Another Adult Stem Cell Breakthrough

A review was conducted of 23 patients who underwent implantation of mesenchymal stem cell allograft for revision foot or ankle surgery. Composed of viable mesenchymal stem cells derived from cadaveric donor tissue, the graft had osteogenic, osteoinductive, and osteoconductive properties, and was capable of direct new bone formation at the site of implantation. In all of the cases, radiographic new bone formation was observed at the area of implantation and a 91.3% union rate was observed, and no evidence of graft rejection or complications associated with implantation were recorded. Wilcoxon rank sum tests were used to determine whether gender, diabetes, chronic renal insufficiency, neuropathy, number of previous surgeries, and smoking were associated with time to healing. Spearman's rank correlation coefficient was calculated in an effort to identify the influence of continuous numeric variables on the time to bone healing. Based on the outcomes observed in this retrospective study, it appears that mesenchymal stem cell allograft is a beneficial biological adjunct to bone healing, and serves as a suitable bone autograft substitute in revision foot and ankle surgery. - The Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery

Far too many scientific terms, but this sounds promising.

Obama Executive Order on Embryonic Stem Cells

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama will soon issue an executive order lifting an eight-year ban embryonic stem cell research imposed by his predecessor, President George W. Bush, a senior adviser said on Sunday.

"We're going to be doing something on that soon, I think. The president is considering that right now," Obama adviser David Axelrod said on "Fox News Sunday."

In 2001, Bush limited federal funding for stem cell research only to human embryonic stem cell lines that already existed. It was a gesture to his conservative Christian supporters who regard embryonic stem cell research as destroying potential life, because the cells must be extracted from human embryos.

Something Bush actually did good is going to now be reversed. Not good.

FDA OKs Embryonic Stem Cell Research

(CNN) -- Federal regulators have cleared the way for the first human trials of human embryonic stem-cell research, authorizing researchers to test whether the cells are safe to use in spinal injury patients, the company behind the trials announced Friday.

The tests could begin by summer, said Dr. Thomas Okarma, president and CEO of the Geron Corporation. The Food and Drug Administration has approved the trials, which will use human stem cells authorized for research by then-President George W. Bush in 2001.

The patients will be those with the most severe spinal cord injuries, called complete spinal cord injuries.

"A complete spinal cord injury has no hope of recovery below the injury," Okarma told CNN. "This is significant because it's the first clinical trial of a human embryonic-based product."

Obama Administration is awarded -1 for this terrible display of insincerity to life.

Pioneering Stem Cell Surgery

Physicians at four European universities have completed what they say is the first successful transplant of a human windpipe, using a patient's own stem cells to fashion an organ and prevent its rejection by her immune system, according to an article in the British medical journal The Lancet. One of the physicians said the surgery could herald a "new age in surgical care."

The transplant operation was performed on the patient, Claudia Castillo, in June in Barcelona, Spain, to alleviate an acute shortage of breath caused by a failing airway following severe tuberculosis. It followed weeks of preparation carried out at the universities of Barcelona, Spain, Bristol, England, and Padua and Milan in Italy.

News of the procedure coincided with speculation that President-elect Barack Obama may reverse the Bush Administration's restrictions on stem cell research, which has been contentious in some European countries, too. - International Herald Tribune

Adult stem cell research FTW.

Japanese Create Stem Cells W/ Wisdom Teeth

Japanese scientists said Friday they had derived stem cells from wisdom teeth, opening another way to study deadly diseases without the ethical controversy of using embryos.

Researchers at the government-backed National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology said they created stem cells of the type found in human embryos using the removed wisdom teeth of a 10-year-old girl.

"This is significant in two ways," team leader Hajime Ogushi told AFP. "One is that we can avoid the ethical issues of stem cells because wisdom teeth are destined to be thrown away anyway.

"Also, we used teeth that had been extracted three years ago and had been preserved in a freezer. That means that it's easy for us to stock this source of stem cells." - Breitbart

See, at least there is some good in getting your wisdom teeth yanked.

Adult Stem Cells Accel Bone Growth

MELBOURNE, August 8, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Adult stem cells have helped to accelerate the healing of severe leg fractures in Australian trials. The trial involved five men and four women who had suffered the worst type of compound bone fractures in serious road accidents, some of whom still could not walk up to 41 months after their accidents.

One man who suffered a compound fracture and was still using crutches a year later, regained the use of his leg the day after the procedure and is now fully recovered, pain free and regularly runs and plays football. Eight of the ten patients experienced full bone regrowth. One man broke both his tibia and femur but only the tibia re-grew. Another patient required further surgery.

The technique was developed by Dr. Richard de Steiger, director of orthopaedic surgery at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, who told media that his team hopes it can be applied to hip replacement procedures as well as accidental injuries. The technology was developed by the hospital's regenerative medicine company, Mesoblast, which has the worldwide licence to commercialise. Dr. de Steiger said it is between three and five years away from being used in hospitals.

This would have come in clutch for my sister, but thank God she is not in the situation as described above: still on crutches 41 months after her accident. For those wondering, she has started walking without any kind of assistance!

