In Brief Studies are being done on the value of replacing older blood with younger blood via transfusions. Other researchers are studying the effects of a certain protein, osteopontin, on blood cell production. 1000 Ways To Live Forever

Society is gradually changing its classification of aging as a natural phenomenon to a disease. We have made strides in our research on preventing and potentially reversing the effects of aging.In addition to the ongoing research in molecular biology ontelomeres, there is the interesting idea of utilizing young blood to combat aging. Ironically, the legends of Dracula might be vindicated in light of new research involving young blood to rehabilitate cognitive abilities in mice, which has inspiredclinical trials that may give patients a chance at beating the Grim Reaper.

Ambrosia, a company inspired by the work done by Stanford University neuroscientistTony Wyss-Coray with parabiosis in mice, charges $8,000 per patient for its human clinical trial ofparabiosis. Although there may be 600 people whotake part in the study transfusing 1.5 liters of plasma with donors between the ages of 16 and 25, thestudy is being done without the blessing of Wyss. He believes that the study does not genuinely represent the science and that, theres just no clinical evidence, and youre basically abusing peoples trust and the public excitement around this.

While Ambrosia is operatingwithout clinical evidence to support the trials, the science behind utilizing young blood in repairing and restoring aged cellular processes is worth taking a look at.

Red and white blood cells are produced from stem cellswithin bone marrow, and as we grow older, our bodys ability to replenish the number of red and white blood cells greatly depletes. Similar to the mouse trials ran by Wyss-Coray, researcherHartmut Geigerand his team at the University of Ulm in Germany looked at the bone marrow in mice at varying ages and determined that older rodents produce very low levels of the protein osteopontin.

Rather than looking at blood transfusions for apossible solution like Wyss-Corays team, Geigers team looked the potential of stem cells to test the importance of the deficient protein.The team introduced fresh stem cells into mice that had little to no osteopontin and noticed that the stem cells aged very quickly. When older stem cells were introduced to a dish with osteopontin and anactivator protein, the stem cells began to propagate blood cells.

While companies like Ambrosia are testing blood transfusions on humans to mimic an experiment that utilized a shared circulatory system between an older mouse and a younger mouse, Geigers team notes that long-term studies must be done on their work to verify the effect of osteopontin on rejuvenating cells completely.

The team is developing a drug with the protein and its activating factor, but they do not promise a fountain of youth. They do believe that there would be benefits for the immune systems of the elderly, which may be better positioned to fight diseases that are linked with cardiovascular agingafter takingthe drug.

While all this talk about immortality is exciting, it might be a while before we can actually reap the benefits of researchers studiesin the way we hope. In the meantime, we can keep dreaming away death.

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If Young Blood Can Combat Aging, It May Be Thanks to Just One Protein - Futurism

Having someone elses marrow or stem cells is called a donor transplant, or an allogeneic transplant. This is pronounced a-low-gen-ay-ik.

The donors bone marrow cells must match your own as closely as possible. The most suitable donor is usually a close relative, such as a brother or sister. It is sometimes possible to find a match in an unrelated donor. Doctors call this a matched unrelated donor (MUD). To find out if there is a suitable donor for you, your doctor will contact The Anthony Nolan Bone Marrow Register.

To make sure that your donors cells match, you and the donor will have blood tests. These are to see how many of the proteins on the surface of their blood cells match yours. This is called tissue typing or HLA matching. HLA stands for human leucocyte antigen.

Once you have a donor and are in remission, you have your high dose chemotherapy and radiotherapy. A week later the donor comes into hospital and their stem cells or marrow are collected.

You then have the stem cells or bone marrow as a drip through your central line.

If you've had a transplant from a donor, there is a risk of graft versus host disease (GVHD). This happens because the transplanted stem cells or bone marrow contain cells from your donor's immune system. These cells can sometimes recognise your own tissues as being foreign and attack them. This can be an advantage as the immune cells may also attack cancer cells left after your treatment.

Acute GVHD starts within 100 days of the transplant and can cause

If you develop GVHD after your transplant, your doctor will prescribe drugs to damp down this immune reaction. These are called immunosuppressants.

Chronic GVHD starts more than 100 days after the transplant and you may have skin rashes, diarrhoea, sore joints and dry eyes. Your doctor is likely to suggest that you stay out of the sun because GVHD skin rashes can often get worse in the sun.

There is more detailed information about graft versus host disease.

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Bone marrow or stem cell transplants for ALL | Cancer ...

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The National Bone Marrow registry took place in the Bluestem Room last Friday. This donor drive was hosted by Love Your Melon and Cardinal Key, with Gail Chism and Mary Kelly acting as representatives from Be The Match as well. On average, one person in 430 is called to donate, but the likelihood of being called also depends on the race of the donor. In total, 57 donors were added to the registry by the end of the event.

Thadd Simpson

Thadd Simpson

The National Bone Marrow registry took place in the Bluestem Room last Friday. This donor drive was hosted by Love Your Melon and Cardinal Key, with Gail Chism and Mary Kelly acting as representatives from Be The Match as well. On average, one person in 430 is called to donate, but the likelihood of being called also depends on the race of the donor. In total, 57 donors were added to the registry by the end of the event.

