Lineage trees reveal cells' histories

By raymumme

The method, developed over several years in the lab of Prof. Ehud Shapiro of the Institute's Biological Chemistry, and Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Departments, uses mutations in specific genetic markers to determine which cells are most closely related and how far back they share a common parent cell, to create a sort of family tree for cells. Shapiro and members of his lab, including Drs. Shalev Itzkovitz and Rivka Adar, together with Prof. Nava Dekel and research student Yitzhak Reizel of the Biological Regulation Department, used their method to see if ova could be descended from bone-marrow stem cells. Their findings indicated that any relationship between the two types was too distant for one to be an ancestor of the other.

These scientists also found, surprisingly, that the ova of older mice had undergone more cell divisions than those of younger mice. This could be the result of replenishment during adulthood, but an alternate theory holds that all eggs are created before birth, and those that undergo fewer divisions are simply selected earlier on for ovulation. Further experimentation, says Shapiro, will resolve the issue.

Cell lineage trees are similar to modern evolutionary and taxonomic trees based on genome comparisons between organisms. Shapiro and his team used mutations in cells that are passed on to daughter cells over an organism's lifetime (though not on to the next generation). By comparing a number of genetic sequences called microsatellites – areas where mutations occur like clockwork – they can place cells on trees to reveal their developmental history.

A number of papers published by Shapiro, his team and collaborators in recent months have demonstrated the power and versatility of this method. One study, for instance, lent support to the notion that the adult stem cells residing in tiny crypts in the lining of the colon do not harbor, as thought, "immortal DNA strands." Immortal strands may be retained by dividing stem cells if they always relegate the newly-synthesized DNA to the differentiating daughter cell and keep the original stand in the one that remains a stem cell.

A second study addressed an open question about developing muscle cells. Here they found that two kinds of progenitor cell - myogenic cells, which eventually give rise to muscle fiber, and non-myogenic cells – found within the same muscle are more closely related than similar cells in different muscles.

One immediate advantage of the cell lineage analysis method developed by Shapiro's team is that it is non-invasive and retrospective, and as such can be applied to the study of human cell lineages. Most other studies of development rely on genetically engineered lab animals in which the stem cells are tagged with fluorescent markers. In addition to providing a powerful new research method that does not rely on such markers, Shapiro believes that it could one day be adapted as a diagnostic tool that might, for instance, reveal the history of an individual's cancer and help doctors determine the best course of treatment.

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February 24th, 2012

A&M to host bone marrow donor drive

By LizaAVILA

Published Wednesday, February 22, 2012 12:12 AM By MAGGIE KIELY
maggie.kiely@theeagle.com

Two Texas A&M cancer awareness organizations are encouraging people to participate in an event that could save lives.

From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on March 1 and March 2 at the Recreation Center, residents will have an opportunity to register their bone marrow into a global data base used to help patients waiting for a donor match.

Spearheading the drive are Christina Ruiz, president of the Texas A&M Cancer Society, and Courtney Hawes, president of Texas A&M American Childhood Cancer Organization.

The two campus groups have teamed up with DKMS, a global bone marrow donor center, for the event.

Registering bone marrow involves swabbing the inside of the person's cheek to gather tissue used to determine the DNA type.

Amy Roseman, donor recruitment coordinator for DKNS Texas region, said finding a match is a challenge for many patients.

"What we're looking for is a genetic twin, so it's really hard to find a match," she said. "Within a family, a patient only has a 30 percent chance of matching a relative."

Each year, there are about 20,000 patients seeking a match, but only four out of 10 are successful, she said.

That's why it's so important to increase the size of the bone marrow data base: "The more the marrower," said Roseman.

Roseman said that 80 percent of patients in need of bone marrow donations are looking for blood stem cells, while only 20 percent -- mainly children -- require a full transplant.

Giving the stem cells involves a process similar to donating blood, she said.

To donate bone marrow, the donor is put under anesthesia while doctors draw tissue from the pelvic bone.

All of the procedures are paid for by DKNS, she said.

Ruiz, a junior molecular and cell biology major, said her plan is to become an oncologist.

Cancer entered her world in middle school when her best friend's mother was diagnosed with lymphoma.

