NBC-5 news anchor Rob Stafford has been diagnosed with a rare blood disorder and will take a leave of absence from the station for several months as he undergoes a bone marrow transplant and chemotherapy.

Stafford credited his wife, Lisa, for pushing him to get an early diagnosis that doctors say greatly improved his prognosis. He is scheduled to begin treatment Friday at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

"I spent my whole life asking questions, but I asked very few questions about my own health because all I wanted to hear is I'm OK," Stafford said in an interview at his Hinsdale home Tuesday. "You have to ask questions."

Stafford told colleagues at WMAQ-Ch. 5 about his illness in an email Wednesday morning and planned to announce the news publicly Wednesday at the end of the 10 p.m. newscast.

He expects to be away from his desk anchoring the 5, 6 and 10 p.m. weekday news for four to six months while at the Mayo Clinic. Doctors there say Stafford is in the early stages, Stage 2, of the disease, which can lead to heart failure and death if undetected.

Stafford's disorder, called amyloidosis, occurs when an abnormal protein called amyloid is produced in bone marrow that can be deposited in tissues and organs. There are more than 40 types of the disorder that affects the heart, kidneys, liver, spleen, nervous system and digestive tract. Stafford's type known as light chain amyloidosis is rare, with fewer than 2,000 or so cases diagnosed in the U.S. each year, according to Dr. Ronald Go, Stafford's hematologist at the Mayo Clinic. Doctors are optimistic he will go into remission after treatment.

Before his diagnosis in January, Stafford had noticed lower energy levels while biking the Cal-Sag trail and hiking through the Rocky Mountains while on vacation. But the 58-year-old award-winning investigative reporter and father of three adult children dismissed the episodes as signs of getting older, he said.

After a physical detected slightly high cholesterol levels and more than usual amounts of protein in his urine, both indicators that his kidney had been damaged as a result of the blood disease, Stafford's wife insisted that he take the symptoms seriously.

"I believe there's a reason that this happened, and I think there's a calling that is to let people know the importance of early detection," said Lisa Stafford, his wife of 30 years who owns a medical marketing and communications company. She plans to stay with Stafford in temporary housing near the Mayo Clinic as he undergoes treatment, lives in a sterile environment and rebuilds his immune system while recovering from the effects of chemotherapy.

In his email to fellow staffers, Stafford joked that he did not wait for the end of sweeps to schedule treatment, but that Friday was the first opening on the Mayo schedule after Stafford completed all the required medical tests.

"I consider this early diagnosis a gift that left to my own devices I would not have received," Stafford wrote. "I'm going to take full advantage of my good fortune and hit this head on with the most aggressive and proven treatment available."

Stafford joined NBC-5 in 2009 after working as a Chicago-based correspondent for Dateline NBC for 11 years. Prior to that, he was a general assignment reporter at CBS2 Chicago. He has won two national and seven local Emmy awards, and an Edward R. Murrow award for a Dateline investigation into racial profiling.

Stafford said his experience meeting and interviewing people in the news, often "on their worst days," has allowed him to keep his health issues in perspective.

"This thing pales in comparison to 95 percent of the stories I do on a daily basis," said Stafford, who added that his work as a journalist also has helped him to seek out the best support, medical opinions and advice about the disorder.

During treatment, doctors will remove, or "harvest," stem cells from Stafford's own bone marrow and freeze millions of healthy ones. Chemotherapy then will be used to wipe out all of his bone marrow, including the unhealthy cells. As the final part of the treatment, doctors will transplant the healthy stem cells back into Stafford's bone marrow, and they will reproduce themselves, Go said.

"You're rescuing your bone marrow by the stem cells that you stored," Go said.

Although Stafford's parents were both treated for cancers in their 50s, doctors do not know the exact cause of Stafford's illness and do not believe it was is hereditary. Risk factors for amyloidosis include exposure to chemicals, radiation and aging, Go said.

Stafford confided in his NBC-5 co-anchor, Allison Rosati, and meteorologist Brant Miller about his illness shortly after his diagnosis in January. As medical tests forced him to travel, he alerted NBC-5 managers, who encouraged Stafford to do whatever it took to get the medical attention needed, he said.

"Rob is loved by his colleagues in the newsroom. We are encouraged by the news that his illness was detected early, and that he is in the excellent hands of the top doctors at the Mayo Clinic. We all wish Rob the best of luck in the weeks ahead, and we can't wait for his return to the newsroom," station manager and vice president of news Frank Whitaker said in an email.

NBC-5 weekend anchor Dick Johnson will be filling in for Stafford during his absence.

Stafford is expected to lose his hair as a result of the chemotherapy and has experienced weight loss. Doctors have encouraged him to pack on a few pounds in anticipation of further weight loss. He's obliged by indulging on Girl Scout cookies, deep dish pizza, cheeseburgers and milk, he said.

Stafford said he is trying to take emotion out of his upcoming battle, which he is approaching as a fight that he plans to win.

"I am not freaking out because I really am confident I am going to get through this," he said.

Lisa Stafford will be posting updates about her husband's condition on a blog: staffordrecovery.com. Rob Stafford also will offer updates on his Facebook Fan page.

Stafford's announcement came less than 24 hours after Hosea Sanders, veteran news anchor at WLS-Ch. 7, announced on his Facebook page he will undergo surgery for prostate cancer and that he was "very optimistic about the outcome."

Sanders told social media friends Tuesday night that he had been diagnosed several weeks ago and would be taking some time off from the ABC-owned station, for which he anchors the 7 p.m. newscast each weeknight.

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NBC-5 news anchor Rob Stafford to undergo bone marrow ... - Chicago Tribune

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Sickle cell disease. Image: Flickr

Sickle cell disease is a slow, vicious killer. Most people diagnosed with the red blood cell disorder in the US live to be between 40 and 60. But those years are a lifetime of pain, as abnormal, crescent-shaped hemoglobin stops up blood flow and deprives tissues of oxygen, causing frequent bouts of agony, along with more severe consequences like organ damage. Now, after decades of searching for a cure, researchers are announcing that, in at least one patient, they seem to have found a very promising treatment.

Two years ago, a French teen with sickle cell disease underwent a gene therapy treatment intended to help his red blood cells from sickling. In a paper published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers revealed that today, half of his red blood cells have normal-shaped hemoglobin. He has not needed a blood transfusion, which many sickle cell patients receive to reduce complications from the disease, since three months after his treatment. He is also off all medicines.

To reiterate, the paper is a case study of just one patient. Bluebird Bio, the Massachusetts biotech company that sponsored the clinical trial, has treated at least six other trials underway in the US and France, but those results have not yet been fully reported. The gene therapy has not worked quite as well in some of those other patients; researchers say they are adjusting the therapy accordingly. It is also possible that the boy may eventually experience some blood flow blockages again in the future.

The results, though early, are encouraging. They represent the promise of new genetics technologies to address a disease that has long been neglected and tinged with racism. Sickle cell disease affects about 100,000 people in the US, most of whom are black. It is an inherited genetic disease caused by a mutation of a single letter in a persons genetic code.

This single-letter mutation makes it a promising candidate for cutting edge technologies, like the gene-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9, and other gene therapies. Recently, a rush of new research has sought to address it. Two other gene therapy studies for sickle cell are underway in the US one at UCLA and another at Cincinnati Childrens Hospital. Yet another is about to start in a collaboration between Harvard and Boston Childrens Hospital. Last fall, researchers all demonstrated the ability to correct the mutation in human cells using CRISPR, though that strategy will yet have to surpass significant scientific and political hurdles before reaching clinical trials.

In the new study, researchers took bone marrow stem cells from the boy and fed them corrected versions of a gene that codes for beta-globin, a protein that helps produce normal hemoglobin. The hope was that those altered stem cells would interfere with the boys faulty proteins and allow his red blood cells to function normally. They continued the transfusions until the transplanted cells began to produce normal-shaped hemoglobin. In the following months, the numbers of those cells continued to increase until in December 2016, they accounted for more than half the red blood cells in his body. In other words, so far so good.

Currently, the only long-term treatment for sickle cell disease is a bone marrow transplant, a high-risk, difficult procedure which many patients are not even eligible for. Pain and other side-effects are treated with blood transfusions for temporary relief. New technologies offer the hope of a solution that could provide long-term relief and allow patients to live some semblance of a normal life.

For decades, gene therapies have been touted as a cure for everything. But so far, successes have been infrequent, and often for very rare diseases. But early success in treating sickle cell disease means that soon, if were lucky, the benefits of this technology may reach hundreds of thousands of people.

[New England Journal of Medicine]

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Will Sickle Cell Be the Next Disease Genetic Engineering Cures? - Gizmodo

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News

by DAVID JENSEN posted 03.02.2017

The California stem cell agency this week approved nearly $33 million for clinical stage research projects testing treatments for type 1 diabetes, arthritis of the knee, ALS and an immunodeficiency affliction.

The awards were quickly approved with little discussion during a meeting at the Oakland headquarters of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine or CIRM, as the agency is formally known.