March 29, 2017 Filed under News

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Fifty-seven students registered to give DNA at the first-ever Bone Marrow Drive at Wayne State College. The drive was in the Bluestem Room of the Kanter Student Center on Friday. That puts WSC at 279 students on the bone marrow registry when combined with MAZE. The drive was put on by Be The Match, a nonprofit organization that helps people diagnosed with diseases such as leukemia and lymphoma to get them the blood that could save their life. Be The Match is operated by the National Marrow Donor Program. We want to get Wayne State on the bone marrow registry, said student Kelsi Anderson said, who runs the Love Your Melon group on campus. A donor can give someone battling blood cancer a second chance. Its crucial for them to have a donor. Those who registered simply gave a cheek swab of their DNA, which will be analyzed to determine if it matches with someone who needs a bone marrow transplant. Its all about the DNA makeup, said Gail Chism of Be The Match. The DNA needs to be as close as possible. A donor could have closer DNA to the patient than a family member. If a match is made, the donor will be sent somewhere local for the bone marrow transplant. A courier will then take the bone marrow to the patient, who could be anywhere in the country. Eighty percent of the time it is like giving plasma, Chism said. Anderson said that in other cases a needle is injected into the pelvic bone todraw the marrow out. Blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma produce abnormal blood cells, other than the normal red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets. Blood cells develop from stem cells in bone marrow. A bone marrow transplant helps the patient produce more normal blood cells that help the body with functions such as fightingoff infections or preventing serious bleeding. Anderson said the drive was a shared idea between herself and Jaelyn Lewis, the leader of Cardinal Key. They hope it will become an annual event in the future. I really appreciate what Kelsi has done, Chism said. Shes really been on it. It takes great leadership to put this together. What we get out of here today is priceless.

Thadd Simpson WSC student Lily Roberts swabs her mouth in order to join the National Bone Marrow registry in the Bluestem Room last Friday.

Tags: 2015, Be The Match, Cardinal Key, Gail Chism, Kelsi Anderson, Love Your Melon, NE, Neb., Nebraska, Nebraska State College System, Spring 2015, Thadd Simpson, The Wayne Stater, Wayne, Wayne State College, Wayne State Wildcats, Wildcats, WSC, WSC Cats, WSC Wildcats, WSCs first-ever Bone Marrow Drive

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All causes of the most common form of liver cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), are not yet known, but the risk of getting it is increased by hepatitis B or C, cirrhosis, obesity, diabetes, a buildup of iron in the liver, or a family of toxins called aflatoxins produced by fungi on some types of food. Typical treatments for HCC include radiation, chemotherapy, cryo- or radiofrequency ablation, resection, and liver transplant. Unfortunately, the mortality rate is still quite high, with the American Cancer Society giving a 5-year survival rate for localized liver cancer at 31%.

Hoping to improve primary liver cancer including HCC and metastatic liver cancer therapies, researchers from Japan began studying induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell-derived immune cells that produced the protein interferon-? (IFN-). IFN- exhibits antiviral effects related to immune response, and two different antitumor activities, the JAK-STAT signaling pathway and p53 protein expression. IFN- has been used for some forms of cancer but problems like rapid inactivation, poor tissue penetration, and toxicity have kept it from being used extensively. To get over that hurdle, Kumamoto University researchers used iPS cell-derived proliferating myelomonocytic (iPS-ML) cells, which they developed in a previous research project. These cells were found to mimic the behavior of tumor associated macrophages (TAMS), which inspired the researchers to develop them as a drug delivery system for IFN- and evaluate the therapeutic effect on liver cancer in a murine model in vivo.

The researchers selected two cancer cell lines that were sensitive to IFN- treatment, one that easily metastasized to the liver after injection into the spleen and the other that produced a viable model after being directly injected into the liver. After injection, mice that tested positive for cancer (~80%) were separated into test and control groups. iPS-ML/IFN- cells were injected two to three times a week for three weeks into the abdomen of the test groups.

Livers with tumors were found to have higher levels of IFN- than those without. This was likely due to iPS-ML/IFN- cells penetrating the fibrous connective tissue capsule surrounding the liver ?serous membrane?and migrating toward intrahepatic cancer sites. The iPS-ML/IFN- cells did not penetrate non-tumorous livers, but rather stayed on the surface of the organ. Furthermore, concentrations of IFN- from 24 to 72 hours after iPS-ML/IFN- injections were found to be high enough to inhibit proliferation or even cause the death of the tumor cells.

Due to differences between species, mouse cells are not adversely affected by human IFN-, meaning that side effects of this treatment are not visible in this model. Fortunately, the researchers are working on a new model with the mouse equivalent of human iPS-ML/IFN, and testing its therapeutic abilities.

"Our recent research into iPS-cell derived, IFN- expressing myeloid cells should be beneficial for many cancer patients," says research leader Dr. Satoru Senju. "If it is determined to be safe for human use, this technology has the potential to slow cancer progression and increase survival rates. At this point, however, we still have much work ahead."

This research may be found in the Journal of Hepato-Biliary-Pancreatic Sciences online.

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Materials provided by Kumamoto University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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But its always been clear that they could be risky too, especially if theyre not used carefully. The LCSB team has published its results in the scientific journal PLOS Biology.

