a year, no complications had occurred and the patient had not experienced any further deterioration of vision in the treated eye. While that is promising, more patients would have to be treated and followed for much longer to know whether that approach is successful, Daley says.

"Given that macular degeneration is the most frequent cause of vision loss and blindness in the elderly and our population is aging, the prevalence of macular degeneration is going up dramatically," Daley says. "So to be able to preserve or even restore sight would be a really remarkable medical advance."

Despite the potentially encouraging results with the first patient, Daley noted that the Japanese scientists decided not to treat a second patient and suspended the study. That's because they discovered worrisome genetic variations in the RPE cells they had produced for the second patient.

"They weren't certain these would cause problems for the patient, but they were restrained enough and cautious enough that they decided not to go forward," Daley says. "That's what contrasts so markedly with the approach of the second group, who treated the three patients with an unproven stem cell therapy that ended up have devastating effects on their vision."

In this case, the New England Journal of Medicine report says, patients paid $5,000 each to receive injections of solutions that supposedly contained stem cells that were obtained from fat removed from their abdomens through liposuction.

Even though the safety and effectiveness of this procedure is unknown, all three patients received injections in both eyes.

"That's what led to these horrible results," says Thomas Albini, a retina specialist at the University of Florida's Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, who helped write the report.

Before the procedure, all three women still had at least some vision. Afterwards, one woman was left completely blind while the other two were effectively blind, Albini and his colleagues reported.

The cases show that patients need to be warned that something that "sounds too good to be true may indeed be too good to be true and may even be horrible," Albini says.

Read this article:
3 Women Blinded By Unproven Stem Cell Treatments - NPR

RenovaCare Inc. (OTCQB:RCAR) is a New York City-based biotechnology company developing its patented CellMist and SkinGun stem cell technologies for treating burns in weeks or less as well as treating chronic and acute wounds, acne scarring, and skin defects and diseases. In December, it received a U.S. patent for its SkinGun device.

Before joining RenovaCare, CEO Thomas Bold was CEO of StemCell Systems. He has more than 15 years of experience in medical biotechnology device manufacturing and stem cell platform development.

Harlan Levy: How does your CellMist technology specifically work?

Thomas Bold: Doctors isolate a high concentration of the most desirable stem cell population from a very small donor sample of the patient's own skin and suspended in the liquid CellMist Solution. It's then gently sprayed onto wound sites using our SkinGun, which looks like Captain Kirk's particle-beam gun, the "Phaser" in the Star Trek TV series.

The isolated cells include cells that proliferate rapidly in order to achieve quick re-epithelialization. This is the stage at which a burn is technically considered "healed" and patients are often discharged. The average person would recognize this healing phase as the point at which the wound develops a thin, shiny, pink-colored protective layer.

H.L.: What are existing burn treatments, and how do they compare with the SkinGun treatment?

T.B.: Traditional skin grafting has been the treatment for burns and wounds for centuries. More recently, mesh grafting has become the latest standard of care. This process surgically removes large sheets of healthy skin from the patient. Following this painful donor procedure, the sheet is punctured in a grid-like pattern to form an expandable mesh. Surgeons pull this mesh as wide as feasible and surgically stitch this skin to the patient's wound. The procedure is extremely painful, creates an additional wound at each donor site and results in poor cosmetic outcomes, often with scarred and deformed skin.

This transplanted skin can result in restricted joint movement and is unable to grow with the patient. Consequently, mesh graft patients require months and sometimes up to a year of physical therapy and can face psychological problems from the permanent disfigurement of scarring. In addition, long-term pain management with painkillers is very often necessary.

With the RenovaCare treatment technology, by spraying the patient's stem cells, the SkinGun overcomes the need for removing large sheets of donor skin, and the resultant healing does not require prolonged physical therapy. The spray procedure is gentle, and the skin that regrows looks, feels, and functions as the original skin that it replaces. Most often the healing process takes only a week.

It's very important to note here that a sheet of meshed skin covers only up to six times its original donor area. The RenovaCare system covers up to 100 times its donor skin sample. This is why the donor skin sample can be so small compared to the injured treatment area.

H.L.: What about scars and infection potential compared with conventional treatments?

T.B.: A wound heals from the edges towards the middle. The bigger the wound, the longer this process takes. And the longer this process takes, the higher the risk of infection and scarring.

Imagine a large burn of 20, 30, 40 percent of your total body surface. With our CellMist System, the doctor sprays the patient's own stem cells with a highly regenerative capacity onto the wound and, by doing so, creates tens of thousands of little regenerative islands across the wound. These islands grow outwards, ultimately connecting to each other to create a protective epithelial skin layer that covers the wound.

Experts believe the formation of this pink-colored layer marks the moment of re-epithelization where the risk of infection is reduced and the patient's wound is effectively healed. Beyond this stage, the cosmetic healing process also happens entirely natural to produce a scar-free result where, finally, skin color, tone and pigmentation are restored.

Since the RenovaCare spray procedure uses the patient's own stem cells, there isn't the risk of tissue rejection, infection, or ongoing immuno suppression therapy.

H.L.: What results have you found for patients using the SkinGun?

T.B.: We have many examples of patients recovering from severe burns within a week or two, scar-free, and walking away with unlimited joint restrictions.

In the case of one patient with severe electrical burns to over a third of his body, we were able to spray his wounds with 23 million stem cells isolated from a tiny two-inch-by two-inch sample of his own skin. Within five days of treatment, his chest and arms were already healed. Four days later, the patient was discharged from the hospital.

It's also important to note that reconstructive surgery for burn patients is especially challenging when tackling joints in the body. To this end, the authors of a case study in the reputable journal "Burns," said, "Cell-spray grafting is also especially suitable for hands and joint areas, where prolonged times to re-epithelization may significantly impact functionality and esthetic outcome."

H.L.: What different uses does the SkinGun have beside burns?

T.B.: Currently, we are focusing on severe second-degree burns, but we see the RenovaCare technology also applicable for other indications such as cosmetic procedures targeting skin pigmentation disorders, scar treatment, and other related conditions.

Our goal is to bring to market the world's most advanced technology for skin repair using a patient's own stem cells.

H.L.: Is there a record of the SkinGun use in the States and abroad?

T.B.: Having treated 72 burn patients to date, the company's early clinical target is burns with follow-on indications, including chronic wounds and cosmetic procedures.

H.L.: How much research went into creating the SkinGun and over what time period?

T.B.: The birth of RenovaCare technology goes back to the early 2000s in Berlin, Germany. Researchers, at that time, were trying to "grow" skin by seeding stem cells inside multi-dimensional bioreactors. They soon discovered that these artificial chambers were no match for the growth of the same cells when transplanted inside a human body; thus, the birth of a concept to use a patient's own wound as a natural bioreactor.

A study published in "Advances in Plastic Surgery" highlights 19 early patients with deep dermal wound burns to the face and neck, complex three-dimensional surfaces. Researchers achieved such outstanding results using our cell spray that they refused to perform further skin grafting. Instead, surgeons adopted our founding technology as their standard of care.

Let me quote from the surgeons' study, which states

"We refuse to perform a prospective randomized study with groups in which traditional skin grafting and/or wound healing are still applied for the therapy for deep dermal burns due to the excellent results in our study. The method of CEA spray application has become our standard of care for these indications. The faster wound closure, the promotion of spontaneous wound healing by keratinocyte application, as well as the preservation of donor sites are further advantages of the method."

The same paper concluded that "using a spray technique results in excellent cosmetic outcomes compared with any other method."

H.L.: How has the technology changed since then?

T.B.: Since the time of this early approach, our technology has evolved and matured significantly. Our cell isolation no longer requires complex procedures, culturing, expansion, and processing time, and our stem cell spray device no longer requires multiple hand-assembled parts. Its independent power and flow-control unit has been condensed in size from a 2-foot cube down to a 9-volt battery placed inside the handle of a single handheld spray gun.

H.L.: What is the potential market for the technology in dollars and number of patients?

T.B.: Conservatively speaking, the market for our technology exceeds $50 billion. There are nearly a million people who suffer from burns each year in the U.S. alone. According to the American Burn Association, burn injuries continue to be one of the leading causes of accidental death and injury in the U.S, and one civilian fire death occurs every two hours and forty minutes.

H.L.: How much would you estimate the treatment cost may be for each different use?

T.B.: The SkinGun technology is currently under development and not approved for clinical use in the U.S., so it's too early to talk about what the treatment will cost. We have always been mindful of reimbursement, and nearly two years ago, we commissioned an investigation into the reimbursement pathway for our CellMist System. We know that reimbursement opportunities are available by way of current coding and practices.

We have further investigated and evaluated the "bundling" approach currently advocated for by insurers and are confident that that our technology is well placed to take advantages of any shift towards such a model.

H.L: What is the schedule to get Federal Drug Administration clearance?

T.B.: In order to achieve FDA clearance for the CellMist System and the SkinGun, we will be working to show our technology is safe and prove its efficacy within applicable clinical trial formats and according to the relevant regulatory requirements. I can't speculate as to how long the FDA clearance process will take, and, therefore, it's hard to speculate when our product will be commercialized.

H.L.: What other products are you investigating and how may they work?

T.B.: We are focusing on bringing the SkinGun and our stem cell spray technology to market at this time.

H.L.: What is your background, including age, education, prior employment?

T.B.: Before joining RenovaCare I worked as the CEO of StemCell Systems GmbH, a Berlin-based biomedical company engaged in the development and commercialization of advanced cell culture bioreactors. I have more than 15 years of professional business experience in the field of medical biotechnology device manufacturing, stem cell culture technology platform development and regenerative medicine research project management and product development. I also co-founded several start-up companies in Germany.

Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.

I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

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RenovaCare: Stem Cell Treatment Heals Burns In Weeks Not Months - Seeking Alpha

Studying brain disorders is complicated for many reasons, not the least being the ethics of obtaining living neurons. To overcome that obstacle, UC San Francisco postdoc Aditi Deshpande, PhD, is starting with skin cells.

Thanks to developments in stem cell technology, new information about the human brain is now being gleaned from a simple cheek swab or skin sample. This technology is key to the kind of progress Despande and researchers like her are making. It allows them to work with cells otherwise unobtainable living brain cells that have the same genetics as the patients.

Deshpande begins with skin cells obtained from the Simons Foundation from volunteers whose DNA contains a specific deletion or duplication of one chromosome. She cultures these cells and then turns them into induced pluripotent stem cells cells that have been coaxed back to their embryonic state and are able to become any other type of cell. From there, she reprograms them to become a specific type of neuron thats involved in attention and information processing.

The deletion or duplication Deshpande is looking for stems from a 2008 finding by Lauren Weiss, PhD, an associate professor of nuerology in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and the UCSF Institute for Human Genetics.