The friend's mom, who had been her after-school caretaker, died her freshman year, but because of two bone marrow transplants, she was able to live longer than expected.

Hawes said several of her family members have been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer since her middle school years, which is what prompted her to join the campus cancer society as a freshman.

She founded ACCO last summer and has recruited about 30 members since, she said.

The cancer society has about 40 members, Ruiz said, adding that most of their work centers around raising awareness about cancer prevention and ways people can contribute to research or treatments.

Josh Lemon, a freshman visualization major from Waco, said he was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma -- a rare form of bone cancer -- two years ago as a senior in high school.

Even though he didn't receive a bone marrow transplant, he did require a platelet transfusion, which wouldn't have been possible without a donor.

"For me, it was very beneficial that someone had donated," he said. "You never know, you may know someone who will be affected by cancer."

For more information about what it takes to register or become a bone marrow donor, visit getswabbed.org.

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February 23rd, 2012

Bone marrow drive held Wednesday for Tyler doctor

By LizaAVILA

TYLER, TX (KLTV) -

Over the last 3 months, life has changed drastically for Cody Chandler, a Tyler doctor diagnosed with leukemia just after Thanksgiving.

A bone marrow drive will be hosted Wednesday afternoon in his honor, and one of the main things Chandler stresses now is his new-found passion to get people who need bone marrow transplants the help they need.

"To be very honest, I didn't realize the severity of it. I was like, leukemia, what do you mean leukemia? And he said, you have cancer, and we need to start chemo tomorrow," Chandler recalls.

Chandler is a young father, husband, and doctor. He describes himself as being "pretty healthy" before he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in November.

"The severity of the diagnosis doesn't really hit you until you unfortunately start looking at statistics, and what it's going to take for me to get treated and get healthy and to live past 5 years," he said. "And I don't think I can explain that feeling. I think the real definition of being humbled, I've really learned what humility means."

Chandler's cancer is currently in remission and he continues to have chemo treatments. But if he relapses, he'll have to have a bone marrow transplant. Heart to Heart Hospice in Tyler is hosting a bone marrow drive Wednesday afternoon to get people on the national registry.

"They wanted to reach out and help and let people know how simple the process is to get into the registry and how simple the process is now to donate," said April Brown, the host of Wednesday's blood drive.

To join the registry, it only takes someone 15 seconds to swab their cheek and a few minutes to fill out some paperwork. And Brown says the bone marrow donation process is much easier than people think.

"They put an IV in both arms. They take the blood out and it goes into a machine that separates the stem cells and they'll collect the stem cells and the blood goes back into the arm," she said.

A process Chandler says he now realizes the importance of -- he wishes he could help Leslie Harris, a young Arkansas mother given 6 months to live without a bone marrow transplant.

"I would give her my bone marrow if I could, and I can't, but there's a million people in the upper East Texas region that could. There's 100,000 people in Tyler that could, with a 15-second swab, can maybe save somebody's life, and the reality is it could actually save someone exactly like me," Chandler said.

If you'd like to attend today's bone marrow drive, it's being held at Heart to Heart Hospice here in Tyler from 1 to 6 pm.

If you'd like to help but can't make it, there are a few ways you can do so.

You can donate to the Chandler family at http://www.comfortforcody.com.

And you can find out more about becoming a bone marrow donor at http://www.getswabbed.org.

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February 23rd, 2012

PBSC vs. BONE MARROW DONATION – Video

By raymumme

10-01-2012 19:46 If you match a patient you will be asked to donate stem cells from either your bloodstream or bone marrow. Learn how it's done by watching this video.

When LSA senior Daniel Lee returned to the United States in December from a family trip to Italy feeling ill, he was rushed to the hospital where he received a life-threatening diagnosis — he had aplastic anemia, a disease that prevents bone marrow from producing red and white blood cells.

Upon hearing news of Lee’s dire need for a bone marrow transplant, students mobilized to encourage members of the campus community to donate marrow and raise awareness about the importance of joining the National Marrow Donor Registry.

As part of this effort, Sigma Kappa sorority members will work with DKMS Americas, a donor recruitment center, helping students, faculty and staff members register for the Be The Match Registry today from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Anderson AB Room in the Union.

