All About Stem Cells!

All about stem cells, the possibilities of stem cell treatments / therapies including my personal thoughts & opinions. My posts are for educational purposes only.
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Scalable amounts of liver and pancreas precursor cells created using new stem cell production method

nerdygirlknits:

Scientists in Canada have overcome a key research hurdle to developing regenerative treatments for diabetes and liver disease with a technique to produce medically useful amounts of endoderm cells from human pluripotent stem cells. The research, published in Biotechnology and Bioengineering, can be transferred to other areas of stem cell research helping scientists to navigate the route to clinical use known as the ‘valley of death’.

“One million people suffer from in the United States, while accounts for 45,000 deaths a year,” said Dr Mark Ungrin from the University of Toronto. “This makes stem cells, and the potential for regenerative treatments, hugely interesting to scientists. Laboratory techniques can produce thousands, or even millions, of these cells, but generating them in the numbers and quality needed for medicine has long been a challenge.”

The research focused on the process of using pluripotent stem cells (PSC) to generate endoderm cells, one of the three primary germ layers which form including the lungs, pancreas, and liver. The ability to differentiate, or transform, PSCs into endoderm cells is a vital step to developing regenerative treatments for these organs.

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alchymista: Baldness Treatments May Mimic Animals’ Winter Coats Research into treatments that fight male-pattern baldness might take a lesson from animals that beef up their fur coats at certain times of the year. In animals, hair growth is triggered not only by hormones in the layer of skin called the dermis, but also by signals coming from elsewhere in the body, said study author Dr. Cheng-Ming Chuong, a professor at the University of Southern California. These signals vary with the seasons, the research showed, which is why some animals lose and gain coats of hair at different times of the year. “The hair-follicle stem cell is not only listening to the voice in the stem cell, but also the voice from outside,” Chuong explained, in an interview prior to his presentation today at the meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in Denver. The search for ways to regrow hair has recently turned to stem cells, but the new study indicates that instead, a treatment could aim at altering the environment around hair follicles, rather than implanting stem cells within them. These outside signals that are present in animals are missing in people. “This extra follicle-affecting factor has disappeared during human evolution,” so human hair follicles are activated only by signals internal to the hair follicle, Chuong told MyHealthNewsDaily. So to regrow hair for men who have lost it with age, a treatment could be developed that targets the tissue around the hair follicle to stimulate hair growth. “To deal with the hair growth, you not only try to help the stem cell, but you can improve the ‘soil,’ like — You put a tulip bulb in a nicer soil, you will grow a nicer hair,” Chuong said. Last month, a paper in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology from researchers at the University of California - Irvine noted that this line of research contributes to an understanding of how to trigger hair growth once a follicle is in the “resting phase” of hair growth. 

alchymista:

Baldness Treatments May Mimic Animals’ Winter Coats

Research into treatments that fight male-pattern baldness might take a lesson from animals that beef up their fur coats at certain times of the year.

In animals, hair growth is triggered not only by hormones in the layer of skin called the dermis, but also by signals coming from elsewhere in the body, said study author Dr. Cheng-Ming Chuong, a professor at the University of Southern California.

These signals vary with the seasons, the research showed, which is why some animals lose and gain coats of hair at different times of the year.

“The hair-follicle stem cell is not only listening to the voice in the stem cell, but also the voice from outside,” Chuong explained, in an interview prior to his presentation today at the meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in Denver.

The search for ways to regrow hair has recently turned to stem cells, but the new study indicates that instead, a treatment could aim at altering the environment around hair follicles, rather than implanting stem cells within them.

These outside signals that are present in animals are missing in people.

“This extra follicle-affecting factor has disappeared during human evolution,” so human hair follicles are activated only by signals internal to the hair follicle, Chuong told MyHealthNewsDaily.

So to regrow hair for men who have lost it with age, a treatment could be developed that targets the tissue around the hair follicle to stimulate hair growth.

“To deal with the hair growth, you not only try to help the stem cell, but you can improve the ‘soil,’ like — You put a tulip bulb in a nicer soil, you will grow a nicer hair,” Chuong said.

Last month, a paper in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology from researchers at the University of California - Irvine noted that this line of research contributes to an understanding of how to trigger hair growth once a follicle is in the “resting phase” of hair growth. 

completeculture: Such a tiny thing to instigate so much moral controversy.

completeculture:

Such a tiny thing to instigate so much moral controversy.

prostheticknowledge: The above photo is a microscopic look at an interesting pattern on rubber, which has proven to help culture neural stem cells. More about this science piece can be found at DigInfo News

prostheticknowledge:

The above photo is a microscopic look at an interesting pattern on rubber, which has proven to help culture neural stem cells.

More about this science piece can be found at DigInfo News

Haematopoiesis,

Not just hypo-thesis.

I’m cultured, I tell ya,

I’ll treat haemophilia.

Or fill your arterials,

With my dark materials.

My stem cells just could,

Be the future of blood.

—

From Keith Macpherson - I couldn’t resist composing this after the mention of the charmingly misspelled word hematopoetic in your story on blood grown in the lab from stem cells(12 November, p 8):

(via ohyeahdevelopmentalbiology)

(via ohyeahdevelopmentalbiology)