Weiss discovered a 29-gene region of DNA on chromosome 16 that is associated with autism, seizures and other brain disorders. Normally, a person has two copies of the region one on each copy of chromosome 16. In some of Deshpandes samples, the region is deleted from one chromosome, leaving one copy. In others, the region is duplicated, resulting in three copies. Subjects with only one copy of the region were more likely to have macrocephaly an enlarged brain than a typical subject, and those with three copies were more likely to have microcephaly a smaller brain.

Whats really interesting, said Deshpande, is that although these subjects seem to have opposite features in terms of brain size, we see a related effect, based on whether they have fewer or more copies of the region.

Some known models of autism show a connection between a neurons growth or appearance and macrocephaly, she explained. We wanted to know if the same thing is happening here.

To compare the effect of the mutation, Deshpande first stains the obtained skin cells so that she can visualize the neurons under a microscope. After staining, Deshpande used cell-counting software to assess several thousands of neurons from deletion and duplication samples and measure them against normal neurons. She found that the neurons missing the DNA region exhibited some differences compared to typical neurons.

Her next step in her research is to discern which of the regions 29 genes are involved in these differences.

The work is meticulous, but Deshpande doesnt mind. I simply love looking at neurons, she said. It really makes you appreciate the complexity of the brain.

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Science in Focus: Creating Neurons from Skin Cells to Understand Autism - ScienceBlog.com (blog)

Researchers led by San Diego scientists have created a lab-grown model of the anorexic brain using stem cells derived from patients with the eating disorder. They say the results provide further evidence for understanding anorexia as largely genetically based, rather than primarily as a socially conditioned behavior.

"There's a stigma regarding eating disorders that it's something social," said UC San Diego researcher Alysson Muotri. "But in fact, our results point to a strong genetic factor. And moreover, it suggests there's a specific pathway in the brain that is altered."

For the study published Tuesday in the journal Translational Psychiatry, Muotri and his colleagues took skin cells from seven anorexia patients and then converted into stem cells in the lab. They then coaxed those stem cells into brain cells, providing scientists with a new model for studying the eating disorder.

Muotri, who has developed similar models for other diseases, says the "disease-in-a-dish" approach is great for studying neurological disorders. Scientists wanting to study these diseases "can't just open the skull and look through the brain cells," he said.

The researchers compared anorexic brain models with other models built from cells taken from four non-anorexic people, most of them relatives of the anorexic patients. The researchers found a difference in the TACR1 gene between the two groups.

Muotri admits the number of patients studied was small, but says these results support "the idea that anorexia has a fundamental biological basis on the perception of fat in the body."

Anorexia experts not involved in the study told KPBS this is another step toward understanding the underlying biology of a misunderstood and often deadly disease.

Walter Kaye, director of the UCSD Eating Disorder Research and Treatment Program, said in an email to KPBS that the findings establish an interesting link between anorexia and a genetic pathway known to play a role in anxiety and fat metabolism.

"This may be a very important clue to understanding puzzling symptoms in anorexia nervosa, such as why food is often associated with anxiety, and why patients see themselves as fat and tend to avoid fat-containing foods," Kaye wrote.

Christina Wierenga, co-director of the eating disorder research program at UCSD, wrote in an email to KPBS, "Although the sample size is small, this elegant study is the first of its kind to examine gene expression in neurons derived from individuals with anorexia and sheds new light on possible causes of anorexia. Of course, replication in larger samples is needed."

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How Stem Cells Could Help Scientists Study Eating Disorders - KPBS

Masayo Takahashi (second from left) treated macular degeneration with retinal tissue grown from iPS cells.

Kyodo News/Contributor/getty images

By Dennis NormileMar. 15, 2017 , 5:00 PM

Its official: The first use of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells in a human has proved safe, if not clearly effective. Japanese researchers reported in this weeks issue of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that using the cells to replace eye tissue damaged by age-related macular degeneration (AMD) did not improve a patients vision, but did halt disease progression. They had described the outcome at conferences, but publication of the details is an encouraging milestone for other groups gearing up to treat diseased or damaged organs with the versatile replacement cells, which are derived from mature tissues.

This initial success is pretty momentous, says Alan Trounson, a stem cell scientist at the Hudson Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia. But the broader picture for iPS therapies is mixed, as researchers have retreated from their initial hopes of creating custommade stem cells from each patients tissue. That strategy might have ensured that recipients immune systems would accept the new cells. But it proved too slow and expensive, says Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan, who first discovered how to create iPS cells and is a co-author of the NEJM paper. He and others are now developing banks of premade donor cells. Using stocks of cells, we can proceed much more quickly and cost effectively, he says.

Even so, clinical work is progressing more quickly than I had expected, says Yamanaka, who did his groundbreaking work just a decade ago. His collaborator on this trial, Masayo Takahashi of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, had a head start. An ophthalmologist, Takahashi was familiar with the ravages of AMD, a condition that progressively damages the macula, the central part of the retina, and is the leading cause of blindness in the elderly.

Takahashi started investigating treatments for AMD in 2000, a time when the only cells capable of developing into all the tissues of the body had to be extracted from embryos. But she was stymied by immune reactions to these embryonic stem (ES) cells. When Yamanaka announced that he could induce mature, or somatic cells, to return to an ES celllike state, Takahashi quickly changed course to develop a treatment based on iPS cells.

Her team finally operated on the first patient, a 77-year-old Japanese woman with late-stage AMD, in September 2014. They took a sample of her own skin cells, derived iPS cells, and differentiated them into the kind of retinal cells destroyed by the disease. A surgeon then slipped a small sheet of the cells into the retina of her right eye.

An operation on a second patient was called off because a number of minor genetic mutations had crept into his iPS cells during processing, and uncontrolled growthcancerhas been a worry with such cells. These changes do not directly induce cancer, but we wanted to make safety the first priority, Yamanaka says. Also, Takahashi says, AMD drugs had stabilized the patients condition so there was no urgency in subjecting him to the risks of surgery, which include hemorrhaging and retinal damage.

Immediately after surgery the first patient reported her eyesight was brighter. Takahashi says the surgery halted further deterioration of her eye, even without the drug injections still being used to treat her other eye, and there were no signs of rejection of the graft as of last December.

Clinical work is progressing much more quickly than I expected.

The result is a proof of principle that iPS cellbased therapy is feasible, says Kapil Bharti, a molecular cell biologist at the U.S. National Institutes of Healths National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, who is also developing iPS cells for treating AMD. Takahashi says once her team gains more experience with the technique they will extend it to patients with earlier-stage AMD in an effort to preserve vision.

Last month, Takahashi won approval to try the procedure on another five patients with late-stage AMD. But this time, instead of using iPS cells derived from each patient, the team will draw on banked cells from a single donor. It takes time to create iPS cells, and a lot of time for the safety evaluation, Yamanaka says. It is also costly, at nearly $900,000 to develop and test the iPS cells for the first trial, Takahashi adds.

Using donor cells to create the iPS cells will make it more difficult to ensure immune compatibility. But Yamanaka says that donor iPS cells can be matched to patients based on human leukocyte antigen (HLA) haplotypessets of cell-surface proteins that regulate immune reactions. HLA-matched cells should require only small doses of immunosuppressive drugs to prevent rejection, Takahashi saysand perhaps none at all for transplantation into the immune-privileged eye.

Kyoto Universitys Center for iPS Cell Research and Application, which Yamanaka heads, has been developing an iPS cell bank. Just 75 iPS cell lines will cover 80% of the Japanese population through HLA matching, he says. Trounson, a past president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, a stem cell funding agency, says banked iPS cells have advantages. Donor iPS cells may be safer than cells derived from older patients, whose somatic cells may harbor mutations. And Jordan Lancaster, a physiologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, likes the speed of the approach. He is devising patches for heart failure patients based on iPS-derived myocardial cells that will be premanufactured, cryopreserved, and ready to use at a moments notice.

Patient-specific iPS cells will still have clinical uses. For one thing, Bharti says it will be difficult for cell banks to cover all HLA haplotypes. And a patients own iPS cells could be used to screen for adverse drug reactions, says Min-Han Tan, an oncologist at Singapores Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, who recently published a report on the approach.

Other human trials are not far behind. Yamanaka says his Kyoto University colleague Jun Takahashi (Masayo Takahashis husband) will launch trials of iPS-derived cells to treat Parkinsons disease within 2 years. Bharti hopes to start human trials of iPS cells for a different type of macular degeneration next year. And as techniques for making and growing iPS cells improve, researchers can contemplate treatments requiring not just 100,000 cells or sothe number in Takahashis retinal sheetsbut millions, as in Lancasters heart patches.

As clinical use approaches, Takahashi cautions that researchers need to keep public expectations realistic. For now, iPS treatments may help but wont fully reverse disease, she says. Regenerative medicine is not going to cure patients in the way they hope.

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Cutting-edge stem cell therapy proves safe, but will it ever be effective? - Science Magazine

Guiding a recent tour of a Kyoto University lab, a staff member holds up a transparent container. Inside are tiny pale spheres, no bigger than peas, floating in a clear liquid. This is cartilage, explains the guide, Hiroyuki Wadahama. It was made here from human iPS cells.

A monitor attached to a nearby microscope shows a mass of pink and purple dots. This is the stuff from which the cartilage was grown: induced pluripotent stem cells, often called iPS cells. Scientists can create these seemingly magical cells from any cell in the body by introducing four genes, in essence turning back the cellular clock to an immature, nonspecialized state. The term pluripotent refers to the fact iPS cells can be reprogrammed to become any type of cell, from skin to liver to nerve cells. In this way they act like embryonic stem cells and share their revolutionary therapeutic potentialand as such, they could eliminate the need for using and then destroying human embryos. Also, iPS cells can proliferate infinitely.

They can also give rise, however, to potentially dangerous mutations, possibly including ones that lead to cancerous tumors. Thus, iPS cells are a double-edged swordtheir great promise is tempered by risk. Another problem is the high cost of treating a patient with his or her own newly reprogrammed cells. But now Japanese researchers are trying a different approach.

When Kyoto University researcher Shinya Yamanaka announced in 2006 that his lab had created iPS cells from mouse skin cells for the first time, biologists were stunned. In 2007, along with James Thomson of the University of WisconsinMadison, Yamanaka repeated the feat with human skin cells. Many hailed the opening of an entirely new field of personalized regenerative medicine. Need new liver cells? No problem. Patients could benefit from having their own cells reprogrammed into ones that could help treat disease, potentially eliminating the prospect of immune rejection. In 2012 Yamanaka shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with John Gurdon for discovering that mature cells can be converted to stem cells. By reprogramming human cells, scientists have created new opportunities to study diseases and develop methods for diagnosis and therapy, the Nobel judges wrote. To capitalize on the discovery, Kyoto University set up the $40-million Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), which Yamanaka directs.