LSA senior Samira Monavvari, Lee’s friend, has been working to promote today’s event via Facebook and has received more than 1,000 confirmed attendees. Monavvari said she hopes to be able to help someone else in need of a transplant, even if she doesn't find a match for Lee.

“The fact that Dan is going through this makes us want to donate to people who we don’t even know because it’s so hard seeing what he’s going through,” Monavvari said.

According to Monavvari, Lee is known jokingly by his friends as “the next Steve Jobs,” adding that he is extremely smart, driven and friendly.

“If you ask him what he wants to do, he’ll always say he wants to be known for something,” Monavvari said. “He is the kind of kid who gets along with everyone … that’s why (his diagnosis) has touched everyone so much.”

LSA junior Jessica Kaltz, a member of Sigma Kappa, started organizing the drive prior to Lee’s diagnosis. Kaltz worked with Christian Montgomery, a University alum and DKMS Americas employee, over the past few months to organize the registry at the University.

She wrote in an e-mail interview that she hopes that Lee’s story will inspire people to attend today’s event.

“When people hear about Dan’s story, I think they will see that by simply taking five minutes of their time by signing up to become a donor, they could possibly be the life-saving difference that Dan needs,” Kaltz wrote.

Montgomery explained that the process for joining the registry involves having potential donors fill out a short form and then submit a cheek swab to determine their tissue type.
Potential donors will then be added to the Be The Match Registry, a national list of potential bone marrow donors.

If the donor is contacted as a match and decides to continue with the process, he or she will be required to take a blood test in order to obtain the best match for the patient in need.

Between four and six weeks later, the donor will undergo a marrow extraction procedure or peripheral blood stem cell donation, depending on the patient’s condition. Contrary to popular belief, the donor typically does not experience significant pain, a common misconception about the two procedures, Montgomery said.

Montgomery is not only a DKMS employee, but also a bone marrow donor himself. In 2007, he registered at an event in the Diag, and in January 2008 he was contacted as a potential match for a 22-year-old female in New Jersey suffering from paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, a rare blood disease.

Nicole Mausteller, the patient to whom Montgomery made his donation, said her disorder was discovered through blood work that was required as part of the process of becoming a dental assistant.

Montgomery donated through marrow extraction in May 2008, a procedure that he said left him a bit stiff and sore for a few days. After receiving a one-month, six-month and one-year update, Montgomery and Mausteller agreed to exchange contact information. They have been in contact since February 2010 and remain good friends.

“He’s my hero,” Mausteller said.

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February 16th, 2012

Stem cells a fix for 'broken hearts'?

By daniellenierenberg

When a piece of muscle in a person’s heart dies from lack of blood flow, it scars over and is lost. But a team of researchers from the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles has proven that those muscles may not necessarily be gone forever.

In a ground-breaking study that may change how heart attacks are treated, Dr. Eduardo Marban and his team used stem cells to re-grow damaged heart muscle. In the 17 patients who received the therapy, Marban measured an average 50 percent reduction in the size of the scar tissue

“One of the holy grails in medicine has been the use of medicine to achieve regeneration,” Marban said. “Patients that were treated not only experienced shrinkage of their scars, but also new growth of their heart muscle, which is very exciting.”

The stem cells were not derived from embryos, but instead were developed from the patients’ own hearts. Marban’s team inserted a catheter into the diseased hearts and took a small biopsy of muscle. In the laboratory, the tissue was manipulated into producing stem cells. After a few weeks of marinating in culture, researchers had enough stem cells to re-inject them into the patients’ hearts. Over the course of a year, the stem cells took root in cardiac tissue, encouraging the heart to create new muscle and blood vessels. In other words, the heart actually began to mend itself.

Click here to see an animation of how the process works.

“We’ve achieved what we have achieved using adult stem cells – in this case – actually specifically from a patient’s own heart back into the same patient. There’s no ethical issues with that – there’s no destruction of embryos. There’s no reason to worry about immune rejection."

While similar research has been done using stem cells from bone marrow, this is the first time that stem cells derived from a patient’s own cardiac tissue have been used.

Marban believes this therapy could be broadly used in many of the 5 to 7 million Americans who suffer from heart disease every year. And he said the applications could go well beyond diseased hearts.