The goal of the research is to regenerate knee cartilage through the use of a mesenchymal progenitor cell treatment, according to the agencys application review summary

The award likely to have an impact on the most people if it is successful is a relatively small, $2.3 million award to the Cellular Biomedicine Group, a Chinese firm with operations in Cupertino, Calif. The stem cell agency by law only finances work in Clifornia. The research would also be supported by $572,993 in co-funding.

The project is aimed at treating osteoarthritis of the knee. More than 51 million people in the United States suffer from arthritis, which is particularly common in the knee.

The goal of the research is to regenerate knee cartilage through the use of a mesenchymal progenitor cell treatment, according to the agencys application review summary. The funding would go to manufacture the product and complete work to secure Food and Drug Administration approval for a phase one safety trial. A treatment for the public would likely be years in the future.

Here are the other winners today of California stem cell cash with links to the summaries of the reviews.

Caladrius Biosciences of New Jersey won $12.2 million for a clinical trial for young people ages 12-17 for newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes. The firm plans to use regulatory T cells from the patients themselves to treat the disease. Caladrius has a California location in Mountain View. (Caladrius press release can be found here.)

St. Judes Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., was awarded $11.9 million for a phase one/two trial to treat infants with X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency. The trial would aim at enrolling at least six patients suffering from the catastrophic affliction. The treatment would use the patients own bone marrow stem cells after the cells were specially handled. The agency said in a press release that St. Judes is working with UC San Francisco. (St. Judes press release can be found here.)

The awards were previously approved behind closed doors by the agencys out-of-state reviewers, who do not disclose publicly their economic or professional interests.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles was awarded $6.2 million for a phase 1/2A trial to test a treatment for ALS, which has no treatment or cure. The CIRM review summary said a huge unmet need existed. About 20,000 persons in the United States suffer from the affliction.

CIRMs press release did not identify the researchers involved in any of the awards.

The agency is on a push to support more clinical trials, which are the last and most expensive research prior to the possibility of winning federal approval for widespread use of a therapy.

Currently the agency is participating in 27 trials and is planning on adding 37 more in the next 40 months. The agency is expected to run out of funds for new awards in June 2020 and has no source of future financing.

The awards were previously approved behind closed doors by the agencys out-of-state reviewers, who do not disclose publicly their economic or professional interests. The agencys directors rarely overturn a positive decision by the reviewers.

All of the winners have links to two or more members of the 29-member CIRM governing board. Those members are not allowed to vote on applications where they have conflicts of interest.

About 90 percent of the funds awarded by the board since 2005 have gone to institutions that have ties to members of the board, past or present, according to calculations by the California Stem Cell Report. Eds Note: David Jensen is a retired newsman who has followed the affairs of the $3 billion California stem cell agency since 2005 via his blog, the California Stem Cell Report, where this story first appeared. He has published more than 4,000 items on California stem cell matters in the past 11 years.

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Stem cell: Knee arthritis in new $33 million research plan - Capitol Weekly

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By Andy Coghlan

Sarah Harrison and Gaelle Recher, Zernicka-Goetz Lab, University of Cambridge

Artificial mouse embryos grown from stem cells in a dish could help unlock secrets of early development and infertility that have until now evaded us.

Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz at the University of Cambridge and her team made the embryos using embryonic stem cells, the type of cells found in embryos that can mature into any type of tissue in the body.

The trick was to grow these alongside trophoblast stem cells, which normally produce the placenta. By growing these two types of cell separately and then combining them in a special gel matrix, the two mixed and started to develop together.

After around four-and-a-half days, the embryos resembled normal mouse embryos that were about to start differentiating into different body tissues and organs.

They are very similar to natural mouse embryos, says Zernicka-Goetz. We put the two types of stem cells together which has never been done before to allow them to speak to each other. We saw that the cells could self-organise themselves without our help.

This is the first time something resembling an embryo has been made from stem cells, without using an egg in some way. Techniques such as cloning, as done for Dolly the sheep and other animals, bypass the need for sperm, but still require an egg cell.

The artificial embryos are providing new insights into how embryos organise themselves and grow, says Zernicka-Goetz. The team engineered the artificial embryos so the cell types fluoresced in different colours, to reveal their movements and behaviour as the embryos go through crucial changes.

Mammal embryos were already known to start as a symmetrical ball, then elongate, form a central cavity and start developing a type of cell layer called mesoderm, which ultimately goes on to form bone and muscle.

We didnt know before how embryos form this cavity, but weve now found the mechanism for it and the sequential steps by which it forms, says Zernicka-Goetz. Its building up the foundations for the whole body plan.

The work is a great addition to the stem cell field and could be extended to human stem cell populations, says Leonard Zon at Boston Childrens Hospital, Massachusetts. Using the system, the factors that participate in embryo development could be better studied and this could help us understand early events of embryogenesis.

But Robin Lovell-Badge at the Francis Crick Institute in London says that the embryos lack two other types of cell layer required to develop the bodies organs: ectoderm, which forms skin and the central nervous system, and endoderm, which makes our internal organs.

Zernicka-Goetz hopes to see these types of cell layers develop in future experiments by adding stem cells that normally form the yolk sac, a third structure involved in embryonic development, to the mix.

If a similar feat can be achieved using human stem cells, this could tell us much about the earliest stages of our development. Current research is limited by the number of excess embryos that are donated from IVF procedures. But the new technique could produce a limitless supply, making it easier to conduct in-depth research. These artificial embryos may also be easier to tinker with, to see what effect different factors have in early embryogenesis.

Disrupting development in this way may provide new insights into the causes of abnormal embryo development and miscarriage. You would be able to understand the principles that govern each stage of development. These are not normally accessible, because they happen inside the mother, says Zernicka-Goetz.

But it is doubtful that this work could ever lead to fully grown babies in the lab. Lovell-Badge says the artificial embryos are unlikely to develop in vitro much further than shown in the study, as they would soon need the supply of nutrients and oxygen that a placenta normally channels from the mother.

Were not planning to make a mouse in the lab using stem cells, says Zernicka-Goetz. But she is hopeful that adding yolk sac stem cells will allow these artificial embryos to survive long enough to study the beginnings of organs like the heart.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aal1810

Read more: Its time to relax the rules on growing human embryos in the lab

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Artificial embryo grown in a dish from two types of stem cells - New Scientist

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event

Date: 14 June 2017 - 17 June 2017

Location: Boston Convention and Exhibition Center 415 Summer Street Boston 02210 United States

Website: ISSCR2017.org

Email: [emailprotected]

Telephone: +1 224-592-5700

The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) 2017 annual meeting will be held 14-17 June in Boston, Mass., U.S., at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. The meeting brings together 4000 stem cell researchers and clinicians from around the world to share the latest developments in stem cell research and regenerative medicine. In a series of lectures, workshops, poster presentations, and a dynamic exhibition floor, researchers focus on recent findings, technological advances, trends, and innovations that are realizing progress in using stem cells in the discovery and validation of novel treatments.

In 2017, the ISSCR is expanding its translational and clinical programming with two half-day, pre-meeting educational sessions geared toward bringing new therapies to the clinic. The Workshop on Clinical Translation (WCT) and the Clinical Advances in Stem Cell Research (CASC) programs are designed for scientists and physicians interested in learning more about the process of developing stem cell-based therapies and advances in stem cell applications in the clinic.

The Presidential Symposium recognizes a decade of progress in iPS cell research and application with a distinguished lineup of speakers including Shinya Yamanaka, discoverer of iPSCs. Additional plenary presentations include distinguished speakers from around the world focusing on organoids and organogenesis, the making of tissues and organs; stem cells and cancer; chromatin and RNA biology; stress, senescence and aging; tissue regeneration and homeostasis; and the frontiers of cell therapy.

Concurrent sessions feature new and innovative developments across the breadth of the field, and incorporate more than 100 abstract-selected speakers. Disease modelling, tissue engineering, stem cell niches, epigenetics, hematopoietic stem cells, and gene modification and gene editing are just a few of the 28 topic areas presented.

Other meeting offerings include career development sessions and networking opportunities. A full listing of the ISSCR 2017 meeting programming can be found at ISSCR2017.org.

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42.3461949 -71.04563680000001

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ISSCR 2017 - Drug Target Review - Drug Target Review

IPS Cell Therapy Comments Off on ISSCR 2017 – Drug Target Review – Drug Target Review | March 2nd, 2017

The mystery of what controls the range of developmental clocks in mammals -- from 22 months for an elephant to 12 days for an opossum -- may lie in the strict time-keeping of pluripotent stem cells for each unique species.

Developmental clocks are of high importance to regenerative medicine, since many cell types take long periods to grow to maturity, limiting their usefulness to human therapies. The regenerative biology team at the Morgridge Institute for Research, led by stem cell pioneer and University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor James Thomson, is studying whether stem cell differentiation rates can be accelerated in the lab and made available to patients faster.