A decade after the Yamanaka teams groundbreaking discoveries, however, iPS cells have retreated from the headlines; to the layperson, progress seems scant. There has only been one clinical trial involving iPS cells, and it was halted after a transplant operation on just one patienta Japanese woman in her 70s with macular degeneration, a condition that can lead to blurry vision or partial blindness. Doctors at Kobe City Medical Center General Hospital used her skin cells to grow iPS cells, which were reprogrammed into retinal cells and implanted in her eye. The treatment stopped the degeneration but the trial was halted in 2015 because genetic mutations were detected in another batch of iPS cells intended for another patient. Regulatory changes, under which the Japanese government allowed the distribution of iPS cells for clinical use, also prompted researchers to switch the study to a more efficient process of using cells from third-party donors instead of using a patients own cells. The Japanese government has a lot of incentives to considerwere developing a new science, a new technology and also a new economic market, says CiRA spokesperson Peter Karagiannis. So theres the ethical issues, but theres also money to be made. How do we balance the two?

The Kobe clinical trial had a lot riding on it. And the setback followed a major stem cell scandal in which biologist Haruko Obokata of the Riken Center for Developmental Biology was found to have falsified data in studies, published in 2014, that claimed a new method of achieving pluripotency. Then, earlier this year, Yamanaka had to apologize at a news conference after it was discovered that a reagent used to create iPS cells at CiRA was mislabeled, which could mean the wrong reagent was used. Although the mix-up is being examined, the center has halted supplies of some of its iPS cells to researchers across Japan; the error also set back by a few years a CiRA project to produce clinical-grade platelets from iPS cells.

But Yamanaka says he remains focused on the bigger picture of iPS cells and is still optimistic they can not only help researchers but may be key to transformative clinical therapies. CiRA still has a bank of tens of millions of iPS cells that have already been reset and checked for safety, so they can be used in patient applications. In terms of regenerative medicine, things have gone quicker than I expected, Yamanaka says, adding, iPS cells have exceeded expectations because of their potential for disease modeling, which allows us to elucidate unknown disease mechanisms, and drug discovery.

Those hoping for quick clinical success should remember it takes time for revolutionary treatments to go from lab bench to bedside, says Andras Nagy, a stem cell researcher at Mount Sinai Hospitals LunenfeldTanenbaum Research Institute in Toronto, who has not been directly involved in Yamanakas work. If you fully appreciate the paradigm-shifting nature of iPS cells, tremendous progress has in fact been made over the past 10 years, says Nagy, who in 2009 established a method of creating stem cells without using viruses (which had initially been used to deliver reprogramming genes into targeted cells). By comparison, penicillin was discovered as an antibiotic in 1928, but it was not available in the clinic until the early 1940s.

Researchers in Japan are meanwhile using iPS cell technology to pave the way to better drugs. For instance, CiRAs Kohei Yamamizu recently reported developing a cellular model of the bloodbrain barrier made entirely from human iPS cells. It could become a useful tool for testing drugs for brain diseases.

All eyes, however, are back on Kobe City Medical Center General Hospital, which is resuming its retina trialthis time with iPS cells from donors instead of cells from patients themselves. Using CiRAs bank of iPS cells, there are significant time and cost savingsit could be one fifth the cost of cell preparation and patient transplant or less. The initial study, with its personalized approach, reportedly cost about $875,000 for just one patient. We plan to evaluate the efficacy of transplanting the [donor] cells and consider the feasibility of using this method as a routine treatment in the future, accessible to the wider society, study co-leader Masayo Takahashi of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology said at a February press conference in Kobe. Her husband Jun Takahashi, a researcher at CiRA, is also planning to use donor-derived iPS cells for a clinical applicationto help treat patients with Parkinsons disease.

Nagy admits the promise of personalized cell regeneration is probably too costly for mainstream use, and he believes genomic editingin which DNA is inserted or deletedis key to safe iPS cell implants. For his part, Yamanaka is cautiously optimistic about iPS cells as a therapeutic tool.

Regenerative medicine and drug discovery are the two key applications for iPS cells, Yamanaka says. With the use of iPS cell stock, we are now able to work quicker and cheaper, so thats the challenge going forward.

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Waiting to Reprogram Your Cells? Don't Hold Your Breath - Scientific American

March 15, 2017 Credit: Universit du Luxembourg

Stem cells are unspecialised cells that can develop into any type of cell in the human body. So far, however, scientists only partially understand how the body controls the fate of these all-rounders, and what factors decide whether a stem cell will differentiate, for example, into a blood, liver or nerve cell. Researchers from the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg and an international team have now identified an ingenious mechanism by which the body orchestrates the regeneration of red and white blood cells from progenitor cells. "This finding can help us to improve stem cell therapy in future," says Dr. Alexander Skupin, head of the "Integrative Cell Signalling" group of LCSB.

Although all cells in an organism carry the same genetic blueprints the same DNA some of them act as blood or bone cells, for example, while others function as nerve or skin cells. Researchers already understand quite well how individual cells work. But how an organism is able to create such a diversity of cells from the same genetic template and how it manages to relocate them to wherever they are needed in the body is still largely unknown. In order to learn more about this process, Alexander Skupin and his team treated blood stem cells from mice with growth hormones and then watched closely how these progenitor cells behaved during their differentiation into white or red blood cells. The researchers observed that the cells' transformation does not occur in linear, targeted fashion, but rather more opportunistically. Each progenitor cell adapts to the needs of its environment and integrates itself into the body where new cells are needed. "So, it is not as though the cell takes a ticket at the beginning of its differentiation and then travels straight to its destination. Rather, it gets off frequently to look around and see which line is best to take," Alexander Skupin explains.

By this clever mechanism, a multicellular organism can adapt the regrowth of new cells to its current needs. "Before progenitor cells differentiate once and for all, they first lose their stem cell character and then check, as it were, which cell line is currently in demand. Only then do they develop into the cell type that best suits their characteristics and which prevails in their environment," Alexander Skupin says. The researcher likens this step to a game of roulette, where the different types of cells can be thought of as the differently numbered slots in the roulette wheel that catch the ball. "When the cells lose their stem cell character, they are quasi thrown into the roulette wheel, where they first bounce around aimlessly. Only when they have found the right environment do the cells then drop into that niche like the roulette ball falling into a numbered slot and differentiate definitively." This way, the body can orchestrate its cell regeneration and at the same time prevent stem cells from being misdirected too early. "Even if a cell takes a wrong turn, it is ultimately sorted out again if its characteristics are unsuitable for the niche, or slot, it has landed in," says Skupin.

With their study, Alexander Skupin and his team have shown for the first time that a progenitor cell's fate is not clearly predetermined and does not follow a straight line. "This observation contradicts the current doctrine that stem cells are programmed to follow a certain lineage from the beginning," Alexander Skupin says. The researcher is furthermore convinced that the processes are similar for other progenitor cells. "In the lab, we have observed the same differentiation pattern in so-called iPS cells, or induced pluripotent stem cells, which can transform into many different types of cells."

This knowledge can help the researchers to improve the effectiveness of therapies in future. Stem cell therapy involves administering a patient his or her own body's stem cells in order to replace other cells that have died as a result of an affliction such as Parkinson's disease. While this promising treatment method has been intensively researched over many years, there has so far been only limited practical success in endogenous stem cell therapy. It is also highly controversial, since it is frequently accompanied by severe side effects and it cannot be ruled out that some cells might degenerate and lead to cancer. "Because we now have a better understanding of how the body influences the direction in which stem cells differentiate, we can hopefully control this process better in future," Alexander Skupin concludes.

Explore further: Genetic factors control regenerative properties of blood-forming stem cells

More information: Mitra Mojtahedi et al. Cell Fate Decision as High-Dimensional Critical State Transition, PLOS Biology (2016). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2000640

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Researchers decipher how the body controls stem cells - Phys.Org

BRUSSELS Belgian biotech group Tigenix said on Monday its medical trial with a novel treatment for patients at risk of heart failure after a coronary attack was successful.

The group said patients treated in its PhaseI/II trial of donor-derived expanded cardiac stem cells (AlloCSC) showed no side-effects and all of them continued to live after 30 days, six months and a year.

Tigenix added that in one subgroup of trial patients associated with a poor long-term outlook, there was a larger reduction in the size of infarction, tissue death due to inadequate blood supply.

"This is the first trial in which it has been demonstrated that allogeneic cardiac stem cells can be transplanted safely through the coronary tree," one of the doctors in the trial said.

The group said it would now analyze the data from the trial and decide on how to proceed with its research.

(Reporting by Robert-Jan Bartunek; editing by Philip Blenkinsop)

A South Dakota state judge has ordered ABC Broadcasting to face a potential $5.7 billion defamation lawsuit claiming it damaged Beef Products Inc by referring in a series of reports to a meat product it sold as "pink slime."

ZURICH Novartis has won U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for Kisqali to treat postmenopausal women who have a difficult-to-treat form of breast cancer, challenging U.S. rival Pfizer's Ibrance.

Employees of Monsanto Co ghostwrote scientific reports that U.S. regulators relied on to determine that a chemical in its Roundup weed killer does not cause cancer, farmers and others suing the company claimed in court filings.

See more here:
Belgium's Tigenix says heart attack stem cell trial successful - Reuters

Milica Radisic, PhD,knew she'd found her scientific niche when she read about tissue engineering as an undergrad. This year's Libin InstituteTine Haworth Cardiovascular Research Day keynote speaker hopes her work will guide healing and tissue regeneration in the body and works to help her students become successful in their careers.

Radisic is a professor at the University of Toronto and Canada Research Chair in Functional Cardiovascular Tissue Engineering (Tier 2). She will be presenting the Dr. E.R. Smith Lecture in Cardiovascular Research April 6, on bioengineering functional tissues for drug discovery and therapy.

Q: How did you become interested in research as a career?

A: I have been interested in science since I was a child, probably since I was in elementary school. It was just the question about what exactly in science I would do. At the end of my undergraduate degree at McMaster, I read an article in the Scientific American about tissue engineering, an emerging field at that time. It was clear to me at that moment that I had found the area I would like to work in as a scientist.

Q: Tell us about your research.

A: The long-term objective of my research is to enable cardiovascular regeneration through tissue engineering and development of new biomaterials. We are working with human-induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) as a source of beating heart cells for our engineered tissues. We are designing new biomaterials to guide cellular response, and we are investigating methods to make both cardiac muscle and vasculature. This work relies heavily on controlling cell environment through microfabrication. My research interests also include microfluidic cell separation and development of in vitro models for drug testing.

Q: Your current research focuses on tissue engineering. How will it help people?

A:It is not possible to take a biopsy from a human heart and make more beating heart cells from the biopsy. This is a big problem in drug discovery, as pharma uses cell lines and animal models that are not fully predictive of the human heart muscle response. Using the methods developed in my lab, it is now possible to make a human heart tissue starting from iPSC for drug discovery and safety testing. These models are already being used by pharma companies through our startup company TARA Biosystems.

Q:What are your ultimate career/research goals?