“If we can do that in the heart, I don’t see any reason, conceptually, why we couldn’t do it in kidneys for example, or pancreas or other organs that have very limited regenerative capacity,” Marban said.

While the procedure may be a revolutionary medical technique, there are still a few more puzzling questions about the research that Marban would like to investigate further. For example, while the patients grew new heart muscle and saw a dramatic reduction in scar tissue, the actual function of their hearts did not show a significant improvement. And it appeared the stem cells themselves may not have turned into cardiac muscle, but rather they stimulated the heart to produce new muscle cells.

Because this was a “Phase 1” study, it was really meant to measure whether the procedure was safe. Of the 17 patients who were given the stem cell injections, six experienced “serious adverse events,” but only one was regarded to be possibly related to the treatment.

The potential success of this research could hold a lot of promise for the millions of Americans who suffer from heart disease each and every year, which is the leading cause of death in the United States. If his future experiments yield the same results as this initial study, Marban believes he could be offering this therapy to patients within four years – and that could go a long way in mending all of America’s broken hearts.

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February 16th, 2012

Bone marrow transplant registration to be held in young boy's memory

By Dr. Matthew Watson

WALLACE, NC (WECT) - Last year, thousands of people became aware of the serious medical condition of a six-year-old boy from Duplin County.

Wright Lanier passed away in mid-December, but there is no doubt he made an impact on the people who followed his medical condition on Facebook.

In 2010, Wright was diagnosed with a rare immune deficiency. Initially, doctors thought that he had lymphoma.

"The doctors, a lot of times, knew something was wrong, but in testing him nothing ever showed up," said Wright's mother, Dona Lanier. "He had a rare immune deficiency called XLP, which always looked like Lymphona in his body."

Because his condition was worsening, doctors decided Wright needed a bone marrow transplant, which is a procedure to replace damaged or destroyed bone marrow with healthy bone marrow stem cells. The stem cells can develop into the red blood cells that carry oxygen through your body. The white cells are the ones that fight infections and the platelets help with blood clotting.

While the transplant actually worked, complications were too great, and Wright died just over a year after the surgery.

"The bone marrow transplant, according to the Cincinnati hospital and Chapel Hill, was a success, meaning it completely cured his XLP and MPS," explained Dona. "Wright just unfortunately had a lot of complications as a result of the transplant that resulted in his passing."

"While bone marrow transplants are life saving procedures for a lot of children and adults, with diseases that used to be deadly, it can also be very dangerous, and unfortunately not everyone who has a bone marrow transplant survives," said Doctor David Hill, a Wilmington pediatrician.

Before Wright got sick, his mother was the school nurse at Penderlea School. Many of the teachers, including Donna Mintz, followed Wright's progress, and shortly after his death, plans were made to honor the young boy's short life. A bone marrow registration drive will be held in his name in Wallace this weekend.

"If you knew Wright, you would be spoiled by the smile he had and he gave the best hugs in the world," said Mintz, a teacher and family friend. "And we want to do anything we can for the memory of Wright, to help his family."

"He had the biggest heart and he did live every day like it was his last," said Wright's mom. "He found joy in every single day".

The "Be The Match" registry drive will be held in honor of Wright Lanier this Saturday, from 11 a.m. - 4 p.m. in the Wallace Woman's Club building. Normally, there is a charge to be checked to see if you can become a donor, but this weekend, the fee has been waived.

There will also be other fundraising events taking place on Saturday, and all proceeds will go directly to the "Be The Match" registry.

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February 15th, 2012

Stem Cells Regrow Healthy Heart Muscle In Heart Attack Patients

By Sykes24Tracey

Stem cells are proving themselves beneficial once again after scientists used the controversial building blocks to resurrect dead, scarred heart muscle damaged by recent heart attack.

Results from a Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute clinical trial show that treating heart attack patients with an infusion of their own heart-derived cells helps damaged hearts re-grow healthy heart muscle.

Reporting in The Lancet medical journal, the researchers said this is the clearest evidence yet that broken hearts can heal. All that is needed is a little help from one’s own heart stem cells.