This study shows that for the first time, targeting the proliferating tumor mass and dormant cancer stem cells with combination therapy effectively inhibited tumor growth and prevented metastasis compared to monotherapy in mice, said Wang, who is a member of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA. However, as of April 2016, new rules on human cells and tissue require FDA oversight and approval for such procedures.

Although the women had moderate vision loss prior to the stem cell treatments, a year later their vision ranged from total blindness to 20/200, which is considered legally blind.

NPR contacted the FDA, and was told by a spokeswoman that the agency is now finalizing a series of new guidelines regulating how clinics could use stem cells for treatment purposes. 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. He wrote an editorial accompanying the two papers.

As reported Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the women, a 72-year-old, went completely blind after doctors injected stem cells into her eye in an attempt to cure the disease.

But within a week of starting the off-the-charts dangerous therapy at an American clinic, the patients suffered complications.

Two of the patients sought treatment at the universitys hospital for the complications they suffered. The agency also noted that it had previously issued a warning to patients. She said that they were treating patients with their own stem cells.

In addition to charging a fee for treatment, there were several other red flags in the Florida cases that consumers should watch for when considering participation in a clinical trial, Goldberg said. They sought treatment at a Florida clinic that had announced a study to treat the condition on clinicaltrials.gov, a federal database of research studies.

Within days of the stem cell injections she was almost blind and ultimately progressed to complete blindness. Their attorney, Andrew Yaffa of Coral Gables, said that the case was resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties but that neither he nor his clients could comment beyond that.

She acknowledged, however, that the clinic had been performing the stem cell procedures.

Shoddy preparation of the stem cells may have led to some of the complications, said the study authors. We feel very confident about the procedures that we do, and weve had great success in many different indications. We believe that regenerative medicine / cellular therapeutics will play a large role in positively changing the natural history of diseases ultimately, we contend, lessening patient burdens, as well as reducing the associated economic impact disease imposes upon modern society.

The body produces a variety of stem cells. It is also costly, at almost $900,000 to develop and test the iPS cells for the first trial, Takahashi adds.

Whatever happened, experts said there was no evidence to suggest the procedure would have helped restore vision, since so little study has been done on whether adipose-derived stem cells can mature into the kinds of retinal cells that are involved in macular degeneration.

This represents a landmark, says Daley. 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. The registry may be useful as a starting point, but patients should then discuss potential trials with qualified physicians, an academic medical center.

A second patient was supposed to be treated, but transplantation was called off after the cells were found to have potential genetic problems. The cells were extracted their from fat, mixed with blood plasma and injected into their eyes.

Even though the safety and effectiveness of this procedure is unknown, all three patients received injections in both eyes. Dr. Thomas Albini of the University of Miami examined the women after they were treated at a clinic in Florida.

Before the procedure, all three women still had at least some vision. Medical experts said the episode raises questions about whether the government and doctors are doing enough to protect patients from the dangers of unapproved therapies.

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Three women blinded after clinical trial went wrong - Normangee Star

A stem cell-derived heart muscle cell. Proteins that are important for muscle cell contraction are highlighted in red and green, and cell nuclei are blue. Credit: Joseph C. Wu, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford Cardiovascular Institute

Using human heart cells generated from adult stem cells, researchers have developed an index that may be used to determine how toxic a group of cancer drugs, called tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs), are to human cells. While 26 TKIs are currently used to treat a variety of cancers, some can severely damage patients hearts, causing problems such as an irregular heartbeat or heart failure.

For the study, reported February 15 in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers used stem cell-derived heart cells from 13 volunteers to develop a cardiac safety index that measures the extent to which TKIs kill or alter the function of heart cells. They found that the TKIs' toxicity score on the index was generally consistent with what is known about each drug's heart-related side effects.

This work follows on the heels of an earlier study from the same research team, published in Nature Medicine, in which they assessed the heart cell toxicity of doxorubicin, a chemotherapy drug that also causes heart-related side effects, including heart failure. In that study, the researchers used stem cell-derived heart cells from women with breast cancer to correctly predict how sensitive each womans heart cells were to doxorubicin.

Such tests could ultimately help the pharmaceutical industry identify drugs that cause heart-related side effects earlier in the drug development process and help the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) during the drug review and approval process, said the study's senior author Joseph C. Wu, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute.

I hope this research will be helpful for individual patients, once we further implement precision medicine approaches, he added.

Ranking Heart Toxicity

To assess the potential risk of heart toxicity for drugs in development, pharmaceutical companies use laboratory tests involving animals (usually rats or mice) or cells from animals or humans that are engineered to artificially express heart-related genes. Drug candidates that appear to have an acceptable balance of benefits and risks typically proceed to testing in human clinical trials.

But there can be biological differences between these existing models and humans, so non-clinical lab tests can have significant limitations, explained Dr. Wu.

Currently, the first time humans are exposed to a new drug is during clinical trials, he said. We think it would be great if you could actually expose patients heart, brain, liver, or kidney cells to a drug in the lab, prior to clinical treatment, allowing researchers to determine whether the drug has any toxic effects.