In a study published in February online editions of the journal Developmental Biology, Morgridge scientists tested the stringency of the developmental clock in human stem cells during neural differentiation. First, they closely compared the differentiation rates of the cells growing in dishes compared to the known growth rates of human cells in utero. Second, they grew the human stem cells within a mouse host, surrounded by factors -- such as blood, growth hormones and signaling molecules -- endemic to a species that grows much more rapidly than humans.

In both cases -- lab dish and different species -- the cells did not waver from their innate timetable for development, without regard to environmental changes.

"What we found remarkable was this very intrinsic process within cells," says lead author Chris Barry, a Morgridge assistant scientist. "They have self-coding clocks that do not require outside stimulus from the mother or the uterus or even neighboring cells to know their pace of development."

While the study suggests that cellular timing is a stubborn process, the Thomson lab is exploring a variety of follow-up studies on potential factors that could help cells alter their pace, Barry says.

One aspect of the study that's immediately valuable across biology is the realization that how stem cells behave in the dish aligns almost precisely with what happens in nature.

"The promising thing is that we can take species of stem cells, put them in tissue culture, and more confidently believe that events we're seeing are probably happening in the wild as well," Barry says. "That is potentially great news for studying embryology in general, understanding what's going on in the womb, and disease modeling for when things can go wrong."

It also opens up potential avenues in embryology that would have been inconceivable otherwise -- for example, using stem cells to accurately study the embryology of whales and other species with much longer (or shorter) gestation rates than humans.

In order to accurately compare development timing across species with wildly different gestation rates -- nine months compared to three weeks -- the team used an algorithm called dynamic time warping, originally developed for speech pattern recognition. This algorithm will stretch or compress the time frame of one species to match up with similar gene expression patterns in the other. Using this process, they identified more than 3,000 genes that regulate more rapidly in mice and found none that regulate faster in human cells.

The impact of solving the cell timing puzzle could be enormous, Barry says. For example, cells of the central nervous system take months to develop to a functional state, far too long to make them therapeutically practical. If scientists can shorten that timing to weeks, cells could potentially be grown from individual patients that could counteract grave diseases such as Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease and spinal cord injuries.

"If it turns out these clocks are universal across different cell types," says Barry, "you are looking at broad-spectrum impact across the body."

A video highlighting Barry's work can be seen at https://vimeo.com/183526442.

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison. Original written by Brian Mattmiller. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Stem cells fiercely abide by innate developmental timing, study ... - Science Daily

Spinal Cord Stem Cells Comments Off on Stem cells fiercely abide by innate developmental timing, study … – Science Daily | March 1st, 2017

The mystery of what controls the range of developmental clocks in mammals -- from 22 months for an elephant to 12 days for a opossum -- may lie in the strict time-keeping of pluripotent stem cells for each unique species.

Developmental clocks are of high importance to regenerative medicine, since many cells types take long periods to grow to maturity, limiting their usefulness to human therapies. The regenerative biology team at the Morgridge Institute for Research, led by stem cell pioneer and UW-Madison professor James Thomson, is studying whether stem cell differentiation rates can be accelerated in the lab and made available to patients faster.

In a study published in February online editions of the journal Developmental Biology, Morgridge scientists tested the stringency of the developmental clock in human stem cells during neural differentiation. First, they closely compared the differentiation rates of the cells growing in dishes compared to the known growth rates of human cells in utero. Second, they grew the human stem cells within a mouse host, surrounded by factors -- such as blood, growth hormones and signaling molecules -- endemic to a species that grows much more rapidly than humans.

In both cases -- lab dish or different species -- the cells did not waver from their innate timetable for development, without regard to environmental changes.

"What we found remarkable was this very intrinsic process within cells," said lead author Chris Barry, a Morgridge assistant scientist. "They have self-coding clocks that do not require outside stimulus from the mother or the uterus or even neighboring cells to know their pace of development."

While the study suggests that cellular timing is a stubborn process, the Thomson lab is exploring a variety of follow-up studies on potential factors that could help cells alter their pace, Barry said.

One aspect of the study that's immediately valuable across biology is the realization that how stem cells behave in the dish aligns almost precisely with what happens in nature.

"The promising thing is that we can take species of stem cells, put them in tissue culture, and more confidently believe that events we're seeing are probably happening in the wild as well," Barry said. "That is potentially great news for studying embryology in general, understanding what's going on in the womb and disease modeling for when things can go wrong."

It also opens up potential avenues in embryology that would have been inconceivable otherwise -- for example, using stem cells to accurately study the embryology of whales and other species with much longer (or shorter) gestation rates than humans.

In order to accurately compare development timing across species with wildly different gestation rates -- nine months compared to three weeks -- the team used an algorithm called Dynamic Time Warping, originally developed for speech pattern recognition. This algorithm will stretch or compress the time frame of one species to match up with similar gene expression patterns in the other. Using this process, they identified more than 3,000 genes that regulate more rapidly in mice and found none that regulate faster in human cells.

The impact of solving the cell timing puzzle could be enormous, Barry said. For example, cells of the central nervous system take months to develop to a functional state, far too long to make them therapeutically practical. If scientists can shorten that timing to weeks, cells could potentially be grown from individual patients that could counteract grave diseases such as Parkinson's, Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer's, Huntington's disease and spinal cord injuries.

"If it turns out these clocks are universal across different cell types," said Barry, "you are looking at broad-spectrum impact across the body."

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Stem Cells Fiercely Abide by Innate Developmental Timing, Study Shows - Bioscience Technology

Spinal Cord Stem Cells Comments Off on Stem Cells Fiercely Abide by Innate Developmental Timing, Study Shows – Bioscience Technology | March 1st, 2017

SAN CARLOS, Calif., March 1, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --Natera (NTRA), a leader in genetic testing, today announced the upcoming launch of Evercord; a new offering being made commercially available in the second quarter of 2017 that enables expectant parents to collect, store and potentially retrieve their newborn's cord blood and tissue for therapeutic use in transplantation and regenerative medicine applications. Natera aspires to build a different type of national cord blood company, by combining best-in-class cord blood cryopreservation with the company's ability to provide timely information about genetic disease risk; potentially expanding families' stem cell treatment options in the future. Natera will offer Evercord through its leading direct sales channel in the United States.

The Market Potential of Cord Blood Stem Cells Newborn stem cells sourced from umbilical cord blood are known to contain hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) that can potentially differentiate and regenerate healthy blood and immune systems. Unfortunately, out of the roughly four million births each year in the United States, more than 95% of the cord blood from those births is currently discarded as waste;1 highlighting a significant opportunity both for families who could benefit from cord blood, and for Natera, as it enters the cord blood and tissue banking market. Published data also suggests that one in three people in the United States, or 128million people, could potentially benefit from regenerative medicine applications which, if proven effective, expands the possible therapeutic use of cord blood stem cells.2 More than 300 studies are currently underway, including clinical trials focused on current and new cord blood stem cell therapies in regenerative medicine.3 These trials hold promise for a growing list of conditions, including Alzheimers disease, cerebral palsy, diabetes (Type I/II), spinal cord injury, cartilage and bone repair, and heart defects. More than 30,000 cord blood stem cell treatments have been conducted worldwide and Natera's prenatal tests, including its carrier test, Horizon, currently screen for 35 of the nearly 80 diseases where cord blood stem cell treatment has been administered. Considering the research advances in stem cells and regenerative medicine, it is anticipated that number will, more than likely, continue to grow.

Introducing EvercordThe launch of Evercord is part of a partnership with Bloodworks Northwest, one of the oldest and most reputable public umbilical cord blood banks in the country. Evercord's service will offer expectant families the opportunity to bank their baby's umbilical cord blood and tissue for potential medical use by the child or related family member. Under the terms of the agreement between Natera and Bloodworks, Bloodworks will perform processing and testing services on cord blood samples submitted by Evercord customers and will cryo-preserve the banked cord blood and tissue at its Seattle, Washington-based best-in-class cord blood cryopreservation storage facility. The companies also plan to build a new facility in anticipation of future growth.

The relationship offers several other competitive advantages. Evercord leverages Bloodworks' 20 years of experience processing and banking cord blood; the lab has a strong track record of successfully releasing nearly 1,000 cord blood samples for transplant, more than other leading private cord blood banks.

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Once Evercord is commercially launched, it will expand Natera's existing portfolio of women's reproductive health products, further diversifying Natera's revenue base and adding a traditionally high yield business into its product mix. Evercord will also be well positioned to immediately take advantage of Natera's well-established commercial capabilities, including: patient and healthcare provider digital services through Natera's Patient Portal and Natera Connect, and a specialized salesforce that already calls on the nation's busiest obstetrics and gynecology offices and fertility centers.

"At Natera, we believe adding cord blood and tissue banking to our product offerings is a natural extension of our commitment to family health and beyond," said Matt Rabinowitz, CEO and founder of Natera. "Evercord builds on our excellence as a genetic testing company and our mission to transform the diagnosis and management of genetic diseases. Cord blood stem cells have demonstrated regenerative capabilities that medicine is just beginning to learn how to harness; offering a unique opportunity to potentially generate complete genetic information on a human being at the moment of birth. Many of the genetic diseases that cord blood treats today are also conditions that our tests screen for, which could enable us to offer a far more extensive service offering in the future than those offered by leading 'storage-only' cord blood banks today."