A:My goals are to provide better healthy and diseased human tissue models for discovery, as well as to develop new biomaterials that can guide healing and regeneration in the body.

Q:What is your favourite thing about being with students?

A:Working with grad students is the best part of my job. As my former chair, Dr. Doug Reeve, said, You are surrounded by young people who are focused on self-improvement. This is really unique to an academic position. Our students are young, energetic, creative, they have outstanding ideas and they want to succeed. It is really fantastic to be surrounded by them. They keep me young, and it is really for them that I work as hard as possible to enable their career success.

Q:What is the best piece of advice you would give to up-and-coming researchers?

A:To work on really important (and hard) problems that have not been solved. I think those projects give us the best returns.

Getmore information on the Libin Institutes Cardiovascular Research Day and register for a free ticket. Milica Radisics presentation will be on bioengineering functional tissues for drug discovery and therapy.

The Libin Institutes Tine Haworth Cardiovascular Research Day is an annual event thatshowcases cutting-edge cardiovascular research presentations from external and internal speakers.The day also consists of a poster competition, TOD talks from Libin Institute trainees andspeakers, and the Dr. E.R. Smith Lecture in Cardiovascular Research, named in honour of the former dean of the Cumming School of Medicine, Dr. Eldon Smith.

Original post:
Cardiac researcher Milica Radisic to present keynote address at Libin Institute's Cardiac Research Day - UCalgary News

Adam Krief, with his wife, Lia, had a rare form of blood cancer that proved to be fatal. (Facebook)

(JTA) Adam Krief, a Jewish cancer patient whose search for a bone marrow donor captured the attention of social media and celebrities including Kim Kardashian, Mayim Bialik and Jason Biggs, has died.

Krief, a father of three from Los Angeles, died Tuesday, a family friend confirmed to JTA. He was 31.

Krief was diagnosed with primary myelofibrosis, a rare form of blood cancer that is likely fatal if a stem celltransplant matchis notfound.To find anHLA, or gene complex matchfor Krief something more difficultto track downthan a blood type match drives were held around the world, including in North America,Israel, France and Mexico.

Kardashian posted about Krief on Facebook in September, saying he was a friend of a friend.

A bone-marrow donor was found last December seven matches were found, in fact, through the donor drives organized for him.

This is what cloud 9 looks like Im so grateful to let you all know that a donorhas been found, Krief wrote at the time, sharing a video with two of his children.

The Hope 4 Adam Facebook page on March 8 called for a Worldwide Unity Shabbat for March 11 and March 18 for the recovery of Krief, asking followers to Help us bring about a miracle.

On Monday, the Eretz Kabbalah Facebook page of the Los Angeles-based Eretz Cultural Center posted a call for followers to recite Tehillim, or psalms, on behalf of Krief.

After a long search for a bone-marrow match to save his life, he finally received one. However, after some complications, he is said to only have a few hours to live, the post said.

Krief is survived by his wife, Lia, and his young children.

RELATED:

Jewish cancer patient finds bone marrow transplant following worldwide search, Kim Kardashians pitch

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Adam Krief, Jewish father of 3 whose bone marrow search inspired ... - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

March of the Men is a month-long campaign run by Anthony Nolan, the blood cancer charity, which seeks to recruit as many young men aged 16-30 to the register as possible.

AnthonyNolans aim to find a match for every person in need of a stem cell or bone marrow transplant. Young men aged 16-30 currently account for just 16% of the register, but provide over 50% of all potentially lifesaving transplants. This is why theMarch of the Men campaign is so important.

On average, people on the register have a 1 in 790 chance of being asked to donate stem cells or bone marrow in the next five years, whereas a man aged 16-30 has a 1 in 170 chance. As our research indicates that young men provide better outcomes for patients, its of vital importance that we encourage more of them to sign up as potential stem cell donors.

Marrow is the collective name given to AnthonyNolans student volunteer network. Operating in over 50 universities across the UK, Marrow groups campaign, fundraise and crucially recruit young students to join the stem cell register on our behalf. Incredibly, donors recruited at university by Marrow groups account for more than a quarter of all potentially lifesaving transplants that take place in the UK each year.

As the Marrow Volunteer Engagement Coordinator at AnthonyNolan, my job is to develop and deliver training workshops and presentations for our student volunteers. I also help to oversee the quality of our university recruitment events to make sure that procedures are being followed properly, and that were recruiting potential stem cell donors in the best possible way.

Recently, the AnthonyNolanResearch Institute (ANRI) carried out the largest-ever UK study into the factors that can make a stem cell transplant more successful. Early indications show the age of the donor can affect patient outcomes, with younger donors leading to better survival rates.

Marrow groups at universities have access not only to young people, but young people from a vast range of ethnic backgrounds, meaning they are of fundamental importance.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting a young man called Chris Lane at The London Clinic while he was donating his stem cells. Coincidentally, it turned out that it was me who had signed him up to the AnthonyNolanregister when I was a Marrow volunteer two years ago. He said: I had only briefly heard of AnthonyNolanbefore signing up. It wasnt until I saw a stand at university that my curiosity to find out more led me to want to be included on the register.

I had never thought about how I would feel or react to being told that I was required to donate but when it happened, I felt a sense of pride and required no second thought to follow through with whatever was required.

I think about the person who received my cells every day. Life is the best gift you could ever give someone so my fingers are always crossed for them.

View original post here:
March of the Men - The Hippocratic Post (blog)

The first new finding is an obvious onethe mouse experiments worked in human cells. Just because something worked in mice doesn't necessarily mean it will work in people too. So this is a really important finding.

The second important finding has to do with the specific genes each group used. Both groups added four genes to turn a stem cell into an ES cell. But they used a slightly different set of genes.

The Japanese group added OCT3/4, SOX2, KLF4, and c-MYC. The Wisconsin group added OCT4, SOX2, NANOG, and LIN28. This matters because of a side effect seen in the previous mouse study.

The mouse study went farther than the human study in that the researchers added these new ES cells to a mouse embryo. The results were disconcerting. Around 20% of the mice developed cancer from the cells. The researchers hypothesized that the cause was one or more of the genes that were used to create the ES cell.

By using different sets of genes in the human cell study, the researchers showed you don't need the same four genes to create an ES cell. The hope is that the researchers will find a combination of genes that do not cause cancer.

Once the scientists find a set of genes that don't cause cancer, this research should blow the stem cell field wide open. We still don't know if ES cells will work to actually cure disease. But ethical ES cells should open the spigot of federal funds so American scientists can finally research this subject to its full extent. Then we'll see if ES cells can really live up to their hype. Or if we need to pursue other ways to cure these illnesses.

Read more here:
Human Embryonic Stem (ES) Cells from Skin Cells ...

HBO

Last weekend was the Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival in Nederland, Colorado, and naturally the title alone brings up some serious questions. What is it? How did it start? Who is the frozen dead guy? We looked into it, and the history of the festival is actually pretty fascinating.

It all begins with Bredo Morstoel who never lived in Colorado during his lifetime, but, due to a series of odd circumstances, has had quite an active death there. Lovingly called Grandpa Bredo by the townspeople of Nederland, Morstoel died from a heart condition in 1989 in Norway. Nothing out of the ordinary, right?

Well here we go: Grandpa Bredo and his family had a strong interest in cryonics. So instead of being buried or cremated, he was packed in dry ice and shipped to a cryonics facility in California where he lived for almost four years. However, his daughter and grandson lived in Colorado and eventually felt that keeping Grandpa frozen was something they could very well do on their own. So in 1993, they had him shipped to their house and kept him in the shed.

It was an odd situation, but it became even odder when his family no longer lived in the area. Because eventually, both his daughter and grandson headed back to Norway. And that left the problem of what would happen to Grandpa Bredos body. Garage sale? Goodwill?

HBO

After the city council found out that a frozen body was being kept in someones shed, they passed a new municipal code making it illegal to keep bodies at your home (something that apparently was A-okay before that). But since Grandpa Bredo had already been kept there for several years, he was grandfathered in and allowed to stay. By that point he had some pretty strong squatters rights.

So, with the assumption that Grandpa Bredo would stay in Nederland until cryogenic reanimation became a reality, Grandpa Bredos grandson put out a want ad on the internet for a caretaker of the body. It was then that resident Bo Shaffer took him on the job. Now known as the Ice man Shaffer and his pals bring Grandpa Bredo 1,600 pounds of dry ice monthly, pack it around him, and surround him with foam padding and blankets. The bizarre situation became a source of laughter and also pride in the small community.

Original post:
A Visual Tour Of Colorado's Most Hilarious Festival: Frozen Dead Guy Days - UPROXX

March 13, 2017 02:00 ET | Source: TiGenix NV

multilang-release

PRESS RELEASE REGULATED INFORMATION INSIDE INFORMATION

TiGenix Announces Top-Line Phase I/II Results of AlloCSC-01 in Acute Myocardial Infarction

Leuven (BELGIUM) - March 13, 2017, 07:00h CET - TiGenix NV (Euronext Brussels and Nasdaq: TIG), an advanced biopharmaceutical company focused on developing novel therapeutics from its two proprietary platforms of donor-derived expanded adipose derived stem cells (eASC) and donor-derived expanded cardiac stem cells (AlloCSCs), today announced top-line one-year results from the CAREMI clinical trial, an exploratory Phase I/II study of AlloCSCs in acute myocardial infarction (AMI).

CAREMI is the first-in-human clinical trial with the primary objective being safety and evaluating the feasibility of an intracoronary infusion of 35 million of AlloCSCs in patients with AMI and left ventricular dysfunction treated within the first week post-AMI. Importantly, the trial is the first cardiac stem cell study to integrate a highly discriminatory magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) strategy to select patients at increased risk of heart failure and late adverse outcomes. CAREMI was not powered to establish efficacy therefore no conclusion can be drawn on the secondary efficacy end-points.

The main findings of this study are:

"This is the first trial in which it has been demonstrated that allogeneic cardiac stem cells can be transplanted safely through the coronary tree, and in the worst possible setting represented by patients with an acute heart attack with left ventricular dysfunction," commented Professor Fernndez-Avils, Head of the Department of Cardiology at the Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Maran in Madrid (Spain), principal investigator on the trial in Spain. "It is especially encouraging that no cardiac or immunological side effects were observed."

"This is the first study in which we have used a state of the art comprehensive MRI analysis to include patients with a large myocardial infarction in an innovative cell therapy protocol," said Professor Janssens, Head of the Department of Cardiovascular Diseases, University Hospital, Leuven (Belgium), and principal investigator on the trial in Belgium. "Serial MRI analysis and extensive immunological profiling will allow us to further explore the encouraging signals we observed in cell treated patients with the worst MRI signature. These findings offer an exciting prospect for targeted follow-up studies in these high-risk patients."

"Besides confirming the long term safety of the treatment these results suggest interesting opportunities in populations with high unmet medical need," said Dr. Marie Paule Richard, Chief Medical Officer at TiGenix. "We look forward to working with our advisors to analyze the data in depth and determine the best way forward with AlloCSC-01 during the second half of this year."

