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Showing posts from September, 2017

Potential of stem cell therapy to repair lung damage

The findings have been offered in Estoril, Portugal right this moment (25 March, 2017) on the European Respiratory Society's Lung Science Convention . Lung injury brought on by persistent irritation in situations akin to COPD and cystic fibrosis, results in lowered lung operate and finally respiratory failure. Mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) remedy is presently being investigated as a promising therapeutic strategy for quite a lot of incurable, degenerative lung illnesses. Nonetheless, there may be nonetheless restricted knowledge on the brief and long-term results of administering stem cell remedy in persistent respiratory illness. The brand new analysis investigated the effectiveness of MSC remedy in a mouse mannequin of persistent inflammatory lung illness , which displays among the important options of illnesses akin to COPD and cystic fibrosis. Researchers delivered stem cells intravenously to b-ENaC overexpressing mice at four and 6 weeks of age, earlier than accumulating sa...

Cells grow more naturally in 'spaghetti'

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When stem cells are cultivated within the fibre community they enter between the fibres and become neurons (purple) or glial cells (inexperienced). The blue buildings are cell nuclei. (Image taken with a confocal microscope. Credit score: Ulrica Englund Johansson, Fredrik Johansson The standard means of cultivating cells is to make use of a flat laboratory dish of glass. Nonetheless, inside a human physique, the cells don't develop on a flat floor, however slightly in three dimensions. This has lead researchers at Lund College in Sweden to develop a porous "spaghetti" of tissue-friendly polymers with cavities wherein the cells can develop in a extra pure means. "When cultivating mind cells in a flat laboratory dish, the totally different cell sorts type layers, with the nerve cells on high and the glial cells -- a type of supporting tissue -underneath. This isn't what it appears to be like like in pure mind tissue, the place the cells are fa...

Researchers turn urine into research tools

Now, researchers from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have developed a breakthrough technique to harvest cells directly from urine, and grow them into durable, clinically relevant stem cells to study Down syndrome. The non-invasive technique, described in the journal  STEM CELLS Translational Medicine , helps creates urgently needed research models for Down syndrome, and can also be used to model other neurologic conditions. "For the first time, we were able to create induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSPs, of persons with Down syndrome by cells obtained from urine samples," said Alberto Costa, MD, PhD, study lead and professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. "Our methods represent a significant improvement in iPSC technology, and should be an important step toward the development of human cell-based platforms that can be used to test new medications designed to improve the quality of life of pe...

Discovery of a new regulatory protein provides new tool for stem cell engineering

The findings were published online in  Cell Reports  on March 28. "This discovery provides a fine-tuning knob for the stem cell engineering toolkit," said Sheng Zhong, a bioengineering professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and the study's senior author. "A number of previously identified regulatory proteins can be considered as rough-tuning knobs that result in greater changes in cellular behavior. We need both tools to precisely set stem cells into the desired cellular state so that they can carry out the functions that we desire." The researchers discovered that the protein, called SMARCAD1, interacts with a specific type of histone modification, called histone citrullination (H3R26Cit), to prevent the spontaneous switch from the naïve to the primed pluripotent state. By suppressing SMARCAD1 from interacting with H3R26Cit, researchers were able to induce this switch. They also found that the stem cells with suppressed SMARCAD1 expres...

Potential drugs and targets for brain repair

New neurons, and support cells called oligodendrocytes, arise during development throughout adulthood from neural stem cells in the subventricular zone, a region of the forebrain adjacent to the ventricles. The transcriptional changes associated with the development of each cell type in the newborn mouse have been catalogued in publicly accessible databases. Similarly, the transcriptional changes produced by thousands of chemicals approved for clinical use have also been catalogued. In the new study, the authors used these databases (which included their own previously generated data) to find overlaps between transcriptional changes associated with cell differentiation and drug treatments, on the premise that these might identify potential therapies to reverse neurodegenerative diseases. Toward that end, they characterized differences in signaling pathways in "microdomains" of the subventricular zone where neurons or oligodendrocytes get their start in life. They found se...