About Bloodworks Northwest's Public Cord Blood ProgramBloodworks Northwest partners with hospitals across the region to recover and store umbilical cord blood from new mothers -- an important source of stem cells for use in cancer treatment, metabolic or immune system disorders, and research. Bloodworks Northwest created the first and only public umbilical cord blood bank in the Northwest of the United States and has program partnerships with 15 hospitals across Washington, Oregon and Hawaii providing nearly 50 units per month to the national cord bloodregistry.

About NateraNatera is a genetic testing company that develops and commercializes non-invasive methods for analyzing DNA. The mission of the company is to transform the diagnosis and management of genetic disease. In pursuit of that mission, Natera operates a CAP-accredited laboratory certified under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) in San Carlos, CA, and it currently offers a host of proprietary genetic testing services primarily to OB/GYN physicians and fertility centers, as well as to genetic laboratories through its cloud-based Constellation software system.

Product offerings include the Spectrum pre-implantation genetic test for embryo selection during IVF; the Anora miscarriage test to understand the genetic causes of a pregnancy loss; the Horizon carrier test to detect inherited mutations; the Panorama non-invasive prenatal test (NIPT) to identify common chromosomal anomalies in a fetus as early as nine weeks of gestation; and Evercord, a cord blood and tissue banking service offered at birth to expectant parents.

Each test described has been developed and its performance characteristics determined by the CLIA-certified laboratory performing the test.

These tests have not been cleared or approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Although FDA does not currently clear or approve laboratory-developed tests in the U.S., certification of the laboratory is required under CLIA to ensure the quality and validity of the tests.

Natera is also applying its unique technologies to develop non-invasive screening and diagnostic tools for earlier detection and improved treatment of cancer. These tests have not been cleared or approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Forward-looking statementsThis release contains forward-looking statements. All statements other than statements of historical facts contained in this press release are forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements contained in this press release are based upon Natera's historical performance and its current plans, estimates, and expectations, and are not a representation that such plans, estimates, or expectations will be achieved. These forward-looking statements represent Natera's expectations as of the date of this press release.

Subsequent events may cause these expectations to change, and Natera disclaims any obligation to update the forward-looking statements for any reason after the date of this press release. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially, including with respect to our efforts to develop and commercialize new product offerings, our ability to successfully increase demand for and grow revenues for our product offerings, whether the results of clinical studies will support the use of our product offerings, whether cord blood or cord tissue will be found to be effective in treating additional conditions, our expectations of the reliability, accuracy and performance of our screening tests, or of the benefits of our screening tests and product offerings to patients, providers and payers.

Additional risks and uncertainties are discussed in greater detail in the sections entitled "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in Natera's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2016. Further information on potential risks that could affect actual results will be included in other filings Natera makes with the SEC from time to time. These documents are available for free on the company's website at http://www.natera.com under the Investor Relations section, and on the SEC's website at http://www.sec.gov.

Contacts:Natera, Inc. Mike Brophy, Chief Financial Officer, 650-249-9091 x1471 mbrophy@natera.com Laura Zobkiw, Corporate and Media Relations, 650-249-9091 x1649 Lzobkiw@natera.com

1https://parentsguidecordblood.org/en/cord-blood-infographic (February 2017). 2 Harris, D., & Rogers, I. (2007). Umbilical Cord Blood: A Unique Source of Pluripotent Stem Cells for Regenerative Medicine.Current Stem Cell Research & Therapy,2(4), 301-309. doi:10.2174/157488807782793790; http://www.mdpi.com/2227-9059/2/1/50/htm 3https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=Umbilical+AND+Stem+Cells (February 2017).

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/natera-inc-announces-launch-of-evercord-cord-blood-and-tissue-banking-service-300415652.html

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Natera, Inc. Announces Launch of Evercord Cord Blood and Tissue Banking Service - Yahoo Finance

Spinal Cord Stem Cells Comments Off on Natera, Inc. Announces Launch of Evercord Cord Blood and Tissue Banking Service – Yahoo Finance | March 1st, 2017

Adult stem cell function declines with age leading to the decline in fitness

The potential therapeutic use of stem cells is a very hot topic these days. Most of the attention has focused on embryonic stem cells and induced Pluripotent Stem cells (iPS cells), which can form every tissue type in the body to regenerate failing organs. The problem is that detailed knowledge is lacking for how to stimulate the embryonic stem cells to form differentiated tissues (e.g. cells that form the heart, pancreas, muscle, and brain). Moreover, because embryonic stem cells are unlimited in their ability to form any type of tissue, the risk of cancer looms large over the therapeutic use of embryonic stem cells. For example, both embryonic and IPS stem cells can form tumors called teratomas when injected into immune-compromised mice. Enter the bodys adult stem cells, which have not generally been associated with cancer and have been used safely as therapeutics in many countries. The problem with adult stem cells is that it is difficult to get enough of them to be effective for most indications or target the harvested adult stem cells to the proper tissue. Moreover, there are scores of different types of adult stem cells in the body, so picking the best type of adult stem cell for a particular therapeutic can be challenging. Thus, adult stem cell therapeutics with all its potential to regenerate damaged organs and tissues is still a work in progress.

But what about the many populations of endogenous adult stem cells that everyone has embedded in every organ system of the body? All the organs and differing tissues of the body appear to have adult stem cells available for regenerating cells in case of injury or disease. It was recently discovered that even brain neurons and heart muscle cells (previously thought to be non-dividing and irreplaceable in adults) have their own reservoirs of adult stem cells for regeneration. Unfortunately, as we age most adult stem cell populations either decline in number and/or lose the ability to differentiate into functional tissue-specific cells. For example, cardiac muscle stem cells exist but old folks have only one half the number of cardiac stem cells found in young people. Thus, adult stem cells become more and more dysfunction with age, which progressively increases organ and tissue dysfunction with age.

There are many examples revealing the role of adult stem cells in aging. First, the outer surface of your skin continuously sloughs off dead cells, so that adult stem cells must continuously replenish the dying skin cells to maintain the skin as an effective protective barrier to the outside world. With age, there are progressively fewer functional skin stem cells, so cell turnover in the skin slows, leading to thinner, dryer skin that loses its elasticity and youthful beauty. Second, hair also thins and goes grey, as functional follicle stem cell decline and the adult stem cells generating hair color also decline. Third, the differing adult stem cells that maintain the tissues composing skeletal muscle, pancreas, heart, bone, liver, kidney, and the immune system lose functional capacity, raising the potential for decline in tissue function or outright failure with age. As a final example, the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch slowly wane with age, as the declining stem cell populations responsible for maintaining these functions are unable to fully replenish the sensory neurons after injury and random cell death.

If your own adult stem cells are a key factor in aging and disease, then one novel way to slow aging and disease is to stimulate your own adult stem cells to maintain their proper numbers and functional capacity to differentiate into the various tissues as needed for repair and regeneration. This makes sense, because in most, if not all, organs of the body, old cells are continually being replaced by new cells coming from the adult stem cell populations. If stem cells are not producing enough new cells, then organs slowly decline in function as you age. Thus, stimulating your own stem cells can be a winning strategy to stave off many of the disorders associated with aging.

In practice, however, stimulating adult stem cell populations in the body is not a simple task. If the proliferation of adult stem cells is over stimulated, then one may get overgrowth of tissues or a potential tumor. Alternatively, one may stimulate the stem cells to proliferate in a balanced and regulated way, but the stem cells lose functionality and cannot differentiate into the desired specialized tissues to replace senescent cells. These twin problems promoting over stimulation or dysfunctional stem cells put real limits on any proposed therapeutic for stimulating stem cells. For example, most current treatments to stimulate immunity or stem cells (nave T cells) rely on complex carbohydrates from mushrooms or microorganisms to provide antigenic material that can stimulate immunity. This will activate the immune system stem cells to make more differentiated non-stem memory T cells directed against the antigenic material, but it does nothing to stimulate more immune stem cells (nave T cells). Indeed, chronic use of such stem cell enhancers may actually lead to stem cell depletion, as more adult stem cells are exhausted from the requirement to respond to the constant presence of the polysaccharide antigen. Indeed, one theory of how the HIV virus causes a defective immune system is that it exhausts the supply of nave T cells by the repeated attacks of the mutating HIV virus.

Stem Cell 100TM is a nutraceutical supplement that improves the function of your existing stem cells rather than over stimulate stem cells to differentiate or divide. By promoting the stability and vitality of adult stem cells they have the capacity to divide when the body signals a need for more stem cells and differentiated cells. When an organ or tissue is damaged, it will send out natural signals that new cells are needed to replace old or damaged cells. Stem Cell 100TM allows the adult stem cells to respond to the damage signal by provided new differentiated cells to replace the old damaged cells and also make more adult stem cells to keep up the stem cell population. Two other compounds in Stem Cell 100TM provide further natural support for stem cells.