Full data results from the CAREMI study will be presented at an upcoming medical congress.

###

For more information

Claudia D'Augusta Chief Financial Officer

T: +34 91 804 92 64

claudia.daugusta@tigenix.com

About TiGenix

TiGenix NV (Euronext Brussels and Nasdaq: TIG) is an advanced biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing novel therapeutics from its proprietary platforms of allogeneic, or donor-derived, expanded stem cells. Two products from the adipose-derived stem cell technology platform are currently in clinical development: Cx601 in Phase III for the treatment of complex perianal fistulas in Crohn's disease patients; Cx611 which has completed a Phase I sepsis challenge trial and a Phase I/II trial in rheumatoid arthritis. Effective July 31, 2015, TiGenix acquired Coretherapix, whose lead cellular product, AlloCSC-01, has concluded a Phase II clinical trial in Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI). In addition, the second product candidate from the cardiac stem cell-based platform acquired from Coretherapix, AlloCSC-02, is being developed in a chronic indication. On July 4, 2016, TiGenix entered into a licensing agreement with Takeda, a large pharmaceutical company active in gastroenterology, under which Takeda acquired the exclusive right to commercialize Cx601 for complex perianal fistulas outside the United States. TiGenix is headquartered in Leuven (Belgium) and has operations in Madrid (Spain). For more information, please visit http://www.tigenix.com.

About AlloCSC-01

AlloCSC-01 is a cellular product consisting of adult expanded allogeneic cardiac stem cells isolated from the right atrial appendages of donors, and expanded in vitro. Pre-clinical data has shown evidence of the strong cardio-protective and immune-regulatory activity of AlloCSC-01. In vivo studies suggest that AlloCSC-01 has cardio-reparative potential by activating endogenous regenerative pathways and by promoting the formation of new cardiac tissue. In addition, AlloCSC-01 has displayed a strong tropism for the heart enabling a high retention of cells in the myocardium after intracoronary administration.

About CAREMI

The CAREMI trial comprised two consecutive phases: an open-label dose-escalation phase (n=6) and a 2:1 randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase (n=49). The objective of this clinical trial is to evaluate the safety and the efficacy of the cardiac stem cells product AlloCSC-01 in the acute phase of ischemic heart disease. The primary safety endpoint are all-cause mortality within 30 days and percentage of patients with major adverse cardiac events (MACE) within 30 days after treatment. MACE is a broader safety endpoint that covers all-cause mortality as well as new AMI, hospitalization due to heart failure, sustained ventricular tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation and stroke. Secondary safety endpoints include percentage of patients with MACE at 6 and 12 months after treatment, all-cause mortality at 12 months after treatment and percentage of patients with AE during the study. Secondary efficacy include MRI parameters (evolution of infarct size and evolution of biomechanical parameters) and clinical parameters (including the 6 minute walking test and the New York Heart Association scale). The CAREMI study has been conducted at the Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Maraon, Madrid, UZ Leuven, Hospital de Navarra, Hospital Clnico Universitario de Valladolid, Hospital Universitario de Donostia, Hospital Universitario de Salamanca, Hospital Clnico Universitario de Valencia, and Hospital Virgen de la Victoria de Mlaga. The CAREMI trial has benefitted from the support of the CARE-MI consortium (Grant Number 242038, http://www.caremiproject.eu/) funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission under the coordination of the Centro Nacional the Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) and the participation of research institutions and companies from nine EU countries.

Forward-looking information

This press release may contain forward-looking statements and estimates with respect to the anticipated future performance of TiGenix and the market in which it operates. Certain of these statements, forecasts and estimates can be recognised by the use of words such as, without limitation, "believes", "anticipates", "expects", "intends", "plans", "seeks", "estimates", "may", "will" and "continue" and similar expressions. They include all matters that are not historical facts. Such statements, forecasts and estimates are based on various assumptions and assessments of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which were deemed reasonable when made but may or may not prove to be correct. Actual events are difficult to predict and may depend upon factors that are beyond the Company's control. Therefore, actual results, the financial condition, performance or achievements of TiGenix, or industry results, may turn out to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such statements, forecasts and estimates. Given these uncertainties, no representations are made as to the accuracy or fairness of such forward-looking statements, forecasts and estimates. Furthermore, forward-looking statements, forecasts and estimates only speak as of the date of the publication of this press release. TiGenix disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statement, forecast or estimates to reflect any change in the Company's expectations with regard thereto, or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement, forecast or estimate is based, except to the extent required by Belgian law.

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TiGenix Announces Top-Line Phase I/II Results of AlloCSC-01 in Acute Myocardial Infarction - GlobeNewswire (press release)

Heptares struck a $12 million deal to partner with Daiichi Sankyo on a new GPCR pain drug. The UK biotech gets $4 million upfront and $8 million in research support along with an unspecified set of milestones for the deal, in which the Sosei subsidiary will search for new drugs that can be developed for pain. Said CEO Malcolm Weir: We are confident that the unique structural insights of the receptor that our technologies can deliver combined with expertise on its role in pain from the Neurosciences team at Daiichi Sankyo will yield new, differentiated molecules that can be advanced into development.

Everybody loves a good takeover rumor. On Friday, it was Incytes turn again. The biotechs shares jumped Friday on buzz that Gilead was interested in acquiring the company, fast on the heels of an analysts report insisting that Gilead needed to do a deal, fast.

Belgiums TiGenix says that it gained some positive data in a Phase I/II cardiac stem cell study. Investigators say that a pre-specified subset of patients demonstrated a larger reduction in infarct size. This is the first trial in which it has been demonstrated that allogeneic cardiac stem cells can be transplanted safely through the coronary tree, and in the worst possible setting represented by patients with an acute heart attack with left ventricular dysfunction, commented Professor Fernndez-Avils, head of the Department of Cardiology at the Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Maran.

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Daiichi Sankyo forges $12M pact for GPCR pain program with Heptares; Incyte shares jump on latest takeover chatter - Endpoints News

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - March 13, 2017) -

NOT FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

Editors Note: There is a photo associated with this press release.

Woodrose Ventures Corporation (TSX VENTURE:WRS.H) ("Woodrose" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has entered into an agreement (the "Agreement") dated March 10, 2017 to acquire all of the shares of Novoheart Holdings Ltd. ("Novoheart"), a global stem cell biotechnology company dedicated to human heart engineering (the "Transaction"). Novoheart develops products and provides services focused on engineering prototypes of bio-artificial human heart tissues and chambers for drug discovery, cardiotoxicity screening, disease modelling and therapeutic applications.

The Transaction will constitute a "reverse-takeover" of Woodrose in accordance with the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange (the "TSXV") and the reactivation of Woodrose, which is currently a NEX-listed issuer.

About Novoheart

Novoheart is a global stem cell biotechnology company headquartered in Hong Kong with R&D Innovation Centres being set up in the United States. Novoheart's mission is to revolutionize drug discovery and the development of heart therapeutics with its range of proprietary bioengineered human heart constructs, collectively known as the MyHeart platform, and to further develop them into transplantable heart grafts for cell-based regenerative therapies with superior safety and efficacy. Its scientific team has pioneered a range of best-in-class bioengineering technologies and constructed the world's first human mini-heart "novoHeart" with which the Novoheart team intends to revolutionize:

1) Pre-clinical drug discovery, cardiotoxicity screening and heart disease modelling;

2) Post-discovery, clinical development of novel therapeutics; and

3) Pre-clinical and clinical development of cell-based cardiac regenerative therapies.

Novoheart's immediate focus is to innovate and accelerate the lengthy, expensive and inefficient drug development process. The development of a new drug candidate typically costs US$2-4bn and takes 10+ years (Tufts Centre for the Study of Drug Development, Tufts CSDD R&D Cost Study 2014) with extremely poor success rates of

Novoheart's intellectual property portfolio, including the human "heart-in-a-jar" (novoHeart) and other related next-generation technologies of the MyHeart platform (see figure below) are unique solutions that help bridge the gap between pre-clinical and clinical drug trials. The MyHeart platform provides advanced human heart surrogates for pre-screening of drug formulas and the elimination of toxic compounds early on in the drug development process, minimizing the risk towards patients. Significantly, the MyHeart Platform provides real time data on the effects of drug formulations enabling drug development companies to undertake "on-the-fly" reformulation of drug candidates to optimize efficacy and toxicological profiles. With Novoheart's technologies, we aim to significantly reduce pre-clinical R&D time and costs, and importantly, improve trial successes. It is anticipated that drug screening results using Novoheart's human engineered tissues would be accepted as reliable indicators for toxicity and efficacy, thereby qualifying the test compounds for accelerated drug development.

Novoheart adopts a hybrid business model by:

These products and services are designed to significantly reduce the time, cost, and use of animal models, as well as improve patient safety, and facilitate pharmaceutical discovery and development. Novoheart is currently working with leading academic and pharmaceutical partners to innovate drug discovery and toxicity screening protocols. Our targeted clients are pharmaceutical companies, government units, and research institutions.

Novoheart was incorporated in 2014 pursuant to the laws of British Virgin Islands (BVI) and its controlling shareholder is Medera Group Limited, a BVI entity. Novoheart has one wholly owned Hong Kong subsidiary "Novoheart Limited" ("Novoheart Hong Kong") which is the group operating entity.

Novoheart Hong Kong was incorporated in January 2014 by founder and CEO Prof. Ronald Li, with scientific co-founders Prof. Kevin Costa and Prof. Michelle Khine.

Novoheart's foundational technologies are the direct outcome of over 15 years of research effort supported by R&D investments amounting to approximately USD30MM. These research efforts, performed at Johns Hopkins University, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, University of California Irvine, University of California Davis, and the University of Hong Kong by our scientific founders, have received major recognitions such as American Heart Association's Best Study of 2005, Ground-breaking Study of 2006, and Late-breaking Studies of 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2007, and the Spirit of Hong Kong Innovating for Good Award in 2015. The "human-heart-in-a-jar" technology was selected by Google's Solve For X as a Moonshot Project in 2015.

Novoheart's scientific founders and advisors are renowned pioneering leaders in the stem cell and cardiac space, with a successful track record in developing and commercializing ground-breaking technologies. In September 2014, Novoheart established its R&D base and office in the Hong Kong Science Park, where it continues to innovate solutions for drug discovery and human heart tissue engineering.

In December 2014, Novoheart signed a strategic partnership with a major global pharmaceutical company (the "Global Pharma Partner") headquartered in New York City to validate the MyHeart platform. The success of this validation process has resulted in follow on income-generating projects.