Method identified to boost detection of highly cancerous stem cells

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Most cancers stem cells (CSCs) escape from 5-aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA)-based photodynamic detection (PDD) (higher panel). An iron chelator deferoxamine (DFO) enhances accumulation in CSCs of PpIX from 5-ALA, which is able to facilitate the elimination of CSCs for most cancers eradication. Credit score: Division of Stem Cell Regulation,TMDU Photodynamic detection and remedy has just lately emerged as a promising method for diagnosing and treating most cancers. With this course of, sufferers are given a chemical metabolized particularly in tumor cells in order that it turns into fluorescent , permitting visible identification and surgical elimination of the tumor. Full elimination of all cancerous cells is essential, as any residual cells could cause tumor recurrence. Nevertheless, tumors are made up of a wide range of totally different cell sorts, and it has been unclear whether or not photodynamic detection identifies all of them. Most cancers stem cells, a sort of...

Stem cells help explain varied genetics behind rare neurologic disease

In the new study, published in  The American Journal of Human Genetics , researchers used stem cells in their laboratory to simultaneously model different genetic scenarios that underlie neurologic disease. They identified individual and shared defects in the cells that could inform treatment efforts. The researchers developed programmable stem cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells, from 12 children with various forms of Pelizaeus-Merzbacher Disease, or PMD. The rare but often fatal genetic disease can be caused by one of hundreds of mutations in a gene critical to the proper production of nerve cell insulation, or myelin. Some children with PMD have missing, partial, duplicate, or even triplicate copies of this gene, while others have only a small mutation. With so many potential causes, researchers have been in desperate need of a way to accurately and efficiently model genetic diseases like PMD in human cells. By recapitulating multiple stages of the disease in thei...

Novel method for generating airway cells from stem cells

Researchers at the Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM) at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and Boston Medical Center (BMC) have discovered that one particular signaling pathway, Wnt, helps direct lung development. A signaling pathway is how developing cells get instruction on what types of cell to become, such as a liver cell, a skin cell, a brain cell, etc. Using this finding, researchers implemented a new way to use stem cells made from any individual, including cells from patients with cystic fibrosis, and turn them into airway cells, which they then grew into three-dimensional spheres. These airway spheres now can be used to study cystic fibrosis disease activity using a specific test called a swelling assay. "Because airway spheres from a patient with cystic fibrosis do not swell in our assay but airway spheres from a healthy person do, we can see whether adding a certain drug or combination of drugs causes them to swell more. Finding a drug that causes t...

Single-cell RNA sequencing reveals detailed composition of two major types of brain tumor

"Our study redefines the cellular composition of two closely related gliomas characterized by mutations in the IDH gene -- astrocytomas and oligodendrogliomas," says Mario Suvà, MD, PhD, of the MGH Department of Pathology and the Center for Cancer Research, co-senior author of the Science paper. "While we know these are genetically distinct tumor types, we did not know whether they had similar cells of origin or if their expression differences could be explained by genetics, by the cells from which they developed, or by the tumor microenvironment." Several recent studies, including The Cancer Genome Atlas, have identified mutations driving tumor growth and defined tumor subtypes based on analyzing gene expression in tissue samples that include both tumor cells and cells from the surrounding microenvironment. But the fact that these analyses are done in bulk pieces of tumors masks many critical pieces of information. Single-cell RNA sequencing, which measures R...

Mini brains from the petri dish

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When pipetting: Affiliate professor Dr. Philipp Koch, Dr. Julia Ladewig and Vira Iefremova. Credit score: (c) Barbara Frommann/Uni Bonn A brand new technique may push analysis into developmental mind problems an essential step ahead. That is proven by a current examine on the College of Bonn wherein the researchers investigated the event of a uncommon congenital mind defect. To take action, they transformed pores and skin cells from sufferers into so referred to as induced pluripotent stem cells. From these 'jack-of-all-trades' cells, they generated mind organoids -- small three-dimensional tissues which resemble the construction and group of the growing human mind. The work has now been revealed within the journal  Cell Reviews . Investigations into human mind improvement utilizing human cells within the tradition dish have up to now been very restricted: the cells within the dish develop flat, so they don't show any three-dimensional construction. Mannequ...