“We have been trying as doctors for centuries to find a treatment that actually reverses heart injury,” Eduardo Marban, MD, PhD, and lead author of the study, told WebMD. “That is what we seem to have been able to achieve in this small number of patients. If so, this could change the nature of medicine. We could go to the root of disease and cure it instead of just work around it.”

Marban invented the “cardiosphere” culture technique used to create the stem cells and founded the company developing the treatment.

“These findings suggest that this therapeutic approach is feasible and has the potential to provide a treatment strategy for cardiac regeneration after [heart attack],” wrote University of Hong Kong researchers Chung-Wah Siu and Hung-Fat Tse in an accompanying editorial of Marban’s paper.

The British Heart Foundation told James Gallagher of BBC News that this could “be great news for heart attack patients” in the future.

A heart attack occurs when the heart is starved of oxygen, such as when a clot is blocking the blood flow to the organ. As the heart heals, the dead muscle is replaced by scar tissue, which does not beat like heart muscle. This in turn reduces the hearts ability to pump blood around the body.

Doctors have long been searching for ways to regenerate damaged heart muscle, and now, it seems heart stem cells are the answer. And the Cedars-Sinai trial was designed to test the safety of using stem cells taken from a heart attack patient’s own heart.

The researchers found that one year after receiving the treatment, scar size was reduced from 24 percent to 12 percent of the heart in patients treated with heart stem cells. Patients in the control group, who did not receive stem cells, did not experience a reduction in their heart attack scar tissues.

“While the primary goal of our study was to verify safety, we also looked for evidence that the treatment might dissolve scar and re-grow lost heart muscle,” Marban said in a statement. “This has never been accomplished before, despite a decade of cell therapy trials for patients with heart attacks. Now we have done it. The effects are substantial, and surprisingly larger in humans than they were in animal tests.”

“These results signal an approaching paradigm shift in the care of heart attack patients,” said Shlomo Melmed, MD, dean of the Cedars-Sinai medical faculty and the Helene A. and Philip E. Hixon Chair in Investigative Medicine. “In the past, all we could do was to try to minimize heart damage by promptly opening up an occluded artery. Now, this study shows there is a regenerative therapy that may actually reverse the damage caused by a heart attack.”

Marban cautioned that stem cells do not do what people generally think they do. The general idea has been that stem cells multiply over and over again, and, in time, they turn themselves and their daughter cells into new, working heart muscle.

But Marban said the stem cells are actually doing something more amazing.

“For reasons we didn’t initially know, they stimulate the heart to fix itself,” he told Daniel J. DeNoon of WebMD. “The repair is from the heart itself and not from the cells we give them.”

Exactly how the stem cells invigorate the heart to do this was a matter of “feverish research” in the lab.

The CArdiosphere-Derived aUtologous stem CElls to reverse ventricUlar dySfunction (CADUCEUS) clinical trial was part of a Phase I study approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

Marban used 25 volunteer patients who were of an average age of 53 and had recently suffered a heart attack that left them with damaged heart muscle. Each patient underwent extensive imaging scans so doctors could pinpoint the exact location and severity of the scars. Patients were treated at Cedars-Sinai in LA and at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Eight of the 25 patients served as a control group, receiving conventional medical treatment. The other 17 patients who were randomized to receive the stem cell treatments underwent a minimally invasive biopsy, under local anesthesia. Using a catheter inserted through a vein in the neck, doctors removed a small sample of heart tissue, about half the size of a raisin. The heart tissue was then taken to the lab at Cedars-Sinai and cultured and multiplied the cells using specially developed tools.

The doctors then took the multiplied heart-derived cells — roughly 12 million to 25 million of them per patient — and reintroduced them into the patient’s coronary arteries during another minimally invasive catheter procedure.

The process used in the trial was developed earlier by Marban when he was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins. Johns Hopkins has filed for a patent on the intellectual property and has licensed it to a company in which Marban has a financial interest. However, no funds from that company were used to support the clinical study. All funding was derived from the National Institutes of Health and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

This study followed another in which doctors reported using cells taken from the heart to heal the heart. That trial reported in November 2011 that cells could be used to heal the hearts of heart failure patients who were having heart bypass surgery.