Dr. Wu, a cardiologist by training, studies toxicities cancer drugs cause in heart cells. Human heart muscle cells (called cardiomyocytes), however, are hard to obtainrequiring risky heart surgery that may be of no direct benefit to the patientand are notoriously difficult to grow in the lab.

As an alternative, researchers have developed a method to produce heart cells from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs). hiPSCs are created by genetically engineering normal human skin or blood cells to express four specific genes that induce them to act like stem cells. Chemical treatments can prompt hiPSCs to develop into mature cell types, such as heart muscle cells.

A large body of research has established that human adult stem cell-derived heart cells, which function and grow in cell culture, can be used as an initial model to screen drug compounds for toxic effects on the heart, said Myrtle Davis, Ph.D., chief of the Toxicology and Pharmacology Branch of NCIs Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis, who was not involved in the studies.

For the Science Translational Medicine study, Dr. Wu and his colleagues set out to determine if a panel of human stem cell-derived heart cells could be used to evaluate the heart toxicity of 21 different FDA-approved TKIs.

They generated hiPSC-derived heart endothelial, fibroblast, and muscle cells from 13 volunteers: 11 healthy individuals and 2 people with kidney cancer who were being treated with a TKI. Using drug concentrations equivalent to what patients receive, the investigators next determined how lethal each TKI was to the heart cells.

They found that several TKIs were very lethal to endothelial, fibroblast, and heart muscle cells from all 13 individuals, while others were more benign.

Stem cell-derived heart muscle cells grown in a dish spontaneously contract as a beating heart does, so the researchers also analyzed the effects of TKIs on the cells beat rate, or contractility. They found that several TKIs altered the cells beat rate before they were killed by the drug treatment. If severe enough, an irregular heartbeat (called an arrhythmia), can disrupt normal heart function.

From these lethality and contractility experiments, the team developed a cardiac safety index, a 0-to-1 scale that identifies how toxic a TKI is to heart cells (with 0 being the most toxic). They then used the index to rank the 21 TKIs. The control treatment scored a 1, while a few TKIs that are labeled by the FDA with boxed warnings for severe heart toxicity scored close to 0.

Safety indices like this one can be very useful during drug discovery, said Dr. Davis, and the applicability of the index developed by Dr. Wu and his colleagues will become clear when they evaluate its performance with more compounds.

And for the safety index to be applicable to more patients, the panel of cells used to develop it would need to be gathered from a sufficiently representative population of people reflecting different ages, races/ethnicities, health statuses, and other characteristics, said Lori Minasian, M.D., deputy director of NCIs Division of Cancer Prevention, who was not involved in either study.

For example, the study did not include cells derived from patients with [pre-existing] cardiac disease, said Dr. Davis.

A Personalized Approach

In addition to their potential application during drug development, Dr. Wu believes that stem cell-derived heart cells could potentially be used to predict toxicity risk for individual patients. He and his colleagues explored this possibility in their Nature Medicine study.

Doxorubicin, used on its own or in combination with other drugs, is an effective treatment for breast cancer and several other types of cancer. Like TKIs, however, it is known to cause heart toxicities, such as arrhythmias and heart failure, in a small proportion of patients. But there has been no way to predict which patients will experience these side effects.

The researchers developed stem cell-derived heart cells from eight women with breast cancer who had been treated with doxorubicinhalf of whom experienced cardiotoxicity from the treatment and half who did not.

In several different lab tests, the heart cells from women who had experienced cardiotoxicity were more sensitive to doxorubicin than those from women who had not. More specifically, in heart cells from women who had experienced cardiotoxicity, doxorubicin treatment caused more severe irregularities in cell contractility, and even low concentrations of the drug killed the cells.

An Improved Model

While the stem cell-derived heart cell model may be an improvement over the current [drug testing] system, its not perfect, said Dr. Minasian. For example, the model does not capture contributions of other organs and cells to the toxic effects of a drug, she explained. The drug may be broken down in the liver, for instance, and side products (called metabolites) may also cause toxic effects.

In addition, the lab-grown stem cell-derived version of someones heart cells are not going to be exactly the same as the cells found in that persons heart, Dr. Wu noted. Nevertheless, they reflect the same genetics and they are pretty good at predicting drug response, he said.

Looking forward, Dr. Minasian said, figuring out how to best use this approach is going to take more work, but being able to better predict human response [to cancer drugs] is important.

The research teams next steps include conducting prospective studies to determine whether they can use a patients stem cell-derived heart cells to potentially predict if that person will develop heart toxicity before they actually receive cancer treatment.

This article has been republished frommaterialsprovided byNCI. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

Reference

Sharma, A., Burridge, P. W., McKeithan, W. L., Serrano, R., Shukla, P., Sayed, N., ... & Matsa, E. (2017). High-throughput screening of tyrosine kinase inhibitor cardiotoxicity with human induced pluripotent stem cells. Science translational medicine, 9(377), eaaf2584.

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Measuring Heart Toxicity of Cancer Drugs | Technology Networks - Technology Networks

Scientists claim that #Stem Cells obtained from skin provide a new weapon against brain tumors. Jedd Wolchok, a cancer immunotherapy expert at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, says that nanoparticles are thinner than a human hair, and help to fight tumors. Previously, doctors used stem cells to target breast cancer tumors. Latest clinical trials show that the new therapy is useful for patients with brain tumors. According to a study published in the journal "Science Translational Medicine," the treatment shrinks the tumors and extends the survival of victims.

