Bringing Stem Cells to War: Meet the Blood Pharmers. Fresher blood is better than stale: It carries more oxygen and, when transfused into patients, speeds recovery.
Military medics are all too familiar with this problem in the field, where donated blood may take two or more weeks to reach soldiers who need it immediately. But medical researchers—also known as blood pharmers—are working on manufacturing the red stuff on the spot. With a machine the size of a few refrigerators, the Defense Department's advanced research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) envisions liter upon liter of fresh blood churning out, destined for the veins of injured soldiers. It doesn't get any fresher than that.
And if it works for the military, it should also work for domestic hospitals that are paying increasingly pricey bills for blood that's in short supply, says DARPA project scientist Jon Mogford, who was awarded nearly $2 million to Cleveland-based Arteriocyte for blood-pharming research. 'Different kind of stem cell' possesses attributes favoring regenerative medicine.
A research team at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center say the new and powerful cells they first created in the laboratory a year ago constitute a new stem-like state of adult epithelial cells.
They say these cells have attributes that may make regenerative medicine truly possible. In the November 19 online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they report that these new stem-like cells do not express the same genes as embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) do. That explains why they don't produce tumors when they grow in the laboratory, as the other stem cells do, and why they are stable, producing the kind of cells researchers want them to. "These seem to be exactly the kind of cells that we need to make regenerative medicine a reality," says the study's senior investigator, chairman of the department of pathology at Georgetown Lombardi, a part of Georgetown University Medical Center.
New method generates cardiac muscle patches from stem cells. Public release date: 18-Jun-2012 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Shantell M.
Kirkendollsmkirk@umich.edu 734-764-2220University of Michigan Health System. Biologists grow human-eye precursor from stem cells. A stem-cell biologist has had an eye-opening success in his latest effort to mimic mammalian organ development in vitro.
Yoshiki Sasai of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CBD) in Kobe, Japan, has grown the precursor of a human eye in the lab. The structure, called an optic cup, is 550 micrometres in diameter and contains multiple layers of retinal cells including photoreceptors. The achievement has raised hopes that doctors may one day be able to repair damaged eyes in the clinic. But for researchers at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Yokohama, Japan, where Sasai presented the findings this week, the most exciting thing is that the optic cup developed its structure without guidance from Sasai and his team.
Dougal Waters/Getty The human eye is a complex structure — but the cues to build it come from inside the growing cells. Until recently, stem-cell biologists had been able to grow embryonic stem-cells only into two-dimensional sheets. Researchers find a way to delay aging of stem cells. Public release date: 23-May-2012 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Andy Hoangahoang@salk.edu 619-861-5811Salk Institute LA JOLLA, CA----Stem cells are essential building blocks for all organisms, from plants to humans.
They can divide and renew themselves throughout life, differentiating into the specialized tissues needed during development, as well as cells necessary to repair adult tissue. Therefore, they can be considered immortal, in that they recreate themselves and regenerate tissues throughout a person's lifetime, but that doesn't mean they don't age. Careers in Stem Cell Research: Rejuvenating Biology and Medicine. With all of the excitement during the past few years, stem cells seem like an entirely new realm of biology and medicine.
Nonetheless, scientists started studying these cells long ago. Now, though, scientists seem on the verge of turning stem cells into one of science’s most powerful tools of all time. In fact, these cells help scientists learn more about basic biology and give physicians new tools against disease. The real power of these cells lies ahead, and there will be plenty of room for trained scientists. “Embryonic stem cells are a cellular window into pluripotency and infinite replicative potential,” says Edison Liu, executive director at the Genome Institute of Singapore. “It doesn’t get mentioned so much,” says Beth Donley, executive director of the WiCell Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, “but stem cells provide an incredible opportunity to study developmental biology.”