In January 2015, Novoheart's R&D proposal to develop bio-artificial heart tissues for drug screening received 50/50 matched funding from the Innovation & Technology Commission (ITC) of the Government of Hong Kong, with a total project cost of over HK$21MM over 2 years. It was also the largest biotech project granted by ITC for that year. Novoheart owns all of the intellectual property generated from this project, and as a result of the R&D, Novoheart has applied or is in the application process for 3 new patents covering newly developed technology, including the human ventricular cardiac anisotropic sheet (hvCAS) as a powerful tool for detecting drug-induced arrhythmias with the results published in the prestigious international peer-reviewed bioengineering journal Advanced Materials (Shum et al. 2017, Advanced Materials, 29). Additionally, Novoheart holds exclusive worldwide licenses or options to acquire the same for technologies that constitute its MyHeart platform and future developments.

In December 2015, Novoheart signed a second contract with the Global Pharma Partner to build disease-specific engineered human heart tissues and chambers for drug discovery. The total project cost is US$726,000 over 1.5 years.

In February 2017, the Corporate Venture Fund (CVF) of the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTPC) completed an equity investment of approximately US$250,000 into Novoheart and an additional investment would be made at the Transaction.

Novoheart Financial Information

The following table includes a summary of certain financial information of Novoheart and is derived from its financial statements for the years ended June 30, 2016 and June 30, 2015.

Summary of the Transaction

Under the terms of the Agreement, the shareholders of Novoheart will receive an aggregate of 66,086,600 common shares of Woodrose on a post-Consolidation basis (see below) ("Woodrose Post-Consolidation Shares"). In addition, a finder's fee of 2,313,038 Woodrose Post-Consolidation Shares will be paid to Cynosure Private Equity Limited in connection with the Transaction.

In connection with the Transaction, Woodrose intends to complete a consolidation of all its outstanding common shares on the basis of 3.56878449 old common shares for each one new common share (the "Consolidation"). In addition, Woodrose intends to complete a non-brokered private placement (the "Private Placement") of 11,700,000 subscription receipts ("Subscription Receipts") at a price of CDN$0.50 per Subscription Receipt to raise gross proceeds of CDN$5,850,000, which will be held in escrow in accordance with the terms of a subscription receipt agreement (the "Subscription Receipt Agreement"). It is anticipated that the Subscription Receipt Agreement will provide that, upon completion of the Transaction, each Subscription Receipt will automatically convert into one Woodrose Post-Consolidation Share. The Subscription Receipt Agreement will also provide that, in the event the Transaction is terminated or does not complete within an agreed timeframe, the Subscription Receipts will be cancelled and the funds will be returned to the holders. Woodrose may pay cash fees in an amount not to exceed 7% of the gross proceeds (to a maximum of $364,000) to certain finders involved in the Private Placement and may issue finder's warrants ("Finder's Warrants"), in an amount not to exceed 7% of the number of Subscription Receipts issued (to a maximum of 728,000 Finders Warrants) each of which would entitle the holder to acquire one Woodrose Post-Consolidation Share at a price of CDN$0.50 for a period of two years following closing of the Private Placement. All securities issued pursuant to the Private Placement will be subject to a statutory hold period of four months and one day.

The Company intends to use the net proceeds of the offering to finance investment in drug discovery and screening, establish commercial partnerships, expand the current laboratory, hire additional research and development team members and for working capital and general corporate purposes.

Upon completion of the Transaction, it is anticipated that the Company will be classified as a Tier 2 Technology Issuer on the TSXV and will change its name to "Novoheart Holdings (BC) Limited" or such other name as is acceptable to the Board of Directors. Closing of the Transaction ("Closing") is subject to conditions precedent, that include, but are not limited to, the following:

The Transaction is an "arm's length" transaction (as defined by the policies of the TSXV). Woodrose intends to rely an exemption from the sponsorship requirements of the policies of the TSXV.

Proposed Management Team

Upon closing of the Transaction, the following directors and senior officers are anticipated to be appointed in replacement of Woodrose's current board and management:

Prof. Ronald Li, B.Sc. (Hons), Ph.D. (Proposed President, Chief Executive Officer and Director)

Prof. Ronald Li is a co-founder of Novoheart, and has been serving as the CEO since 2016. He is concurrently Director of Ming-Wai Lau Centre for Reparative Medicine, HK node, Karolinska Institutet (KI), Sweden, with a professorial cross appointment at the Dr. Li Dak-Sum Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong (HKU)-KI Collaboration in Regenerative Medicine of HKU. Prof. Li has been an advocate of stem cell technology for many years, starting from his career as Assistant Professor of Cardiology, and Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) School of Medicine. He founded and led the Human Embryonic Stem Cell Consortium when he was recruited in 2005 to become a tenured Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis, in light of state's USD3-billion stem cell initiative Proposition 71. Prof. Li was the Founding Director of the Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine Consortium (SCRMC) at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) from 2010 to 2015. He also co-directed the Section of Cardiovascular Cell & Tissue Engineering in Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai with Prof. Kevin Costa. Prof. Li has received multiple accolades and recognitions during his career, including the Spirit of Hong Kong Innovating for Good Award by the South China Morning Post (2015), the Top Young Faculty Award (2002, 2004), the Top Prize for the Young Investigator Basic Research (2001) and Top Postdoctoral Fellow Helen Taussig Award (2001) of JHU School of Medicine, Young Investigator Award 1st Prize from the Heart Rhythm Society (2002), and the Career Development Award from the Cardiac Arrhythmias Research & Education Foundation (2001).

Prof. Li graduated with his B.S. with honors in Biotechnology from University of Waterloo, Ontario, on Dean's List and his Ph.D. in Cardiology/Physiology at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Camie Chan, B.Sc. (Hons), M.Sc., Ph.D. (Proposed Chief Operating Officer and Director)

Dr. Camie Chan joined Novoheart Hong Kong as the Chief Operating Officer in 2016, after having served at HKU as the Deputy Director of the Faculty of Medicine Core Facility, a founding member of the Management Committee of the Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine Consortium (SCRMC), and Assistant Professor in the Department of Anatomy, between 2010 and 2016. She has had extensive experience managing laboratory operations in her capacity at HKU, and her prior career as Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis, and Assistant Investigator at the Shriners Hospital for Children. Dr. Chan is also a co-inventor of technology allowing mass production of human ventricular heart cells from pluripotent stem cells.

Dr. Chan graduated with her B.Sc. with honors at the University of Waterloo, followed by obtaining her M.Sc. degree in Medical Sciences and Ph.D. degree in Immunology at the University of Toronto, Canada. She then received postdoctoral training at the Sydney Kimmel Cancer Research Center at the Johns Hopkins University. She has garnered numerous awards in her career, including the prestigious National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Developmental Research Grant Award.

Prof. Kevin Costa, B.S., Ph.D. (Proposed Chief Scientific Officer)

Prof. Costa is Director of the Section of Cardiovascular Cell and Tissue Engineering at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Prof. Costa was previously trained at the Johns Hopkins University and on the faculty as Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University. As a "blue-blood" biomedical engineering (BME) expert (B.S. and M.S. in BME from Boston University, Ph.D. in BME from UC San Diego, and postdoc in BME from JHU and University of Washington) in cell and tissue biomechanics and cardiac tissue engineering, he has developed one of the first engineered cardiac tissue systems. Since 2009, he has been working with Prof. Ronald Li to translate such systems into human cells. Prof. Costa has received research funding from the Whitaker Foundation, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH; NHLBI, NIBIB, and NIGMS). He was also a recipient of the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the NSF. Prof. Costa is an inventor of several cardiac tissue engineering technologies and one of the scientific co-founders of Novoheart Hong Kong.

Ms. Iris Lo, B. Comm. (Hons), CPA, CA (Proposed Chief Financial Officer)

Ms. Lo is a seasoned professional with expertise in corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, accounting, and finance. Prior to joining Novoheart, Ms. Lo was the Director of Corporate Development & Analysis at Cardiome Pharma Corp., a Canadian public company dually listed on the TSX and NASDAQ (TSX: COM, NASDAQ: CRME). At Cardiome, she held responsibilities in equity and debt financing, corporate mergers and acquisitions, product licensing and distributions, financial planning and analysis, as well as regulatory and risk management. During her tenure at Cardiome, Ms. Lo participated in transactions totaling over US$240 million as Cardiome grew from a company with a market capitalization of US$25 million to over US$150 million at its peak. She brings with her valuable experience from the life sciences and pharmaceutical sector, as well as expertise in dealing with the complexities of operating and financing public corporations. Ms. Lo was also previously a Manager in the Transaction Services team at PwC Hong Kong and began her career articling with KPMG Vancouver. She is a Chartered Professional Accountant and holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) from the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia.

Mr. Victor Chang (Proposed Director)

Mr. Chang is a seasoned investor who has lately become focused on start-ups. Mr. Chang started his career with Lippo Securities Limited in 1996 and became a Director of Grand International Holdings Limited in 1999, which was engaged in general investments. During the period from 2007 to 2009, he was a Director and Responsible Officer for Astrum Capital Management Limited carrying out regulated activities under the Securities and Futures Ordinance ("SFO", Cap. 571, Laws of Hong Kong) and with Murtsa Capital Partners Limited as well. During the period from 2007 to 2012, he was also a compliance consultant for Astrum Capital Management Limited. As co-founder and Managing Director of Zebra Strategic Outsource Solution, he has over 16 years of experience in recruitment process outsourcing, executive search as well as and private investment management. In Apil 2013, he successfully brought Zebra Strategic Holdings Limited which offers holistic HR solutions to IPO on the HK GEM board (Stock Code: 8260) and was re-designated as and is currently a Non-Executive Director with the company. He is currently a Director and Responsible Officer of Dakin Financial Group, a corporation licensed to carry out type 1, 2 & 9 regulated activity under the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Ordinance.

Mr. Tong Ricky Chiu (Proposed Director)

As a key founder and visionary for Grand Power Logistics Group Inc., which was listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (GPW.V) before its privatization in 2016, and Baoshinn International Express Ltd., Mr. Chiu adds value with his immense corporate development and growth skills. He received his education in Oxford University, England, and Beijing University, and began his career in Australia. He has a diversified background in a wide range of industries with roles in finance, audit, real estate, merchandise trading and travel, as well as logistics.

Mr. James Topham (Proposed Director)

Mr. Topham is an experienced executive with expertise in finance, accounting, auditing and entrepreneurial technology companies. He was an audit partner leading KPMG's Technology Group in the Vancouver office for 20 years where he worked with many fast growing public companies and was involved in many M&A and IPO transactions in Canada, the US and Europe. Mr. Topham founded Social Venture Partners Vancouver in 2001 with a mission to strengthen the organizational capacity of innovative non-profits serving children in-need and youth at-risk. It has funded several million dollars and provided thousands of hours of executive time mentoring these local non-profits. Since retiring at KPMG 7 years ago, Mr. Topham has worked on several Boards of both public and private technology companies. He received a lifetime achievement award from the BC Technology Industry Association and was awarded the designation of Fellow Chartered Public Accountant (FCPA) from the Chartered Public Accountants of BC for his career achievements in the profession and community. He was a founder and Board member for 9 years of the BC Technology Industry Association that represents the technology industry in BC. Mr. Topham is a CPA and has a Bachelor of Commerce degree with Honours from the University of Saskatchewan graduating as the most distinguished graduate in the College of Commerce.