Researcher says that it's time to forget about drugs that spur the immune system to fight tumors. Stem cells will be used on a large scale to treat patients. Every year, pharmaceutical companies develop a number of antibodies and proteins that block the overexpressed molecules, enabling the immune system to target tumors. All these medicines are harmful to the nervous system. In contrast, the stem cells directly target a tumor without damaging the neurons. Jedd Wolchok believes that the current anti-cancer drugs work in only 10% to 40% of patients. There is no use of drugs that target only several cells of a tumor and fail to completely destroy it. Stem cells destroy a tumor within a few minutes. However, the process is very complicated and only experienced neurosurgeons should perform an operation. Once a patient receives radiation therapy to shrink a tumor, his immune system mounts an aggressive response that wipes out both the tumors and metastases throughout the body.

Jedd Wolchok will find out whether it is possible to use nontoxic nanoparticles to sensitize the immune system or not. He requires more time and further research before he publishes his findings. He says that it is not easy to pass the nanoparticles through the tumors as the particles are bigger than macrophages. However, specific blood proteins can be used to coat the nanoparticles, facilitating their uptake. Once these particles reach the brain tumor, they act as tumor killers. Jedd and his team will carry out an experiment on mice with breast cancer. Wolchok builds his study on an earlier discovery that brain stem cells have a weird affinity for cancers. #Beat The Clock

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Skin cells provide a new weapon against brain tumors - Blasting News

SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwired - March 23, 2017) - Strategic News Service (SNS) has selected lpisremo as a 2017 FiReStarter company to be featured at the 15th annual Future in Review (FiRe) Conference. FiRe 2017 will take place October 10-13 at the Stein Eriksen Lodge Deer Valley in Park City, Utah.

Described by The Economist as "the best technology conference in the world," FiRe features global speakers and participants in technology and the global economy, including Elon Musk, Craig Venter, Michael Dell, Vint Cerf, Leroy Hood, Elena Polyakova, Mark Hurd, Paul Jacobs, Cory Doctorow, Kamran Elahian, Ken Goldman, Dharmendra Modha, and many others. FiReStarters are selected based on the strength of their potential to bring positive change to the world, and are showcased at the FiRe conference in panels throughout the event and with ongoing relationships introduced and supported by SNS.

lpisremo is a disruptive precision bioengineering regenerative-medicine company whose platform technology harnesses and instructs the body's own tissue-resident cells, to produce nearly any therapeutic and regenerative protein, in place, with on/off precision, without the need to inject small-molecule drugs, mRNA, stem cells, or chemicals.

lpisremo's bleeding-edge platform enables the precision modulation of cell signaling pathways to elicit specific gene and protein expression of tissue-restricted transcription factors that are the fundamental biological mechanisms contributing to cardiogenesis, chondrogenesis, neurogenesis, vasculogenesis, skeletal myogenesis, osteogenesis, hepatogenesis, and organogenesis, which are the key mechanisms to regenerating and restoring tissue and organ function to its optimum healthy state. lpisremo's precision platform can target the key mechanisms that cause biological aging to elicit adult skin stem cells self-renewal, boost their lifespan, replenish, and elicit prevention and reversion of cellular aging ("reversing the aging process"), with the goal of making aging a reversible phenomenon.

"lpisremo's team is honored to be recognized as a 2017 FiReStarter company. We are extremely excited to share the next-generation regenerative technology at such a highly regarded technology conference, and we look forward to showing how we could revolutionize the way we treat devastating degenerative and debilitating diseases for which no cures or treatments are available today, including aging," said James Ryan, CEO of lpisremo Inc.

"We have invested years into looking at, and in some cases helping to launch, new medical discoveries, technologies, and procedures, from Personalized Medicine to Precision Medicine and including our Nutritional Microanalysis and UnDx (Undiagnosed) initiatives. lpisremo fits perfectly into this universe of brilliant and radically creative new approaches to medicine, and we are delighted to announce its selection as a FiReStarter company this year. We look forward to helping the team share their passion and research and to partnering with them in the future in making the world a better -- and healthier -- place," said Mark Anderson, Founding Chair and CEO of Future in Review and the Strategic News Service.

Future in Review is a gathering of world-class thought leaders, convened each year with the goal of providing the most accurate look forward in technology. FiRe is a world leader in exploring how technology drives the world economy and in using technology to solve major social challenges. These goals have been consistently achieved through FiRe's collaboration across technology-driven industries and through active support from the global FiRe community.

To register for FiRe 2017, go to http://www.futureinreview.com.

Strategic News Service was founded by Mark Anderson in 1995 as the first subscription-based online news service. Since its inception, SNS has proven the most accurate predictive report covering technology and the global economy. Its subscribers include top managers at technology and finance companies across the globe, including Oracle, Microsoft, HP, Dell, Cisco, Intel, Google, British Telecom, SpaceX, Amazon, Telstra, and others.

