Pancreatic Cancer

“Blood stem cells represent an important target for the treatment of a variety of blood and immune disorders, so our ability to engineer them to selectively stimulate immune responses opens up new possibilities for gene therapy,” says Linzhao Cheng, Ph.D., assistant professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and director of the [...]

The cell line has grown continuously for 10 months. The stem cell line was produced by collaboration between researchers from ACT, led by Jose Cibelli, Ph.D. and Michael West, Ph.D., Wake Forest researchers Kathleen A. Grant, Ph.D. and Kent E. Vrana, Ph.D., Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (Lorenz Studer, M.D.), and the Mayo Clinic (Peter Wettstein, [...]

The scientists emphasized that although their studies show that adult stem cells have the capacity to develop into functioning brain cells, their findings do not mean that clinical application of adult neural stem cells is imminent. The studies were published April 15, 2002, in an advance online article in Nature Neuroscience by Howard Hughes Medical [...]

Now researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have for the first time succeeded in growing the precursors of heart cells from human embryonic stems cells. This puts the researchers considerably closer to clinical application in humans. The research, conducted by Dr. Lior Gepstein of the Faculty of Medicine at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology [...]

According to the scientists, who published their findings online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the stem cells are unique compared to many “adult” stem cells in the body. They are long lived, grow rapidly in culture, and, with careful prompting in the laboratory, have the potential to induce the formation [...]

Dr Anne Bishop, from Imperial College Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Centre at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, comments: “This research will make it possible eventually to repair lungs that have been damaged by disease, by implanting fully functioning lung cells to repopulate damaged areas. Also, unlike transplantation from a donor, the cells can be developed [...]

“The study is proof of principle that therapeutic cloning can be used to create tissues without the threat of rejection,” says Anthony Atala, M.D., director of Tissue Engineering at Children’s Hospital Boston and the senior author on the paper. “While more work needs to be done, this demonstrates the potential use of this technology.” As [...]

The focus of the new study, conducted in the lab of Andrew Feinberg, M.D., was whether Hopkins-developed human embryonic germ cells and their more specialized “daughter” cells would have correct “imprinting,” a way cells determine which of the two copies of a gene to use in making proteins. For imprinted genes, which copy is active [...]

This technique, which involves injecting the stem cells into the eye, could potentially be used to stimulate vessel growth and address inherited degenerations of the retina in the first instance, and in the second, to treat ocular diseases resulting from abnormal retinal angiogenesis, the aberrant growth of new blood vessels in the eye, which is [...]

“Transplantation of neural stem cells in mice three days after brain injury promotes the improvement of specific components of motor function,” said Tracy K. McIntosh, PhD, professor in the Department of Neurosurgery, Director of Penn’s Head Injury Center, and senior author of the study. “More importantly, these stem cells respond to signals and create replacement [...]