Mr. Allen Ma (Proposed Director)

As a 30-year technology industry veteran, Mr. Ma was the CEO of Hong Kong Science & Technology Parks before he retired in July 2016. He held senior executive positions within the information and communications technology sector. His past roles include president for Asia-Pacific at British Telecom, vice-president for Asia at the global telecom solutions sector of Motorola, executive director of Hong Kong Telecommunications - subsequently called Cable & Wireless HKT - and managing director of Hong Kong Telecom CSL. Ma holds an MBA from the University of Toronto and is a fellow member of both the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, UK and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, UK. He is also a Certified Management Accountant of Canada.

Proposed Advisory Team

Novoheart is supported by a Scientific Advisory Board whose proposed composition consists of eminent scientists renowned in the fields of stem cells, cardiac biology and physiology, tissue engineering, and clinical cardiology including clinical trials research, from top academic research institutes in the U.S.A. Their technical expertise will guide the development of Novoheart as a forerunner in the application of cutting-edge technologies to develop new and better treatments for heart disease and beyond.

Further Details

Both the Company and Novoheart intend to work diligently to complete the conditions precedent to Closing and anticipate completion of the Transaction in the second quarter of 2017. The Company will update its shareholders with further details as they become available.

ON BEHALF OF WOODROSE VENTURES CORPORATION

Darren Devine, President, CEO and Director

NEITHER THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

Completion of the Transaction is subject to a number of conditions, including but not limited to, Exchange acceptance and if applicable pursuant to Exchange requirements, majority shareholder approval. Where applicable, the Transaction cannot close until the required shareholder approval is obtained. There can be no assurance that the Transaction will be completed as proposed or at all.

Investors are cautioned that, except as disclosed in the Filing Statement to be prepared in connection with the Transaction, any information with respect to the Transaction may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied on. Trading in securities of the Company should be considered highly speculative.

The TSX Venture Exchange has in no way passed upon the merits of the Transaction and has neither approved nor disproved the contents of this news release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Information set forth in this news release may involve forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements are statements that relate to future, not past, events. In this context, forward-looking statements often address expected future business and financial performance, and often contain words such as "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect", and "intend", statements that an action or event "may", "might", "could", "should", or "will" be taken or occur, or other similar expressions. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation; statements about the terms and completion of the Transaction are forward-looking statements. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements, or other future events, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, the following risks: failure to satisfy all conditions precedent to the Transaction, including shareholder approval, approval of the TSX Venture Exchange and completion of the necessary financings and the additional risks identified in the management discussion and analysis section of Woodrose Corporation's interim and most recent annual financial statement or other reports and filings with the TSX Venture Exchange and applicable Canadian securities regulators. Forward-looking statements are made based on management's beliefs, estimates and opinions on the date that statements are made and the respective companies undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if these beliefs, estimates and opinions or other circumstances should change, except as required by applicable securities laws. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements.

To view the photo associated with this press release, please visit the following link: http://www.marketwire.com/library/20170312-1088577_MyHeart_800.jpg

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Woodrose Ventures Corporation Announces Proposed Acquisition ... - Marketwired (press release)

Runner's World

Stem Cell Therapy Runner's World This is why researchers and physicians think this therapy may help joint injuries caused by worn-out cartilage; in cell cultures, stem cells can grow new cartilage, and if this can happen in a joint, it may prevent the need for a joint replacement ... Nutrients Boost Stem Cell FunctionProHealth At 6th Annual Clinical Trial Supply New England 2017 Conference in Boston Asymmetrex Introduces A First Specific ...Benzinga Research report explores the stem cell therapy market worth 145.8 million USD by 2021WhaTech all 14 news articles »

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Stem Cell Therapy - Runner's World

March 13, 2017 6:01 PM By Stephanie Stahl

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) Doctors at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine are conducting a study to see if stem cell therapy will ease the pain of arthritis and the results of their research could benefit human patients as well.

Its Zoeys last check up,walking on a special mat called a forceplate to measure how much weight she puts on each leg.

It was just a year ago that putting weight on her front legs was painful.The 2-year-old Golden Retriever was diagnosed with elbow dysplasia, a condition that created arthritis in both elbows.

It is the most common cause of chronic pain in dogs, saidDr. Kimberly Agnello at Penn Vet.

Zoeys owner, Christine Brown, says she was a bundle of energy when she first got Zoey.

She was so sweet, said Brown. She was your typical energetic puppy.

But soon Brown knew her dog was hurting.

After coming back from a walk and taking a nap, she would get up and limp, said Brown. With her being a puppy it was devastating.

Zoey was enrolled in aPenn Vet trial to determine the benefits of stem cell therapy as a treatment to ease arthritic pain.

They are randomized into three groups, whether they receive an interarticular joint injection of hyaluronic acid or they geteither stem cells derived from their bone marrow or stem cells derived from fat, saidAgnello.

The stems cells from the dogs bone marrow are injected back into the elbow joint. Doctors hope it will relieve the arthritic pain.

We also remove a little fragment of bone that can be causing some more pain, saidAgnello.

The research isnt just about arthritis in dogs but humans as well.

The goals of this study are to look for different treatments to not only help our canine patientsbut also to help human patients with arthritis, saidAgnello.

For now results are promising.

Oh my gosh, she is not limping, she runs and jumps, and has a great time, said Brown.

The trial is ongoing so there is no hard data yet to show final results if stem cells are effective for treating arthritis, but Dr.Agnello says there are many dogs in the study and almost all of them have improved during the year-long research.

Stephanie Stahl, CBS 3 and The CW Philly 57s Emmy Award-winning health reporter, is featured daily on Eyewitness News. As one of the television industrys most respected medical reporters, Stephanie has been recognized by community and he...

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TiGenix announces positiveone-year results forits phase I/II trial of donor-derived cardiac stem cell therapy in acute myocardial infarction (AMI).

The Belgian biotech TiGenixis developing allogeneic stem cell therapies. Now the companyhasannouncedthat its cardiac stem cell therapyAlloCSC-01 reached its primary endpoints in aphase I/IItrial.

In 2015, the companyacquired Coretherapixin a292M deal for its allogeneic cardiac stem cell pipeline, which is being developed for the treatment of AMI.The first-in-human trial was designed to test the safety and feasibility of an intracoronary infusion of donor-derivedexpanded cardiac stem cells (AlloCSCs)in patients with AMI and left ventricular dysfunction.

AlloCSC-01consists of adult allogeneic cardiac stem cells isolated from the heartof donors and expanded in vitro. In vivo studies suggest that these cellshave cardio-reparative potential by activating regenerative pathways and promoting the formation of new hearttissue.

Thecurrent phase II study demonstrated thesafety of these allogeneic stem cells. Initial results also revealed a larger reduction of infarct size in a subgroup of patients.

Myocardial infarction caused by blockade of coronary arteries

TiGenix is well known forChondroCellect, which was the first cell therapyto reach the European market for the repair of knee cartilage.After the companyrecently withdrew its market authorization for this product, due to a lack of reimbursement, the biotech is focusing on another stem cell therapy, Cx601, in addition to AlloCSC-01. Under development for Crohns disease, Cx601 is currently awaitingEMA approval and is in phase III trials in the US.

For a late-stage clinical company, TiGenix has a low market cap of191M. Even so, the company seems to be doing well these days with the progress of Cx601 and AlloCSC-01.

If AlloCSC-01 obtains market approval, it could treat the more than 1.9 millionpeople affected by AMI, a major cause of heart failure. So far, most treatments are palliative or restore myocardial function by angioplasty and insertion of a stent to support the vascular lumen.

Stem cell therapy of the heart is definitely not a new topic, but many trials have been conducted using the patients own stem cells derived from the bone marrow. A recent meta-analysisof such trials has suggested that these therapies are safe, but do not enhance cardiac function. TiGenixs approach using allogeneic heart-derived stem cells may offer a new and promisingopportunity in thefield.

Images via shutterstock.com / Liya Graphics andVeronika Zakharova

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New Cardiac Stem Cell Therapy passes Phase I/II Trials - Labiotech.eu (blog)

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Last week, as tens of thousands of US and South Korean soldiers gathered at a base in Iwakuni, Japan for an annual joint military exercise, North Korea fired four ballistic missiles from Pyongyang into the sea off Japans northwest coast. In a world where the US is headed by a Twigger-happy political neophyte and the risk of a Cold War reboot looms larger with each Wikileaks disclosure, this demonstration wasnt just an empty display of dictatorial propaganda. It was a reminder that the nuclear threat is still alive and well.

But even if youve taken a decades-long break from stocking your fallout shelter, the federal government hasnt. Over the last ten years the US has poured millions of dollars into technologies and treatments it hopes to never have to use, but could, in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. From assays that measure radiation exposure to cell therapies that restore dwindling blood cells to liquid spray skin grafts, government officials are now far better equipped to deal with diagnosing and treating people if the unthinkable were to happen. And the next generation of treatments are being funded right now.

In 2006, the Department of Health and Human Services established the Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise to coordinate federal solutions to large-scale public health threats, including the nuclear one. Pretty much every agency you can think of is involvedCDC, NIH, FDA, DoD, DHS, USDA, VA, and OEM, among others. But in terms of nuclear countermeasures, three programs nested within HHS do the bulk of the heavy lifting.

The NIHs National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease is the first stop; it runs clinical and preclinical trials for promising technologies. Then theres the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development AuthorityBardawhich is basically a taxpayer-backed investment firm that develops these potential drugs, vaccines, treatments, and supplies and ushers them through FDA approval. Finally theres Project BioShield, which contracts with companies when their products are almost ready, ensuring a national market. To date, the project has acquired 12 products related to a nuclear blast or reactor meltdown, some FDA-approved, some still in late stage development, but all destined for the Strategic National Stockpile, the CDC-managed backup supply of drugs and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency. And each class of products addresses a different part of the threat.

The first is diagnosis. When a person is exposed to high levels of radiation, unpaired electrons careen around their cellular machinery, breaking DNA and causing damage to every organ, including the bone marrow. This means you cant generate new red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets, so you cant fight off infections or coagulate your blood. People usually dont start feeling the effects of acute radiation syndrome for 24 to 48 hours, but damage to their cells DNA starts almost immediately. Which is why you need a reliable diagnostic device; following a nuclear event, people who feel well might actually be in danger, and people who werent exposed will want treatment just to be safe.

So Project BioShield acquired two diagnostic devices, known as biodosimeters, to tell the difference. One works by measuring gene expression, the other by visually analyzing cell nuclei. In the event of a nuclear event, the countermeasures weve procured will be precious resources, says Joe Larsen, acting director of Bardas division of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear medical countermeasures. Were going to end up with a lot of worried well demanding treatment, and we can only afford to treat people that need it.