SNS has been operating the annual FiRe conference since 2003. FiRe exposes world experts and participants to new ideas, and conversations about them, producing an accurate portrait of the future; and focuses on creating technology solutions to current local and global problems. FiRe 2017 will take place October 10-13, 2017, at the Stein Eriksen Lodge Deer Valley in Park City, Utah. For more information and to register, go to http://www.futureinreview.com.

Future in Review is a Strategic News Service conference. Future in Review and Strategic News Service (SNS) are registered international trademarks. The "SNS Global Report on Technology and the Economy" is the most accurate publicly ranked predictive newsletter in computing and communications.

Websites: http://www.stratnews.com, http://www.futureinreview.com, https://www.elpiseremo.com/

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Want more stem cells and a higher pain tolerance? Try shocking yourself. Men's Fitness The acupuncture stimulus we're giving these animals has a rapid effect on neuroanatomical pathways that connect the stimulus point in the arm to responsive neurons in the spinal cord and into a region in the brain called the hypothalamus. In turn, the ...

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Want more stem cells and a higher pain tolerance? Try shocking yourself. - Men's Fitness

Challenging a long-held model about how blood is formed, a study led by UC San Francisco researchers has found that the lungs play a crucial role in the process, producing half of blood platelets and also storing blood-forming stem cells.

The study, performed in mice, also found that blood stem cells and progenitor cells travel freely between the lungs and bone marrow, long considered the primary source of blood production.

If found to occur in humans, this discovery about the lungs role in blood production could provide new approaches for treating blood diseases, pulmonologist Mark R. Looney, M.D., senior author of the study, said in a statement.

Moreover, the success of lung transplantation might be increased by better understanding this process. Immune reaction between donor blood cells in the lungs and the host could contribute to transplant rejection, the study stated.

The study was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. When placed online, the study can be found at j.mp/lungblood.

"This finding definitely suggests a more sophisticated view of the lungs -- that they're not just for respiration but also a key partner in formation of crucial aspects of the blood," Looney said. "What we've observed here in mice strongly suggests the lung may play a key role in blood formation in humans as well."

"Dr. Looney and his team have disrupted some traditional ideas about the pulmonary role in platelet-related hematopoiesis, paving the way for further scientific exploration of this integrated biology," said Traci Mondoro, of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, in the statement.

While it has been known for decades that platelets can be made in the lungs, the study indicates that lung production is a more important factor than previously thought, said Mondoro, project officer at the Translational Blood Science and Resources Branch of the NHLBI, a division of the National Institutes of Health.

Researchers studied the lungs of mice genetically engineered to make a green fluorescent protein in platelets and platelet-making cells called megakaryocytes. They found a larger than expected number of these cells.

Megakaryocytes that release platelets in the lungs originate from extrapulmonary sites such as the bone marrow; we observed large megakaryocytes migrating out of the bone marrow space, the study said. The contribution of the lungs to platelet biogenesis is substantial,accounting for approximately 50% of total platelet production or 10 million platelets per hour.

After discovering this process, the researchers looked for more signs of blood cells residing in the lungs. They found progenitor cells that turn into megakaryocytes, along with blood-forming, or hematopoietic, stem cells. a total of 1 million per mouse lung.

These cells constitute a reservoir that can replenish the bone marrow, the study said.

Under conditions of thrombocytopenia (platelet deficiency) and relative stem cell deficiency in the bone marrow, these progenitors can migrate out of the lungs, repopulate the bone marrow, completely reconstitute blood platelet counts, and contribute to multiple hematopoietic lineages, the study stated. These results identify the lungs as a primary site of terminal platelet production and an organ with considerable hematopoietic potential.

The studys co-first authors are Emma Lefranais and Guadalupe Ortiz-Muoz, both of UCSF. It was supported by the UCSF Nina Ireland Program in Lung Health; the UCSF Program for Breakthrough Biomedical Research, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

bradley.fikes@sduniontribune.com

(619) 293-1020

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Science Daily

Stem cell therapy is safe for stroke patients, study shows Science Daily A multicenter trial looking at whether a single dose of millions of adult, bone-marrow-derived stem cells can aid stroke recovery indicates it's safe and well-tolerated by patients but may not significantly improve their recovery within the first three ... Stem cells seem speedier in spacePhys.Org Borrowing from nature: UW-Madison scientists use plants to grow stem cellsMadison.com The Worst 'Healthcare': 'Stem Cell' Clinics Wrought with Red Flags, Insincerity and BlindnessAmerican Council on Science and Health all 34 news articles »

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Stem cell therapy is safe for stroke patients, study shows - Science Daily

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 applications could be very significant, from studying genetic diseases in a dish to generating possible regenerative cures from the patients own cells.

Its actually quite remarkable that it happens, says Stelios T. Andreadis, PhD, professor and chair of UBs 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 UBs 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 UBs office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Developments 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 Parkinsons-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, described in the journal Stem Cells under the title Reprogramming Postnatal Human Epidermal Keratinocytes Toward Functional Neural Crest Fates, was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Reference:

Bajpai, V. K., Kerosuo, L., Tseropoulos, G., Cummings, K. A., Wang, X., Lei, P., Liu, B., Liu, S., Popescu, G. K., Bronner, M. E. and Andreadis, S. T. (2017), Reprogramming Postnatal Human Epidermal Keratinocytes Toward Functional Neural Crest Fates. Stem Cells. doi:10.1002/stem.2583

This article has been republished frommaterialsprovided by University at Buffalo. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

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Stem Cells Reprogrammed without Genetic Modification - Technology Networks

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 neurology 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 ... - UCSF News Services

Abnormal development of the brain in an intractable disease, thanatophoric dysplasia Science Daily It is only possible, by using appropriate animal model that reproduces relevant pathophysiology, to uncover the process of pathogenesis and to develop therapy. Since the research on abnormalities of bones in TD is progressing with iPS cells at Kyoto ...