(Note that not everyone will experience the same effects, as conditions vary among individuals. The general expectation is that for most health measurements that are in the Normal Range for your age, Stem Cell 100TM will promote readings that you had when some 20 years younger.)

The statements above have not been reviewed by the FDA. Stem Cell 100TM is not meant as a preventive or treatment for any disease.

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Stem Cells and Aging | Life Code

Cardiac Stem Cells Comments Off on Stem Cells and Aging | Life Code | March 1st, 2017

KARAIKAL: Recent advancements in stem cells research have given hope for successfully treating diabetic heart disease (DHD), renowned New Zealand-based researcher in cardiovascular diseases Dr Rajesh Katare said today.

DHD affected the muscular tissues of the heart leading to complications and it had been demonstrated that resident stem cells of myocardium can be stimulated to repair and replace e degenerated cardiac myocytes resulting in a novel therapeutic effect and ultimately cardiac regeneration, he said.

Katare, Director of Cardiovascular Research Division in the University of Otago, New Zealand, was delivering the keynote address at the continuing medical education programme on "Role of Micro-RNAs and stem cells in cardiac regeneration in diabetic heart disease" at the Karaikal campus of premier health institute JIPMER.

Presenting clinical evidences, Katare said stem cell therapy certainly presented a new hope for successfully treating DHD.

Jawaharlal Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education (JIPMER) Director Dr Subash Chandra Parija pointed out that it was the first such programme on the role of stem cells in cardiac regeneration in the whole of the country.

He said as diabetes was highly prevalent in the country, providing treatment for DHD had become a big challenge. Patients suffering from the condition have to undergo lifelong treatment and medications. "In this backdrop, advancements in stem cell therapy assume significance," he said.

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Stem cell therapy can help treat diabetic heart disease - The ... - Economic Times

Cardiac Stem Cells Comments Off on Stem cell therapy can help treat diabetic heart disease – The … – Economic Times | March 1st, 2017

Xconomy Texas

San Antonio StemBioSys, the life sciences company with a system for growing stem cells, has licensed an experimental technology from University of Texas Health San Antonio that may help identify healthy young adult stem cells among large pools of other cells.

Theres plenty of research examining how to possibly use adult stem cells as treatments for medical conditions, ranging from cardiac disease to metabolic disorders, but current uses are rather limited to therapies like bone-marrow transplants for blood disorders, especially in children. Treatments that use patients own stem cells may be safer than using stem cells from someone else because they might reduce the potential for an immune response, according to StemBioSys CEO Bob Hutchens. Thats still theoretical, he says.

Finding large quantities of usable adult stem cells is difficult, though. StemBioSys believes its new technology can potentially identify a few thousand high-quality, young stem cells from a sample of tens of thousands of cells taken from a patient, Hutchens sayspotentially being a key word.

The research is quite earlythe technology has only been studied in animal models and in vitro, and StemBioSys is in the process of applying for federal grants to take the research into animal trials. If StemBioSys new intellectual property can successfully isolate the stem cells, Hutchens says they could grow more of them with StemBioSys core product.

StemBioSys sells a so-called extracellular matrix product made of proteins that provide a hospitable environment for stem cells, helping them divide and produce more stem cells.

Whats intriguing to us is that its a really interesting application of our technology, Hutchens says. You take this combination of identifying this very small population of young healthy cells in elderly people, and use our technology to expand it.

If the company can indeed find the young stem cells of a single patient and replicate them, it would give researchers and physician an accessible pool of the cells that theyd want for potential stem cell transplants and other treatments, Hutchens says.

Terms of the deal werent disclosed. StemBioSys, which was founded based on other University of Texas System research, acquired a portfolio of issued and pending patents. Famed MIT researcher and Xconomist Robert Langer is on the companys board of directors.

Again, theres plenty to prove out with this early stage research, so it will take time before any potential commercialization comes to fruition. Travis Block, the researcher who helpeddevelopthe technology while earning his PhD. last year at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, will help shepherd the project along and other regenerative medicine work as StemBioSyss senior scientist.

David Holley is Xconomy's national correspondent based in Austin, TX. You can reach him at dholley@xconomy.com

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StemBioSys Lands Experimental UT Tech That Finds Young Stem Cells - Xconomy

Cardiac Stem Cells Comments Off on StemBioSys Lands Experimental UT Tech That Finds Young Stem Cells – Xconomy | March 1st, 2017

SAN CARLOS, Calif. & BALTIMORE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Johns Hopkins Medicine, the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund (MSCRF) and BioCardia, Inc. (OTC:BCDA) today announced that the first patient has been treated in the pivotal Phase III CardiAMP clinical trial of a cell-based therapy for the treatment of ischemic heart failure that develops after a heart attack. The first patient was treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital by a team led by Peter Johnston, MD, a faculty member in the Department of Medicine and Division of Cardiology, and principal investigator of the trial at Johns Hopkins.

The investigational CardiAMP therapy is designed to deliver a high dose of a patients own bone marrow cells directly to the point of cardiac dysfunction, potentially stimulating the bodys natural healing mechanism after a heart attack.

The patient experience with CardiAMP therapy begins with a pre-procedural cell potency screening test. If a patient qualifies for therapy, they are scheduled for a bone marrow aspiration. A point of care cell processing platform is then utilized to concentrate the autologous bone marrow cells, which are subsequently delivered in a minimally-invasive procedure directly to the damaged regions in a patients heart.

This cell-based therapy offers great potential for heart failure patients, said Carl Pepine, MD, professor and former chief of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Florida, Gainesville and national co-principal investigator of the CardiAMP trial. We look forward to validating the impact of the therapy on patients quality of life and functional capacity in this important study.

In addition to Dr. Johnston, the CardiAMP research team at Johns Hopkins includes Gary Gerstenblith, MD, Jeffrey Brinker, MD, Ivan Borrello, MD, Judi Willhide, Katherine Laws, Audrey Dudek, Michele Fisher and John Texter, as well as the nurses and technicians of the Johns Hopkins Cardiovascular Interventional Laboratory.

Funding the clinical trial of this cell therapy, which could be the first cardiac cell therapy approved in the United States, is an important step towards treatments, said Dan Gincel, PhD., executive director of the MSCRF at TEDCO. Through our clinical program, we are advancing cures and improving healthcare in the State of Maryland.

The CardiAMP Heart Failure Trial is a phase III, multi-center, randomized, double-blinded, sham-controlled study of up to 260 patients at up to 40 centers nationwide, which includes an optional 10-patient roll-in cohort. The primary endpoint for the trial is a significant improvement in Six Minute Walk distance at 12 months post-treatment. Study subjects must be diagnosed with New York Heart Association (NYHA) Class II or III heart failure as a result of a previous heart attack. The national co-principal investigators are Dr. Pepine and Amish Raval, MD, of the University of Wisconsin.

For information about eligibility or enrollment in the trial, please visit http://www.clinicaltrials.gov or ask your cardiologist.

About BioCardia BioCardia, Inc., headquartered in San Carlos, CA, is developing regenerative biologic therapies to treat cardiovascular disease. CardiAMP and CardiALLO cell therapies are the companys biotherapeutic product candidates in clinical development. For more information, visit http://www.BioCardia.com.

About Johns Hopkins Medicine Johns Hopkins Medicine (JHM), headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, is one of the leading health care systems in the United States. Johns Hopkins Medicine unites physicians and scientists of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine with the organizations, health professionals and facilities of The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System. For more information, visit http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org.

About Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund The Maryland Stem Cell Research Act of 2006was established by the Governor and the Maryland General Assembly during the 2006 legislative session and created the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund. This fund is continued through an appropriation in the Governor's annual budget. The purpose of the Fund is to promote state-funded stem cell research and cures through grants and loans to public and private entities in the State. For more information, visit http://www.MSCRF.org.

Forward Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements as that term is defined under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements include, among other things, references to the enrollment of our Phase 3 trial, commercialization and efficacy of our products and therapies, the product development timelines of our competitors. Actual results could differ from those projected in any forward-looking statements due to numerous factors. Such factors include, among others, the inherent uncertainties associated with developing new products or technologies, unexpected expenditures, the ability to raise the additional funding needed to continue to pursue BioCardias business and product development plans, competition in the industry in which BioCardia operates and overall market conditions, and whether the combined funds will support BioCardias operations and enable BioCardia to advance its pivotal Phase 3 CardiAMP cell therapy program. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this press release, and BioCardia assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements.

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Johns Hopkins Medicine, Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund and ... - Business Wire (press release)

Cardiac Stem Cells Comments Off on Johns Hopkins Medicine, Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund and … – Business Wire (press release) | March 1st, 2017

Wednesday, March 1, 2017 6:01 AM UTC

PRESS RELEASE

TiGenix to present at Cowen's 37thAnnual Health Care Conference in Boston

Leuven (BELGIUM) - 1st March, 2017, 07:00h CET - TiGenix NV (Euronext Brussels and Nasdaq: TIG), an advanced biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing novel therapeutics from its proprietary platforms of allogeneic expanded stem cells, today announced that Eduardo Bravo, CEO of TiGenix, will be presenting at the 37th Annual Cowen and Company's Health Care Conference in Boston (USA) at The Boston Marriott Copley Place on Monday, March 6 at 3:20-3:50PM (EST) in Regis, 3rd Floor (breakout at 4:00 PM-04:30PM (EST) at Boston University, 3rd Floor).