And another trial is about to get underway in Europe, which will be the largest ever for stem cell therapy in heart attack patients.

The BAMI trial will inject 3,000 heart attack patients with stem cells taken from their bone marrow within five days of the heart attack.

Marban said despite the heart’s ability to re-grow heart muscle with the help of heart stem cells, they found no increase in a significant measure of the heart’s ability to pump — the left ventricle ejection fraction: the percentage of blood pumped out of the left ventricle.

Professor Anthony Mathur, a coordinating researcher for the upcoming BAMI trial, said that even if the Marban trial found an increase in ejection fraction then it would be the source of much debate. As it was a proof-of-concept study, with a small group of patients, “proving it is safe and feasible is all you can ask.”

“The findings would be very interesting, but obviously they need further clarification and evidence,” he told BBC News.

“It’s the first time these scientists’ potentially exciting work has been carried out in humans, and the results are very encouraging,” Professor Jeremy Pearson, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, told BBC News.

“These cells have been proven to form heart muscle in a petri dish but now they seem to be doing the same thing when injected back into the heart as part of an apparently safe procedure,” he added. “It’s early days, and this research will certainly need following up, but it could be great news for heart attack patients who face the debilitating symptoms of heart failure.”

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February 15th, 2012

Stem Cells Help Heal Broken Hearts

By Sykes24Tracey

Click here to listen to this podcast

Valentine's Day can lead to plenty of broken hearts. But for cardiac wounds that time alone won't heal, science has made some major advances. When it comes to heart attack, for example, a big development is emerging from a tiny source. Stem cells are coming of age.

Stem cells, harvested from a patient's own bone marrow, have been heralded as a potential quick fix for damaged heart tissue. But can these progenitor cells actually work to heal massive muscle damage?

A new review of 33 studies assessed data from more than 1,700 heart attack patients. The review researchers found that those patients treated with stem cells—in addition to the standard care of angioplasty—had stronger tickers for years to come than those who had not gotten stem cell therapy. The review article is published in The Cochrane Library. [David Clifford et al., Stem Cell Treatment for Acute Myocardial Infarction, link to come]

It's too early to say whether those with stem cell treatments will live longer, according to the new analysis. But for affairs of the heart, it's more evidence that good things can come in very small packages.

—Katherine Harmon

[The above text is a transcript of this podcast]

Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs. Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.
© 2012 ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved.

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February 15th, 2012

Bone Marrow Stem Cells Help Heal Heart Attack Damage

By raymumme

Featured Article
Academic Journal
Main Category: Stem Cell Research
Also Included In: Cardiovascular / Cardiology
Article Date: 15 Feb 2012 - 2:00 PST

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A systematic review of the evidence so far suggests stem cells derived from bone marrow moderately improves heart function after a heart attack. But the authors say larger trials are needed before we can devise guidelines for therapy practice, or draw conclusions about the long-term benefit of the treatment, such as whether it extends life.

The review, about to be published in the Cochrane Library, updates one done in 2008 that reviewed 13 trials; the new one takes into account another 20 more recent trials. Even though these later trials had longer follow ups, it was still not possible to draw firm conclusions about the long term benefits.

Lead author Enca Martin-Rendon, of the Stem Cell Research laboratory, NHS Blood and Transplant at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, UK, told the press that they found it hard to compare the 33 studies because they used so many different approaches:

"Larger trials with standardised treatment procedures would help us to know whether this treatment is really effective," said Martin-Rendon.

In order to pump blood around the body, the heart also needs its own constant supply of blood. If this supply is cut off by a blocked artery, it can cause a heart attack and damage the muscle tissue in the affected part of the heart, causing the cells to start dying, a process known as necrosis.

In the days and weeks after a heart attack, the necrosis can spread, eventually leaving a large part of the heart muscle unable to perform the job of contracting and pumping as well as it ought to. This increases the risk of further heart problems.

Stem cells are precursor cells that have the potential to mature into any cell in the body, including heart muscle cells. For this review, the researchers looked only at treatments that use stem cells derived from bone marrow. At present, such treatments are only available at centres that do research.

Another recently published study described a treatment that used stem cells derived from the patient's own heart tissue to repair heart attack damage.