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Abnormal development of the brain in an intractable disease, thanatophoric dysplasia - Science Daily

Seven-month-old Madalayna Ducharme is receivingthe stem celltransplant she urgently needs to save her life, from a donor found in herWindsor home her two-year-old brother Henrik.

But her mother Tamara cautioned Friday that the hardest days start today as specialistsat Torontos Sick Kids hospital closely monitor for the next several weeks how Madalayna responds to her brothers stem cells, needed to halt the terrible effects of malignant infantile osteopetrosis.

Theone-in-200,000 genetic disorder causes bones toget thicker and more dense. She cant lift her head because its too heavy. One of the most devastatingeffects vision loss caused by thickening bones compressing nerves has already happened since her January diagnosis.

People dont get how difficult this still is, Tamara said during a phone interview Friday from Sick Kids. Once the match was found (last week) everyone was so excited. But then there was eight days of chemo, to kill off Madalaynas own stem cells and make room for those from her brother. The chemo was tough on Madalayna, Tamara said.

And that isnt even the most difficult part. We keep being told its going to get a lot harder before it gets better.

She said doctors will monitor her for signs of rejection for the next 14-27 days in Toronto. Theres a risk of graft versus host disease, which can happen if Henriks donated bone marrow thinks Madalaynas body is foreign and attacks her.

When Tamarawas interviewed on Friday, she and husband Charles were waiting while Henrik was donating his bone marrow a 3-hour procedure called harvesting. Madalayna was on Tamaras lap, waiting for the procedure that involves transfusing the bone marrow into her system, much like a blood transfusion.

The Ducharme family at their home in Windsors Riverside area on Jan. 18, 2017. From left: Henrik, Tamara, Charles, and warrior princess Madalayna. Nick Brancaccio / Windsor Star

Because hes only two, Henrik only understands that hes helping his sister, Tamara said.He was very willing, she said, because he knows she is very sick.

The family went public in January to plead for people to get swabbed tested to see it theyre a match and to register on the international bone marrow registry. About 1,500 volunteered, said Tamara.

Its phenomenal, she said of the response. Its very uplifting, it makes you feel really great that people are behind us. She said social media posts about Madalaynas progressare followed by 7,000-15,000 people.

Shes got a lot of prayers and thoughts behind her, so shes going to be OK.

Tamara said Madalaynas eyes have been affected by the disease, but doctors arent yet 100 per cent sure if shes entirely lost her eyesight a permanent effect from the disease.

Madalayna appeared perfectly healthy when she was born, but at two months, theirfamily doctor noticed herfontanel the soft spot in a babys skull was enlarged. It was the start of a long list of symptoms such as spitting up, seizures, spots on the liver and abnormal findings from blood work, ultrasounds and other tests. The definitive diagnosis came in January.

When the Ducharmes made their public appeal for people to get swabbed, the situation was an emergency due to the possible arrival of terrible complications, including lost eyesight and hearing.

Windsor is such a great community, as soon as you put a call out, people are willing to help, theyre always there in abundance, said Joanne Bedard, whose Katelyn Bendard Bone Marrow Associationorganizedlocal bone marrow registrations in Madalaynas name.

About 1,300 people registered with CanadasOne Matchstem cell and marrow registry, not including other donors who were swabbed at regular Canadian Blood Services blood donor clinics or who submitted their swab sample through the mail.

The fact we had that many people who joined the registry, it just offers so much more hope to the other over 800 Canadians who are waiting for a (stem cell) transplant, said Bedard, whose daughterKatelyn died of leukemia in 2005 when she was three, aftera bone marrow donor could not be found.

When they learned last week that Henrik was a match, doctors were initially hesitant to use him because of concerns his genetic makeup was too close to Madalaynas and could therefore share some of the diseases traits. But they ultimately decided that Henrik was the best option.

Madalayna Ducharme at her family home in Windsors Riverside area on Jan. 18, 2017. The baby warrior princess suffers from the rare disorder of malignant infantile osteopetrosis. Nick Brancaccio / Windsor Star

Friday was Day Zero for Madalayna, and the medical experts will start counting upwards from there as Henriks stem cells start to graft into her system.

Thereare a lot of things that can happen from Day Zero on up until she has accepted this bone marrow, her mother said. So were actually going to be in the roughest days starting today.

