Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and their collaborators found that tweaking a gene known as PGC-1, which is also found in human DNA, in the intestinal stem cells of fruit flies delayed the aging of their intestine and extended their lifespan by as much as 50 percent.

“Fruit flies and humans have a lot more in common than most people think,” says Leanne Jones, an associate professor in Salk’s Laboratory of Genetics and a lead scientist on the project. “There is a tremendous amount of similarity between a human small intestine and the fruit fly intestine.”

While they won’t get anywhere using discount dental equipment for such a study, their findings were published online in Cell Metabolism. For a less in depth press release check here.

Scientists have derived individual stem cells from individuals by adding the nuclei of adult skin cells from patients with type 1 diabetes to unfertilized donor oocytes. BAsically this advancement is useful to help transplant patient’s own stem cells for replacement of diseased and damaged cells. Get these guys a new bulova watch.

Keck School of Medicine of USC scientists deciphered how hair stem cells in mice and rabbits can communicate with each other and encourage mutually coordinated regeneration, according to an article published in the April 29 edition of the journal Science. Here I thought an IT degree was the way to go.

“The results are totally surprising. There is complex coordination not apparent to the naked eye,” said Cheng-Ming Chuong, professor of pathology at the Keck School and the principal investigator of the study funded by the National Institutes of Health. Again why didn’t I go into this intstead of an it degree

Sign me up for the human testing!

The current administration has always been highly supportive of stem cell research and the ban was a blow, but all is well now it appears. Perfect for printdirectforless postcard printing announcements yes?

“This is a victory not only for the scientists, but for the patients who are waiting for treatments and cures for terrible diseases,” Arnold Kriegstein, MD, PhD, director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCSF said. “This ruling allows critical research to move forward, enabling scientists to compare human embryonic stem cells to other forms of stem cells, such as the cell lines which are derived from skin cells, and to pursue potentially life-saving therapies based on that research.”

Kriegstein said the ruling will make a significant difference for stem cell research in general, including at UCSF, where the majority of stem cell investigators receive some funding from the National Institutes of Health for their research, as well as from private sources and from the state. The ruling enables those scientists to integrate research from various funding sources, thereby more quickly addressing the causes and therapies for diseases

“It’s a big step forward,” said Kang Zhang, MD, PhD, professor of ophthalmology and human genetics at Shiley Eye Center and director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine, both at UC San Diego. “It means we can generate stable, renewable neural stem cells or downstream products quickly, in great quantities and in a clinical grade — millions in less than a week — that can be used for clinical trials and, eventually, for clinical treatments. Until now, that has not been possible.”

Human embryonic stem cells are some of the most important materials needed for research of regenerative medicine. They can become any kind of cell needed to repair other damaged tissue. So being able to create enough to work with is a very big development since until now this was a major issue. Give these guys a free aircast air stirrup.

To produce the neural stem cells, Zhang, with co-senior author Sheng Ding, PhD, a former professor of chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute and now at the Gladstone Institutes, and colleagues added small molecules in a chemically defined culture condition that induces hESCs to become primitive neural precursor cells, but then halts the further differentiation process.

“And because it doesn’t use any gene transfer technologies or exogenous cell products, there’s minimal risk of introducing mutations or outside contamination,” Zhang said. Assays of these neural precursor cells found no evidence of tumor formation when introduced into laboratory mice.

U.S. researchers have coaxed stem cells into becoming a type of brain cell that dies off early in people with Alzheimer’s disease.

The new technology would provide a ready supply of cells for use in testing new drugs or even transplants to help restore lost memory, the team reported on Friday in the journal Stem Cell.

While most Alzheimer’s research is done in genetically modified mice, the new technique would allow researchers to study a key aspect of the disease in human cells.

“These are cells that are critically important for memory functions,” said Dr. Jack Kessler of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, who worked on the study.

This is crazy. Stem cell research never fails to amaze me. Truly even more than cheap car insurance in this day and age.

Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology said it would start testing its stem cell-based treatment on 12 patients with Stargardt’s macular dystrophy.

It is the second trial of human embryonic stem cells to be approved by the FDA this year. Just last month, Geron Corp enrolled the first patient in its study using the cells in people whose spinal cords have been crushed. Maybe soon they can take care of a natural colon cleanse.

“It is exciting — a vindication. All this work really came through,” said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief medical officer of the company, which has struggled to stay solvent as it gambled on the controversial cells.

“The patient was enrolled at Shepherd Center, a 132-bed spinal cord and brain injury rehabilitation hospital and clinical research center in Atlanta, Georgia,” Geron said in a statement. click here for something else entirely.

“Shepherd Center is one of seven potential sites in the United States that may enroll patients in the clinical trial.”

Geron’s stem cells come from human embryos left over from fertility treatments. They have been manipulated so that they have become precursors to certain types of nerve cells.

These in particular are being used to help spinal injuries. The hope is that they will travel to the site of a recent spinal cord injury and release compounds that will help the damaged nerves in the cord regenerate.

The Phase I trial will not be aiming to cure patients but to establish that the cells are safe to use. Under the guidelines of the trial, the patients must have very recent injuries. Real human guinea pigs in action.

“When we started working with human embryonic stem cells in 1999, many predicted that it would be a number of decades before a cell therapy would be approved for human clinical trials,” Geron President and CEO Dr. Thomas Okarma said in a statement.

Hmmmmm…what is going on down there?

About 400 patients, mostly foreigners from the United States, have been treated at the Institute of Cellular Medicine in San Jose for multiple sclerosis, arthritis, spinal injuries and other illnesses.

“This isn’t allowed in any serious country in the world,” Health Minister Maria Luisa Avila said in a telephone interview.

The Health Ministry several weeks ago ordered the clinic, owned by Arizona entrepreneur Neil Riordan, to stop performing the treatment, in which stem cells extracted from the patients are reinjected into their bodies.

The ministry said the clinic has a permit to store the stem cells extracted from patients’ own fat tissue, bone marrow and donated umbilical cords but is not authorized to perform the treatment.

Sylvia Molina, an assistant at the clinic, said it would shut its doors on Friday as they get the boots.

Sounds pretty fishy. Not the shutting tit down, but that this is a clinic owned by an entrepreneur and they are basically testing on humans without results? No idea. Just sounds a bit shady to me and I’m all about stem cell research.

They used two types of master cells to create the mouse hair cells — embryonic stem cells and a similar type of cells called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, which are ordinary cells re-programed to act like stem cells.

Both came from mice, and the next step is to try the experiment using human cells. Much better use of time than making cartoons of atv racing mice I would say.

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders estimates that 15 percent of Americans between 20 and 69, or 26 million people, have high frequency hearing loss caused by noise. Antibiotics and genetic disorders can also damage the hair cells in the middle ear needed for normal hearing.

“What we are thinking is to get human iPS cells from hearing loss patients and just try to re-make the disorder in the petri dish,” Oshima said in a telephone interview.

This could be used to screen drugs that might cause the cells to regenerate, or to activate hibernating stem cells in the ear, he said.

It may also be possible to grow the cells and inject them into the ear, but no one has developed a technique for doing this, Oshima said.

“There are still so many hurdles to overcome,” he said.