The presentation will be webcast live and can be accessed on the day of the event at this link. A replay of the webcast will be available on the Company's website for 30 days following the presentation. To ensure timely connection, it is recommended that users register at least 10 minutes prior to the scheduled webcast.

The TiGenix management team will be available for one-to-one meetings from Monday, March 6th to Wednesday, March 8th. Please contact Investor Relations at Investor@tigenix.com for a meeting request.

For more information:

Claudia D'Augusta Chief Financial Officer T: +34 91 804 92 64 claudia.daugusta@tigenix.com

About TiGenix

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

About Cx601

Cx601 is a suspension of allogeneic expanded adipose-derived stem cells (eASC) locally injected. Cx601 is an investigational agent being developed for the treatment of complex perianal fistulas in Crohn's disease patients with inadequate response to at least one conventional or biologic therapy including antibiotics, immunosuppressants, or anti-TNF agents. Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammatory disease of the intestine and patients can suffer from complex perianal fistulas for which there is currently no effective treatment. In 2009, the European Commission granted Cx601 orphan designation for the treatment of anal fistulas, recognizing the debilitating nature of the disease and the lack of treatment options. Cx601 has met the primary end-point in the Phase III ADMIRE-CD study in Crohn's disease patients with complex perianal fistula, a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial run in Europe and Israel and designed to comply with the requirements laid down by the EMA. 'Madrid Network' issued a soft loan to help finance this Phase III study, which was funded by the Secretary of State for Research, Development and Innovation (Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness) within the framework of the INNTEGRA plan. The study's primary endpoint was combined remission, defined as clinical assessment at week 24 of closure of all treated external openings draining at baseline despite gentle finger compression, and absence of collections >2cm confirmed by MRI. In the ITT population (n=212), Cx601 achieved statistically significant superiority (p=0.024) on the primary endpoint with 50% combined remission at week 24 compared to 34% in the placebo arm. Efficacy results were robust and consistent across all statistical populations. Treatment emergent adverse events (non-serious and serious) and discontinuations due to adverse events were comparable between Cx601 and placebo arms. The 24-weeks results have been published by The Lancet, one of the most highly regarded and well known medical journals in the world. The Phase III study has completed a follow-up analysis at 52 weeks confirming its sustained efficacy and safety profile. Top line follow-up data showed that in the ITT population Cx601 achieved statistical superiority (p=0.012) with 54% combined remission at week 52 compared to 37% in the placebo arm. The 52-week data also showed a higher rate of sustained closure in those patients treated with Cx601 and in combined remission at week 24 (75.0%) compared to patients in the placebo group (55.9%). Based on the positive 24-weeks Phase III study results, TiGenix has submitted a Marketing Authorization Application to the EMA in early 2016. TiGenix is preparing to develop Cx601 in the U.S. after having reached an agreement with the FDA through a special protocol assessment procedure (SPA) in 2015. On July 4, 2016 TiGenix entered into a licensing agreement with Takeda, a pharmaceutical company leader in gastroenterology, whereby Takeda acquired an exclusive right to commercialize Cx601 for complex perianal fistulas in Crohn's patients outside of the U.S.

Forward-looking information

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

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TiGenix to present at Cowen's 37th Annual Health Care Conference in Boston - EconoTimes

Cardiac Stem Cells Comments Off on TiGenix to present at Cowen’s 37th Annual Health Care Conference in Boston – EconoTimes | March 1st, 2017

Abby West first decided to become a bone-marrow donor when she was a young journalist covering a bone-marrow drive. Little did she know that nearly two decades later, shed be called upon to try to help save someones life.

The newspaper I had joined had a reporter who had passed away of sickle cell anemia, and I had become aware of the need for African-Americans to join the registry, West, a senior editor at Yahoo Celebrity, tells Yahoo Beauty about her decision to sign up with Be The Match. I was covering a bone-marrow drive for African-Americans, and it seemed like the right thing to do. West says she simply got her cheek swabbed which yields a sample of cells that doctors use to compare specific protein markers with those of patients who need a bone-marrow transplants and then went about her life.

But in June 2014 17 years later she received an email from Be the Match, a registry of the National Marrow Donation Program, saying that her bone marrow was a potential match for someone in need. She called the organization to learn more. You get a sense of urgency, need, and what is expected of you, she says. To make sure she was a healthy donor, West needed to fill out forms, and once it was determined she met all of the donor criteria, she moved on to a physical examination.

(Photo courtesy Abby West)

West says she underwent seven weeks of blood testing and prep work before she donated bone marrow. Part of the process was making a decision about whether she would do a surgical bone-marrow donation, in which a person is put under general or local anesthesia and liquid marrow is taken from the back of the pelvic bone, or a nonsurgical peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) harvest, in which blood is drawn from one arm into a machine, where it is spun and the stem cells are extracted. The remaining blood is then returned to the persons body via the other arm. West chose the latter option, and started receiving Neupogen shots, which increased her bodys production of stem cells. It puts your stem cells on overdrive, she explains.

West says the message from Be the Match was always clear: It was her body and she could change her mind at any point. However, she says, they request that if youre going to change your mind, you do so before you begin the shots. Heres why: At this point, the patient she would be donating to was starting chemotherapy in anticipation of receiving her stem cells. You get the sense that someones life is in the balance and theres no turning back only moving forward, she says. You need to understand the commitment to potentially saving someones life.

West says the shots werent painful, but she did experience some flu-like symptoms. You feel a little achy, she says. Your body is becoming laden with stem cells. Its uncomfortable, but not painful. A nurse came to Wests office to give her the shots, but donors can also go to clinics to get them, or do them on their own. They try to make it as seamless and painless as possible, she says, noting that the shots made her feel moretired than usual. I wasnt on my gym grind that week, she says.

The day of the donation, West reported to a blood donation center at 7 a.m., along with a friend to keep her company, and sat in a chair for about eight hours while her blood was drawn, spun, and returned to her body. When you have to go to the bathroom, you just stop, unhook, go the bathroom, and hook back up again, she says. It wasnt a hardship I cant complain about it. It was eight hours of sitting and talking. West says the process was mildly uncomfortable, but she knew that in about 48 hours, someone was going to have a life-saving operation. Afterwards, she felt tired and went to sleep for a little while. I did it on Friday and was back at work on Monday, but I would have been fine to go to work the next day, she says.

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Stem cells are regenerative, and there is no long-term harm to the donor, Muzzafar Qazilbash, MD professor of stem cell transplantation at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center explains to Yahoo Beauty.

Photo: Courtesy of Abby West

While there is a need for people of all races and ethnicities to donate bone marrow, there a special need for African-Americans to do so, Qazilbash says. African-Americans make up about 10 percent of the U.S. population, and only about 25 percent to 30 percent of people who could potentially benefit from a bone-marrow transplant have a perfectly matched sibling donor available, he says. The rest of the patients have to find matched, unrelated donors from the National Marrow Donor Program. However, the overwhelming majority of approximately 25 million volunteer donors registered with NMDP are people of Western and Northern European origins, and as a result it is very hard to find matching, unrelated matchingdonors for African-American patients, he says. Encouraging more people of African ancestry will increase the possibility of finding unrelated donors for African-American patients, which can be life saving.

Jack Jacoub, MD, medical oncologist and director of thoracic oncology at MemorialCare Cancer Institute at Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center in Fountain Valley, Calif., tells Yahoo Beauty while some ethnicities have very little genetic variability, there is a lot of genetic variability in the African-American population making the probability of having two genetically similar people less likely. Then you bring up the issue of how few African-American donors there are, and there is difficulty finding an adequate donor, he says.

Donor stem cellscan be used to treat life-threatening conditions such as leukemia and lymphoma, as well as sickle-cell anemia, Jacoub says. They can also help people with bone-marrow failure syndromes such as aplastic anemia a condition in which a persons body stops producing blood cells as well as help treat children born with severe immune system deficiencies, Qazilbash says.

West never received information about the person she donated bone marrow to, other than the fact that the patient was a man. She doesnt know how he fared after the donation, but learned that he struggled with graft-versus-host disease, a complication that can occur after a stem-cell or bone-marrow transplant. Its fairly common for people to have it and move forward, but Ive never found out how he ultimately ended up, she says.

West was so moved by her experience that she eventually joined the board of Be the Match, and now urges others tobecome bone-marrow donors. You always think about what you would want someone to do for you or your family member, she says, noting that shes still on the registry and would donate again if there was a need.

Of course, blood and needles are involved, which can scare some people off, but West says its worth it in the end. In order to do something heroic, you have to overcome some discomfort and some trepidations, she said.