That treatment, at least right now, consists of injections of immune-boosting cytokines, developed for cancer patients to restore depleted white blood cells lost during radiation treatments or chemotherapy. Project BioShield has acquired three such cytokine treatmentsbut, Larsen notes, they wont work for about 20 percent of people. For them, the only option will be bone marrow or cord blood transplants, which come with the extra obstacle of having to be matched with a donor. So Barda and Project BioShield are now looking for cellular therapies that dont require any donor matching to their portfolioa universal treatment. That could shore up gaps in our initial capability to treat radiation. And theyve got at a few promising options coming down the pipeline.

Barda recently signed a $188 million contract to developa stem cell therapy produced by California-based Cellerant Therapeutics, which restores white blood cells in leukemia patients whove had theirs taken outby chemotherapy. The cells are cryopreserved and shelf-stable, important features for a stockpile item. But the treatment is focused on white blood cells, and radiation exposure doesnt limit itself to the immune systems front-line fighters.

To that end, NIAID is funding clinical trials for a placenta-derived stem cell treatment developed by an Israeli company, Pluristem, that has shown the ability to restore all three blood cell linesred and white blood cells, as well as plateletsin animal models. Like Cellerants, the treatment comes cryogenically frozen along with a thawing device to deploy it easily in the field. The cells stay viable on liquid nitrogen inside their canisters, so you dont have to worry about losing them if the power goes out. From their injection site, the placental stem cells sense stress signals in bone marrow tissues, and send more than 20 signaling molecules to repair and restore their functions. The company isnt testing efficacy in humans, for obvious reasons. But Pluristem says their animal studies showed close to 100 percent survival rates with the treatment, compared to 30 percent without.

Arik Eisenkraft, who began working on an ARS application for Pluristems technology following the Fukushima disaster, isnt surprised that a potential solution to nuclear radiation would come out of a place like Israel. We live in a world of imminent threats, not theoretical ones, he said. Even though we dont have the same budgets and the same scope of institutes, what we do have is a real sense of urgency.

Neither Barda nor Pluristem could confirm whether or not a contract is somewhere in their future. But the agency did say it was looking at all the options. And with Bardas budget cut by $160 million last year and an uncertain future for disaster preparedness funds in a Trump administration, theres no time like the present for some urgency of their own.

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The Feds Are Spending Millions to Help You Survive Nuclear War - WIRED

Vampire facials sound like a totally modern sci-fi development, but people have thought that drinking or slathering on blood can heal and renew for millennia. Pliny the Elder, nearly 2,000 years ago, wrote, [e]pileptic patients are in the habit of drinking the blood even of gladiators, draughts teeming with life. Elizabeth Bthory, a noblewoman from early modern Hungary, was said to have murdered virgins and then bathed in their blood in order to retain her youth. (Its worthwhile to note that King Louis XV and Marie Antoinette were also accused of bathing in their subjects blood.) In the stories, Bthory literally soaks up the youth of virgins via contact with their blood.

We think topically applied and ingested blood, bones, organs, and cells are magical sources of life force, health, and youth that somehow surpass the efficacy of less gory, more common ingredients.

The tales of blood baths seem spurious to say the least, and apparently theyre not backed up by primary evidence. But the fact that people have been passing the stories along for centuries tells us something about how we think. Even now, we seem to really dig the idea of applying or consuming human cells for the purpose of absorbing beauty and health from them. Vampire facelifts and Dr. Barbara Sturms MC1 cream make use of plasma from ones own blood drawn and separated in-office to supposedly renew skin. We think topically applied and ingested blood, bones, organs, and cells are magical sources of life force, health, and youth that somehow surpass the efficacy of less gory, more common ingredients.

Ingredients associated with conception, birth, and nursing seem to particularly excite us. Semen facials inadvisable and groan-worthy seem to make the rounds again when clicks are needed. In Korea, the brand Isa Knox uses recombinant human placenta protein (rHPP-8TM) in the Tervina line, supplied by the CHA Placenta Institute (part of the CHA Global Medical Network that includes a university medical school and institutes for stem cell and cosmetics research).

In the case of human stem cell skincare, companies have slapped a veneer of science on our old magical beliefs to ratchet up prices and expectations.

The idea of human ingredients is so seductive that people pay extra for them even when theyre not actually in the products. A Korean beauty product nicknamed mothers milk, Eureque Muru Mor Cream, contains no human milk, just baby powder fragrance and animal milk extracts that are supposed to be similar to human breast milk. If youre looking for the real deal, check out Mud Facial Bar, which offers an ethically sourced, $10 breast milk add-on for its facials.

In the case of human stem cell skincare, companies have slapped a veneer of science on our old magical beliefs to ratchet up prices and expectations. Stem cells here Im talking about pluripotent human stem cells can be manipulated to become any cell type in the human body under the right conditions and divide essentially without limit to replenish other cells as long as the person or animal is still alive according to the National Institutes of Health.

The twist is that stem cell skincare brands such as Lifeline Skin Care dont actually use whole, live human stem cells in their products. An actual stem cell would need to be kept alive in a skin cream, and that would certainly be challenging to accomplish, according to cosmetic chemist Kelly Dobos. Lifelines parent company, International Stem Cell Corporation, extracts human growth factors from stem cells by stimulating unfertilized eggs. Its the growth factors which stimulate cell growth, differentiation, healing, and proliferation that end up bottled, not the whole stem cells.

There really isn't any concrete, unbiased research to support the use of epidermal growth factors (EGF).

I asked Stephen Alain Ko, cosmetic chemist and blogger at kindofstephen, whether applying growth factors to skin makes sense. He wrote via email, [t]here really isn't any concrete, unbiased research to support the use of epidermal growth factors (EGF) on healthy human skin, and there is also a concern that EGF can also be involved in certain cancer growth as well. Ko noted that Oprah-recommended SkinMedicas TNS Essential Serum ($281 for one ounce) faces a California class action lawsuit claiming the company failed to disclose cancer risks associated with applying human growth factors to skin.

When asked about Skinmedicas TNS Essential Serum, Dobos wrote, [a]t $281 for one ounce and questionable science backing the ingredient claims, I would opt for a less expensive skin care product. Skincare companies dont need to make extravagant claims about the power of stem cell-derived ingredients, or even use whole human stem cells in their products; simply mentioning stem cell taps into long-held beliefs about the power of wearing and consuming human cells and our wallets.

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Would You Slather Blood and Breast Milk on Your Face? - Racked

Scientists from the University of Cambridge have determined the first 3D structures of mammalian genomes from individual cells.

For the first time, researchers from the University of Cambridge were able to determine the 3D structure of an active mouse genome in embryonic stem cells. Tim Stevens and his colleagues used a combination of imaging and measurements that reveal DNA interactionsto unravel how the DNA is folded together.This could lead tonew insights into the regulation of gene expression in health and disease.

Every cell in our body contains the same DNA molecules and thusthe same set of genes. Still,our blood cells differ fundamentally from our skin cells. The basis for this isgene regulation, meaning that different cells will not express every gene encoded on our DNA but only a specific subset.

An exciting new avenue for our understanding of gene regulation is the importance of the 3D DNA structure. Regulatory regions within our DNA play a major role in regulating gene expression, but arequirement is that the regions come into spatial contact with the associated genes.

It is well known today, that the way the DNA is folded within the cell is tightlyregulated and determines the contact between different regulatory regions with different genes and thereby determines which genes areswitched on or off.

By looking at individual stem cells, the researchers willnow be able to better understandhowthese master cells are able to differentiate into different cell types of our body, which could revolutionize regenerative medicine.

Knowing where all the genes and control elements are at a given moment will help us understand the molecular mechanisms that control and maintain their expression. () Currently, these mechanisms are poorly understood and understanding them may be key to realizingthe potential of stem cells in medicine.says Prof Ernest Laue, who supervised the study.

A better understanding of how the genome structure determines whether genes are switched on or off could also be important to understand what happens in cancer. Abnormal genomes might cause changes in DNA folding and thereby lead to abnormal gene expression.

Changes in gene expression which are not based on the DNA sequence are calledepigenetic modifications. Epigenetics is definitely one of the recent hypes within the cancer field.The folding of DNA is only one aspect of epigenetic gene regulation, while direct modifications of the DNA or DNA-associated proteins provide another. Cancer cells often make use of the epigenetic machinery to change gene regulation and support their survival.

A recent study,for example, unveiled the role of epigenetic changes in driving pancreatic cancer metastasis. By understanding what happens on the gene regulatorylevel, the researchers were able to find a compound, which specifically inhibits these epigenetic changes and therebycancer cell progression.

Epigenetic mechanisms definitely play a key role not only to advance our understanding of stem cell commitment and regenerative medicine, but also in disease areas such as cancer research. You can findthe identified 3D structures of the DNA below.

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The First 3D DNA Structure could advance Stem Cell Therapies - Labiotech.eu (blog)

The key ingredients of the Fleuresse Skin Care System are natural botanicals extracted from the stem cells of a rare Swiss apple. These extracts, combined with some of the same ingredients found in Kyni's incredibly popular nutritional productsincluding blueberry, Noni, and Vitamin E Tocotrienolsact as nutritional building blocks for the skin's own regenerative process, and leave the user with softer, brighter, more youthful looking skin.

Four products make up the Fleuresse Skin Care System; a Boosting Cleanser, a Serum, a Day Crme, and a Night Crme. Each product, designed to work for any skin type, acts to hydrate and nourish the skin to prevent and reduce the visible signs of aging.

While speaking to Kyni Distributors in Ft. Worth, Kyni Founder and Chairman, Kirk Hansen, shared the following:

"We've had other products proposed to us," Hansen explained, "Even products developed. But we didn't go with them because they just weren't impactful enough." Kirk goes on to say, "We had to wait for two things to be just right. The quality of the new productsand the science behind themhad to match up with the products we already have. Today the timing is right, and the products are unequaled."

Fleuresse is available for purchase through authorized Kyni Distributors both online and in person.

About KyniKyni, Inc. is a wellness company founded in 2005. With a goal to bring hope to people throughout the world through wellness and opportunity, Kyni products are distributed in over 60 countries worldwide. With the introduction of their new skin care line, Kyni offers complete nutrition for the body, both inside and out. Learn more about Kyni at https://www.kyani.com/ or the official Kyni News Site https://news.kyani.com/.

Media Contact: Jon Rea Director of Global Communications (844) 701-5049

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/announcement-of-fleuresse-skin-care-product-line-by-kyani-inc-300422249.html

SOURCE Kyani

https://www.kyani.com/ https://news.kyani.com/en-us/introducing-kyani-skin-care-customer

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Announcement of Fleuresse Skin Care Product Line by Kyni, Inc. - PR Newswire (press release)