A benefit to help the family is planned for April 1 at Parkwood Gospel Temple, 3005 Temple Dr., from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Call 226-348-0388 for information about tickets. You can also donate to an account set up at Libro Credit Union. Go to any location and make a deposit to the Warrior Princess account. You can also make an e-transfer towarriorprincesslayna@gmail.com with the password Layna.

bcross@postmedia.com

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Prayers, hopes for Madalayna, as brother donates life-saving stem ... - Windsor Star

Newser

3 Women Blinded After Stem Cell Therapy Newser CORRECTS FROM MD ANDERSON HOSPITAL TO MD ANDERSON CANCER CENTER -Senior Clinical Cell Therapy Specialist Megan Raggio prepares stem cells from bone marrow before they are transplanted into sportscaster... (AP Photo/David J. Phillip). These Women Went Blind After A Florida Clinic Injected Fat Cells Into Their EyeballsBuzzFeed News Florida Clinic Blinds Three Patients in Botched 'Clinical Trial'Gizmodo From Hope To Despair: Three Women Blinded By Unproven Stem Cell Therapy [VIDEO]Counsel & Heal The New England Journal of Medicine -The New England Journal of Medicine -The New England Journal of Medicine -Bascom Palmer Eye Institute all 131 news articles »

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3 Women Blinded After Stem Cell Therapy - Newser

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 32.

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.

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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 celebrities, dies - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

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 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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Veterinary Doctors Conduct Study Looking To Ease Arthritis Pain - CBS Philly

March 10, 2017 15:16 ET | Source: NASDAQ, Inc.

ADVISORY, March 10, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

What:VistaGen Therapeutics Inc. (Nasdaq:VTGN), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing new generation medicines for depression and other central nervous system (CNS) disorders, will visit the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square.

In honor of the occasion, Shawn K. Singh, CEO & Director, will ring the Closing Bell.

Where:Nasdaq MarketSite 4 Times Square 43rd & Broadway Broadcast Studio

When:Monday, March 13, 2017 3:45 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET

VistaGen Contact:Mark A. McPartland (650) 577-3600 IR@vistagen.com

Nasdaq MarketSite:Emily Pan (646) 441-5120 emily.pan@nasdaq.com

Feed Information:Fiber Line (Encompass Waterfront): 4463

Gal 3C/06C 95.05 degrees West 18 mhz Lower DL 3811 Vertical FEC 3/4 SR 13.235 DR 18.295411 MOD 4:2:0 DVBS QPSK

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Photos: To obtain a hi-resolution photograph of the Market Close, please go to http://business.nasdaq.com/discover/market-bell-ceremonies and click on the market close of your choice.

About VistaGenVistaGen Therapeutics, Inc.(NASDAQ:VTGN), is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing new generation medicines for depression and other central nervous system (CNS) disorders. VistaGen's lead CNS product candidate, AV-101, is a new generation oral antidepressant drug candidate in Phase 2 development. AV-101's mechanism of action is fundamentally differentiated from all FDA-approved antidepressants and atypical antipsychotics used adjunctively to treat MDD, with potential to drive a paradigm shift towards a new generation of safer and faster-acting antidepressants. AV-101 is currently being evaluated by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)in a Phase 2a monotherapy study in MDD being fully funded by the NIMH and conducted by Dr. Carlos Zarate Jr., Chief, Section on the Neurobiology and Treatment of Mood Disorders and Chief of Experimental Therapeutics and Pathophysiology Branch at the NIMH. VistaGen is preparing to launch a 280-patient Phase 2b study of AV-101 as an adjunctive treatment for MDD patients with inadequate response to standard, FDA-approved antidepressant therapies. Dr. Maurizio Fava of Harvard University will be the Principal Investigator of the Phase 2b study. AV-101 may also have the potential to treat multiple CNS disorders and neurodegenerative diseases in addition to MDD, including chronic neuropathic pain, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease, where modulation of the NMDAR, AMPA pathway and/or key active metabolites of AV-101 may achieve therapeutic benefit.

VistaStem Therapeutics is VistaGen's wholly owned subsidiary focused on applying human pluripotent stem cell(hPSC)technology, internally and with third-party collaborators, to discover, rescue, develop and commercialize proprietary new chemical entities(NCEs),including small molecule NCEs with regenerative potential, for CNS and other diseases, and cellular therapies involving stem cell-derived blood, cartilage, heart and liver cells. In December 2016, VistaGen exclusively sublicensed to BlueRock Therapeutics LP, a next generation regenerative medicine company established by Bayer AG and Versant Ventures, rights to certain proprietary technologies relating to the production of cardiac stem cells for the treatment of heart disease.

For more information, please visitwww.vistagen.comand connect with VistaGen onTwitter,LinkedInandFacebook.

About NasdaqNasdaq (Nasdaq:NDAQ) is a leading provider of trading, clearing, exchange technology, listing, information and public company services across six continents. Through its diverse portfolio of solutions, Nasdaq enables clients to plan, optimize and execute their business vision with confidence, using proven technologies that provide transparency and insight for navigating today's global capital markets.As the creator of the world's first electronic stock market, its technology powers more than 85 marketplaces in 50 countries, and 1 in 10 of the world's securities transactions. Nasdaq is home to approximately 3,800 listed companies with a market value of $10.1 trillion and nearly 18,000 corporate clients. To learn more, visit: business.nasdaq.com.

-NDAQA-

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VistaGen Therapeutics Inc. (Nasdaq: VTGN) to Ring The Nasdaq Stock Market Closing Bell - GlobeNewswire (press release)