To find out more about becoming a bone-marrow donor, please visit BeTheMatch.org.

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Exactly What It's Like to Donate Bone Marrow and Why More African-American Donors Are Needed, Stat - Yahoo Health

Bone Marrow Stem Cells Comments Off on Exactly What It’s Like to Donate Bone Marrow and Why More African-American Donors Are Needed, Stat – Yahoo Health | March 1st, 2017

Johns Hopkins Medicine doctors have treated the first person in a key phase of a clinical trial where a high dose of the patient's own bone marrow cells was used to treat heart failure after a heart attack.

The dose was directed precisely at the point of dysfunction in the heart in the hope that it will stimulate the body's natural healing process.

The Hopkins patient was the first to receive what is called the CardiAMP therapy as part of the third phase of a trial taking place at 40 medical centers across the country. Once phase three trials show a treatment works well, doctors can apply for approval with the Food and Drug Administration.

BioCardia, Inc., headquartered in San Carlos, CA., developed the therapy and The Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund provided research money. The fund was created by the Maryland General Assembly in 2006 to promote state-funded stem cell research and cures through grants and loans to public and private entities.

"Funding the clinical trial of this cell therapy, which could be the first cardiac cell therapy approved in the United States, is an important step towards treatments," Dan Gincel, executive director of the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund, said in a statement. "Through our clinical program, we are advancing cures and improving health care in the State of Maryland."

Heart disease is the number one killer in the United States. About 610,000 people die from heart disease every year and it accounts for one in every four deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The first patient was treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital by a team led by Peter Johnston, faculty member in the Department of Medicine and Division of Cardiology, and principal investigator of the trial at Johns Hopkins.

amcdaniels@baltsun.com

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Patient's own bone marrow used to treat heart failure - Baltimore Sun (blog)

Bone Marrow Stem Cells Comments Off on Patient’s own bone marrow used to treat heart failure – Baltimore Sun (blog) | March 1st, 2017

Researchers at the Universit libre de Bruxelles, ULB define for the first time the changes in the stem cell dynamics that contribute to wound healing.

One of the key questions in biology is to identify how tissues are repaired after trauma and understand how stem cells migrate, proliferate, and differentiate to repair tissue damage.

In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers lead by Pr. Cdric Blanpain, MD/PhD, WELBIO investigator, and Professor at the Universit libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, defined the cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate wound healing in the skin.

The skin is the first barrier protecting the animals against the external environment. When the skin barrier is disrupted, a cascade of cellular and molecular events is activated to repair the damage and restore skin integrity. Defects in these events can lead to improper repair causing acute and chronic wound disorders. In the skin, distinct stem cells populations contribute to wound healing. However, it remains unclear how these different stem cells populations balance proliferation, differentiation and migration during the healing process.

In this new study published in Nature Communications, Mariaceleste Aragona, Sophie Dekoninck and colleagues define the clonal dynamics and the molecular mechanisms that lead to tissue repair in the skin epidermis. They used state of the art genetic mouse models to study different stem cells populations. Specifically, they use a technique called lineage tracing to mark stem cells and follow the fate of their progeny over time. Interestingly, they found that stem cells coming from different epidermal compartments present very similar response during wound repair, despite the fact that they are recruited from different regions of the epidermis. It was particularly exciting to observe that the repair of the skin epidermis involves the activation of very different stem cells that react the same way to the emergency situation of the wound and have the power to completely restore the damaged tissue, comments Mariaceleste Aragona, the first author of the study. The authors defined the gene signature of the different regions surrounding the wound to uncover the gene expression signature of the cells that actively divide and those that migrate to repair the wound. The molecular characterization of the migrating leading edge suggests that these cells are protecting the stem cells from the infection and mechanical stress allowing a harmonious healing process, comments Sophie Dekoninck, the co-first author of the study.

Altogether, this study provides important insights into the changes in the mechanisms that lead to tissue repair, and demonstrates that the capacity of the stem cells to regenerate a tissue does not depend on their cellular origin but rather on their proliferation capacity.

This new study uncovers for the first time the dynamic of stem cells during wound healing and identifies new molecular players associated with skin regeneration. The deregulation of several of these genes in patients with chronic ulcers, suggest that defects in the formation and/or function of these two different structures may induce defect of wound-healing leading to chronic ulcer formation. Further functional studies will be needed to define the role of these genes and to identify new therapeutic targets to treat chronic wound disorders that cost each year billions of dollars, explains Cdric Blanpain, the senior and corresponding author of this new study.

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Materials provided by Libre de Bruxelles, Universit. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Wound healing: The stem cell dynamic - Science Daily

Skin Stem Cells Comments Off on Wound healing: The stem cell dynamic – Science Daily | March 1st, 2017

The skin cells of four adults with schizophrenia provide an unprecedented window into how the disease began before they were born.

Scientists call the findings the first proof of concept for the hypothesis that a common genomic pathway lies at the root of schizophreniaand say the work is a step toward the design of treatments that could be administered to pregnant mothers at high risk for bearing a child with schizophrenia, potentially preventing the disease before it begins.

We show for the first time that there is, indeed, a common, dysregulated gene pathway at work here.

In the last 10 years, genetic investigations into schizophrenia have been plagued by an ever-increasing number of mutations found in patients with the disease, says Michal K. Stachowiak, professor of pathology and anatomical sciences at the University at Buffalo. We show for the first time that there is, indeed, a common, dysregulated gene pathway at work here.

The authors gained insight into the early brain pathology of schizophrenia by using skin cells from four adults with schizophrenia and four adults without the disease. The cells were reprogrammed back into induced pluripotent stem cells and then into neuronal progenitor cells.

By studying induced pluripotent stem cells developed from different patients, we recreated the process that takes place during early brain development in utero, thus obtaining an unprecedented view of how this disease develops, said Stachowiak. This work gives us an unprecedented insight into those processes.

Stachowiak says the research, published in Schizophrenia Research, is a proof of concept for a hypothesis he and colleagues published in 2013 that proposed that a single genomic pathway, called the Integrative Nuclear FGFR 1 Signaling (INFS), is a central intersection point for multiple pathways involving more than 100 genes believed to be involved in schizophrenia.

This research shows that there is a common dysregulated gene program that may be impacting more than 1,000 genes and that the great majority of those genes are targeted by the dysregulated nuclear FGFR1, Stachowiak says.

When even one of the many schizophrenia-linked genes undergoes mutation, by affecting the INFS it throws off the development of the brain as a whole, similar to the way that an entire orchestra can be affected by a musician playing just one wrong note, he says.

The next step in the research is to use these induced pluripotent stem cells to further study how the genome becomes dysregulated, allowing the disease to develop.

We will utilize this strategy to grow cerebral organoidsmini-brains in a senseto determine how this genomic dysregulation affects early brain development and to test potential preventive or corrective treatments.

Other researchers from University at Buffalo and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai are coauthors of the work, which was funded by NYSTEM, the Patrick P. Lee Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.

Source: University at Buffalo

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Skin cells suggest schizophrenia may start in the womb - Futurity - Futurity: Research News

Skin Stem Cells Comments Off on Skin cells suggest schizophrenia may start in the womb – Futurity – Futurity: Research News | March 1st, 2017

The skin cells of four adults with schizophrenia provide a unique insight into how the disease began before they were born.

Scientists call the findings the first proof of concept for the hypothesis that a common genomic pathway lies at the root of schizophrenia. They add the work is a step toward the design of treatments that could be administered to pregnant mothers at high risk for bearing a child with schizophrenia, potentially preventing the disease before it begins.

Michal K. Stachowiak, professor of pathology and anatomical sciences at the University at Buffalo, says:

In the last 10 years, genetic investigations into schizophrenia have been plagued by an ever-increasing number of mutations found in patients with the disease. We show for the first time that there is, indeed, a common, dysregulated gene pathway at work here.

The authors used skin cells from four adults with schizophrenia and four adults without the disease. The cells were reprogrammed back into induced pluripotent stem cells and then into neuronal progenitor cells.

By studying induced pluripotent stem cells developed from different patients, we recreated the process that takes place during early brain development in utero, thus obtaining an unprecedented view of how this disease develops, said Stachowiak. This work gives us an unprecedented insight into those processes.

Stachowiak says the research is a proof of concept for a hypothesis he and colleagues published in 2013 that proposed that a single genomic pathway, called the Integrative Nuclear FGFR 1 Signaling (INFS), is a central intersection point for multiple pathways involving more than 100 genes believed to be involved in schizophrenia.

This research shows that there is a common dysregulated gene program that may be impacting more than 1,000 genes and that the great majority of those genes are targeted by the dysregulated nuclear FGFR1, Stachowiak says.

When even one of the many schizophrenia-linked genes undergoes mutation, by affecting the INFS it throws off the development of the brain as a whole, similar to the way that an entire orchestra can be affected by a musician playing just one wrong note, he says.

The next step in the research is to use these induced pluripotent stem cells to further study how the genome becomes dysregulated, allowing the disease to develop.