Adult Stem Cells In Action

Adult stem cells improve healing of broken bones and could eventually serve as a new treatment for the 10 to 20 percent of fractures that fail to heal, according to a new study. The results were presented at The Endocrine Society's 90th Annual Meeting in San Francisco, by Froilan Granero-Molto, PhD, research associate of the University of North Carolina.

"Lack of fracture repair often leads to several surgeries, long periods of immobilization, pain, bone deformities, and sometimes death," said the study's senior investigator, Anna Spagnoli, MD, of the University of North Carolina. "The precise reason why a patient's fracture does not heal remains unknown in most cases." - Medical News Today

Embryonic advocates, put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Thanks To Adult Stem Cells

Two-year-old Elio Burgos, who was born blind, is now able to see, thanks to a series of adult stem-cell treatments.

Elio was diagnosed with optic nerve hypoplasia, an underdeveloped optic nerve. His mother found a hospital in China that offered umbilical cord stem-cell treatments that could improve her son’s sight. The Florida family flew to China so Elio could undergo the treatments.

Now, fewer than three months after his treatments — a series of cell injections consisting of 10 to 15 million healthy umbilical cord stem cells — Elio's eyesight has gone from 20/1200 to 20/200 and will hopefully continue to improve during the next seven months.

"While there have been unethical and dangerous experiments done in China with destructive embryonic stem-cell research,” said Dawn Vargo, bioethics analyst for Focus on the Family Action, “it's nice to see that ethical treatments that can cure patients are finally getting some attention." - Focus on the Family

Of course an article like this would only appear on a Focus on the Family website.

"Blank" Stem Cells

Cambridge scientists have used stem cells that were "reprogrammed" from ordinary skin cells to alleviate symptoms of Parkinson's disease in rodents, illustrating the vast medical potential of this new type of stem cell.

In the study, rats whose midbrains were damaged in a way to closely mimic Parkinson's received transplants of healthy neurons cultivated from reprogrammed stem cells. These are basically biological "blank slates" that are believed to have the same capacity as embryonic stem cells to be turned into nerves, organs, bloods, bone, or any other cell type.

The brain-damaged rats had wandered in uncontrollable circles. After the treatment, however, eight of the nine test rats "showed markedly less or even no circling," according to Marius Wernig, a scientist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and lead author of the research. - Boston Globe

Anything non-embryonic is good stem cell wise.

Stem Cells

About four years ago, the “Ultimate” stem cell was discovered. The stem cell, which was found in adults, can turn into any tissue in the body. The adult stem cell could possibly spell the end of embryonic cells. According to Ihor Lemischka of Princeton University, “They (adult stem cells) can differentiate into pretty much anything that an embryonic stem cell can differentiate into.”

The cells were found in the bone marrow of adults by Catherine Verfaillie at the University of Minnesota. The cells known as MAPCs (Multipotent Adult Progenitor Cells) have been found in the skin and muscle as well as in mice. The question still remained at the time of publication: Are these adult stem cells as versatile as embryonic stem cells?

If given under the right conditions, MAPCs can turn into various tissue types such as muscle, cartilage, liver and brain cells among others. When Verfaillie conducted an experiment which involved MAPCs being placed into new born mice, the results turned up nicely showing that one single MAPC can give supply to all the body’s tissues. In no way are the embryonic cells identical to MAPC cells, although they do share a lot of properties. Embryonic cells have been known to form cancerous loads if you insert them into adults, but as far as MAPC’s are concerned this hasn’t been of any danger.

Questions have been raised concerning the functionality of the MAPC as well as if it can be truly considered ‘a cell’. None-the-less, it is a decisive step for Stem Cell Research.

Stem Cells will impact the way society functions in the years too come. Already there are numerous pro-stem cell research movements and the potential developments and breakthroughs stem cells can have are tremendous. If stem cell research continues, former detrimental illnesses such as cancer, blindness and diabetes, could soon go away quicker than it had started. The focus from embryonic stem cells to adult stem cells is becoming more eminent and the number of scientists constructing stem cell research studies amplifies everyday. With the expected abundance of stem cells in the coming years (if research is funded and sanctioned by the government), the cost of treatment shouldn’t be that high. What does this mean? It means that people won’t have to fight illness or even worry about having a prolonged medical condition. Within the next twenty, I predict that stem cells will literally take over the medical field of study.

The following words describe my opinion on the stem cell debate: Embryonic stem cells = bad, adult stem cells = good. I think that using embryonic stem cells is a destruction of human life, considering that the embryonic stem cells come from a dead baby, most likely as a result of an abortion, something that I am also against. I have no problems with adult stem cells because they are coming from living beings. As long as no harm is done to the adults of whom the stem cells are coming from, it is all well and good. So if I was asked to support embryonic stem cell research, I would instantaneously state my dislike.

Scientists successful at cloning monkeys

A technical breakthrough has enabled scientists to create for the first time dozens of cloned embryos from adult monkeys, raising the prospect of the same procedure being used to make cloned human embryos.

The work was led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a Russian-born scientist at the Oregon National Primate Research Centre in Beaverton. Dr Mitalipov helped to pioneer a new way of handling primate eggs during the cloning process, which involved fusing each egg with a nucleus taken from a skin cell of an adult primate.