For the review, Martin-Rendon and colleagues pooled data on a total of 1,765 patients from 33 trials. All the patients had already undergone the conventional treatment, angioplasty, where a balloon is inflated in the blocked artery to open it up and restore blood flow.

They concluded that stem cell therapy using bone marrow-derived stem cells (BMSCs) can result in a moderate long-term improvement in heart function, that lasts for up to 5 years. But there was not enough data to enable them to say anything firm about the effect on survival rates.

Martin-Rendon said:

"This new treatment may lead to moderate improvement in heart function over standard treatments," adding that:

"Stem cell therapy may also reduce the number of patients who later die or suffer from heart failure, but currently there is a lack of statistically significant evidence based on the small number of patients treated so far."

The authors said it was still to early to compile guidelines for standard practice, and further work would be needed before anyone can do this. For instance, more information is needed to establish cell dosage, the timing of transplantation and how best to measure heart function.

One large trial, called BAMI, is already under way. The European Society of Cardiology for Stem Cells and Cardiac Repair is conducting the trial, which is funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (EU FP7-BAMI).

Anthony Mathur, a co-author of this latest Cochrane review, and principal investigator of the BAMI trial, said:

''The BAMI trial will be the largest stem cell therapy trial in patients who have suffered heart attacks and will test whether this treatment prolongs the life of these patients."

Written by Catharine Paddock PhD
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today

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February 15th, 2012

Bone marrow recipient meets donor who gave him gift of life

By daniellenierenberg

BOCA RATON—

A physician from Indianapolis met the woman who saved his life on Sunday morning, providing an emotional kick-off for the second annual Walk for Life, sponsored by the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation.

"It's almost like a total out of body experience," said Scott Savader, 53, moments after he embraced former Sunrise resident Jill Rubin, who provided the stem cells that were transplanted into Savader's body nearly two years ago.

As the two met for the first time, about 300 people cheered before heading off on a 5K walk at Florida Atlantic University. The effort is part of a campaign to raise awareness and raise $100,000 for lab tests necessary to match donors and recipients.

Savader said receiving the transplant was "like being plucked from a fire or a sinking car. There is a bond there now that transcends just knowing somebody. If not for her generosity, I would have died."

Each year, 10,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with a disease treatable with a bone marrow transplant. Yet only about half find the donor who could save them, according to Jay Feinberg, the Delray Beach resident who started the foundation after he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia.

He received a transplant in 1995 and has since dedicated his life to making matches for others.

Savader, a radiologist, was diagnosed with myelofibrosis in 2008.

Rubin, 45, a physical therapist, said she registered as a bone marrow donor 10 years ago while attending a fair in Plantation. She and her family have since moved to Deland.

"This is very emotional for me," said Rubin as she and Savader posed for pictures.

After spending a little time with Savader and his family Sunday, Rubin said she felt even better about her gift to him.

She also learned that Savader grew up and went to high school in Cooper City. "Small world," she said.

Temperatures in the 40s and a chilly wind did little to dampen enthusiasm for the walk. Participants were inspired by Savader and Rubin and other success stories.

Among the latter were 6-year-old Matthew Welling, on hand with his parents Michael and Susie Welling of Port Chester, N.Y., and Boca Raton resident Jill Goldsmith, who donated the bone marrow that reversed the boy's osteoporosis in 2007.

"It was an amazing, life-changing experience," said Goldsmith, 50, as she watched Matthew dance happily around a field at the university.

"What I had to do to save a life was so easy," said Goldsmith. "And to see him now, well, I feel proud and honored and so blessed."

During last year's walk, more than 1,000 new donors were added to the registry and resulted in 14 matches for patients throughout the U.S. They joined a total registry of nearly 200,000, said Feinberg.

Volunteering to become a potential donor begins with an oral swab that is then tested for tissue type. Most of the foundation's money goes toward paying for those lab tests, which cost about $55 each, said Feinberg.

For information, go to mwclary@tribune.com">http://www.giftoflife.org.

mwclary@tribune.com or at 954-356-4465

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Bone marrow recipient meets donor who gave him gift of life

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February 13th, 2012

Bone marrow recipient meets donor who gave him the gift of life

By NEVAGiles23