We will utilize this strategy to grow cerebral organoidsmini-brains in a senseto determine how this genomic dysregulation affects early brain development and to test potential preventive or corrective treatments.

The work was funded by NYSTEM, the Patrick P. Lee Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.

Image: Views of a Foetus in the Womb (c. 1510 1512) by Leonardo da Vinci

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Schizophrenia May Begin In The Womb, Skin Cells Suggest - ReliaWire

Skin Stem Cells Comments Off on Schizophrenia May Begin In The Womb, Skin Cells Suggest – ReliaWire | March 1st, 2017

Karaikal, Feb 28 (PTI) Recent advancements in stem cells research have given hope for successfully treating diabetic heart disease (DHD), renowned New Zealand-based researcher in cardiovascular diseases Dr Rajesh Katare said today.

DHD affected the muscular tissues of the heart leading to complications and it had been demonstrated that resident stem cells of myocardium can be stimulated to repair and replace e degenerated cardiac myocytes resulting in a novel therapeutic effect and ultimately cardiac regeneration, he said.

Katare, Director of Cardiovascular Research Division in the University of Otago, New Zealand, was delivering the keynote address at the continuing medical education programme on Role of Micro-RNAs and stem cells in cardiac regeneration in diabetic heart disease at the Karaikal campus of premier health institute JIPMER.

Presenting clinical evidences, Katare said stem cell therapy certainly presented a new hope for successfully treating DHD.

Jawaharlal Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education (JIPMER) Director Dr Subash Chandra Parija pointed out that it was the first such programme on the role of stem cells in cardiac regeneration in the whole of the country.

He said as diabetes was highly prevalent in the country, providing treatment for DHD had become a big challenge.

Patients suffering from the condition have to undergo lifelong treatment and medications. In this backdrop, advancements in stem cell therapy assume significance, he said.

This is published unedited from the PTI feed.

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Stem cell therapy can help in treating diabetic heart disease - India.com

Cardiac Stem Cells Comments Off on Stem cell therapy can help in treating diabetic heart disease – India.com | February 28th, 2017

With MLB spring training underway, there's plenty to talk about. USA TODAY Sports

Garrett Richards is aiming to pitch through a ligament tear via stem cell therapy and other recovery methods.(Photo: Rick Scuteri, USA TODAY Sports)

TEMPE, Ariz. Garrett Richards first thought when he found out about his torn elbow ligament last May was to schedule Tommy John surgery as soon as possible.

It made sense, considering the ligament-replacement procedure has become the standard fix for such injuries. Plus, the Los Angeles Angels ace was familiar with the operating room, having undergone surgery for a ruptured patellar tendon he sustained on Aug. 20, 2014, toward the end of a breakout season.

Richards knew how to handle the seemingly interminable months of rehab, and he wanted to get the clock started on his return.

But a conversation with Angels head physical therapist Bernard Li convinced Richards to consider other alternatives, and in mid-May he tried a relatively novel treatment in which stem cells taken from bone marrow in his pelvis were injected into the damaged area.

Richards did not pitch again the rest of the year except for a stint in the instructional league, but he has been back on the mound throwing bullpen sessions since the first day of the Angels camp and reported no problems.

This weekend, Richards anticipates pitching in a game for the first time since May 1, when his aching elbow forced him from a start after just four innings.

Its nice to know Ill be able to start the season this year and kind of pick up where I left off, Richards said.

A couple of lockers away, fellow starter Andrew Heaney had a different tale to tell.

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The promising left-hander also went down with a torn ulnar collateral ligament early in the season, after making only one start. Their ailments were the two biggest blows to an Angels rotation that was decimated by injuries, dooming the club to a 74-88 record and a fourth-place finish in the AL West.

Heaney also tried stem cell therapy, two weeks before Richards, both under the supervision of team doctor Steve Yoon. Heaneys ligament didnt heal, though, and after experiencing discomfort throwing following his rehab, he had Tommy John surgery July 1. He has been ruled out for the 2017 season.

They tell you its 50-50. It either works or it doesnt, Heaney said of the stem cell procedure. Obviously, me and Garrett are pretty much the proof of that rule.

Even with less-favorable odds than reconstructive surgery, which has an 80% success rate for returning to action and 67% for pitching 10 games or more, stem cell therapy is gaining acceptance as an option for pitchers with partial UCL tears. The recovery time is shorter 3-5 months instead of 12-18 and the treatment less invasive.

There are limitations. Biological approaches based on stem cells or platelet-rich plasma (PRP) wont repair a complete tear of the ligament. The location of the injury and its extent factor into the chances of success. And players whose ligament doesnt recover, then have to undergo surgery, extend their window of time for returning to action.

Even then, the idea of healing without going under the knife is becoming increasingly appealing. New York Yankees ace Masahiro Tanaka treated the small tear in his elbow ligament with PRP and rehabilitation in 2014, sitting out 10 weeks but coming back to pitch in late September.

Hes 26-11 with a 3.26 ERA over the last two seasons, raising the profile of PRP a procedure in which the players own blood is used to promote healing of the injury as a non-surgical alternative.

Now Richards looms as the test case for stem cell treatment to fix partial UCL tears, which make up about 60-70% of these injuries. If the hard-throwing right-hander can return to his old form he was a Cy Young Award candidate before his knee injury in August 2014 other pitchers in his situation are bound to at least consider the route he took.

I hope this opens another path for guys, Richards said. Obviously, if you can prevent being cut on and having surgery, thats the No. 1 priority. I hope guys dont just jump right into Tommy John, that they at least explore this option.

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Ageless veteran Bartolo Colon was the first pitcher widely known to have undergone stem cell therapy as he sought to recover from elbow and shoulder ailments in 2010. At the time, the ethics of the procedure were questioned, especially because the doctor who performed it, South Florida-based Joseph Purita, acknowledged using human growth hormone in previous treatments, though not in Colons.

Since then, the use of stem cells has become more mainstream. They are the focus of Yoons practice.

As more and more people start to use it, youre getting a better sense for what it can and cant do, Yoon said. Baseball definitely has opened up to it quite a bit, and as we see some of the successes like with Garrett, were getting a better understanding that theres a lot of potential here with these types of treatment.

Yoon calls stem cell therapy a super PRP because it combines the curative properties of that treatment with more healing agents, and said it can be used on tendon tears, muscle tears and strains and even to address degenerative joint disease.

However, much remains unknown about the benefits of stem cells. Lyle Cain, an orthopedist who has performed both Tommy John surgeries and stem cell treatments at the Andrews Sports Medicine & Orthopaedic Center in Birmingham, Ala., said most of the research has been anecdotal, not scientific.

We still dont have a good understanding even four or five years into it exactly what the stem cells do, what their method is, Cain said. The theory is theres probably a chemical reaction where it releases chemicals in the cell that help the healing process. The stem cells arent necessarily put in there with the thought theyre going to become ligament, but theres probably a cellular chemical mechanism that helps the healing response.

And as Heaney discovered, theyre not always effective. His tear was located farther down the arm, which reduced his chances of success with stem cell therapy. Richards was a better candidate because his injury, though deemed high grade, was located within the ligament, like a slit on a rubber band.

But because Heaney was looking at likely missing most or all of 2017 even if he had surgery right away, he decided to try stem cells. The timing of the injury plays a major role in whether pitchers contemplate alternatives to surgery, with the more conservative approach often recommended if it happens early in the season.

Heaney said he doesnt regret taking that route, and would have been upset if he had undergone the ligament-replacement operation right away, only to find out he could have returned to action quicker through another means.

Im glad it worked for him, he said of Richards. It would have been really awful if it hadnt worked for either of us. Then wed both look like idiots.

Their peers are paying attention. In a major league pitching community where about a quarter of its members have undergone Tommy John surgery, interest in the effectiveness of alternative cures is high.

The Los Angeles Dodgers Brandon McCarthy was not a candidate because his ligament tore clear off the bone, but said he had heard positive reports about stem cell treatment, not so much about PRP.

The Pittsburgh Pirates Daniel Hudson, a veteran of two Tommy Johns, is encouraged as well.

Its supposed to help repair the tissue. Before, ligaments just wont repair themselves, Hudson said. It might keep a lot of guys from going under the knife.

Thats Cains hope. He regularly treats UCL tears on high school, college and minor-league players with stem cells or PRP, but realizes theres heightened pressure on major leaguers to return to the field.

If more of them can do it without visiting an operating room, it would represent a major advancement for both the players and the industry.

I think overall the biologic treatment of these injuries will certainly progress and it will be somewhat the wave of the future, Cain said. There will be certain ligaments that are damaged enough that we dont have an answer; they have to reconstruct. But I think overall, if you look 15 years down the road, I suspect well be doing a lot more non-surgical treatment than surgical treatment.

Contributing: Gabe Lacques in Bradenton, Fla.

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All eyes on Garrett Richards, in hopes stem cells stave off Tommy John surgery - USA TODAY

Bone Marrow Stem Cells Comments Off on All eyes on Garrett Richards, in hopes stem cells stave off Tommy John surgery – USA TODAY | February 28th, 2017