stem cell news 101208-11

kittybruce

Glance at last issue:
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+ A% k( J% J. w9 L$ |( ^“I’m also up here with Carol Franz; she has whipped cancer twice by using adult stem cells. In other words, adult stem cells have saved her life. She’s a determined woman who believes strongly that there are different alternatives available to use stem cells other than those which are created as the result of destruction of human life.”--President George W. Bush.
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4 p" ~! P" _2 k- Y8 o- C"This is about the mission — this is not a career position. I agreed that given the critical nature of the momentum of the agency right now that I would agree to serve longer to find another scientist or clinician-scientist who really has the same kind of national respect and competency to drive these therapies forward."--Bob Klein, the head of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM).
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"When you want to regenerate bone in trauma patients, they’re often quite young, and getting bone marrow from them is quite easy; the marrow is thin and easy to process. But when you’re looking at revision hip replacements, where you remove a loose hip prosthesis from a femur and you want to regenerate bone around a new one, we’re looking at older patients, often in their 70s and 80s, and we’d find that the marrow is more viscous and has a lower concentration of stem cells, making it more difficult to process."--Orthopaedic registrar and research fellow James Smith.1 `) G2 ~, O3 c1 N
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“Our research also revealed that during pregnancy there is a profound increase in breast stem cell numbers. This might account for the short-term increase in cancer risk associated with pregnancy...Our discovery suggests that inhibitors of RANK or other stem cell pathways represent possible therapeutic strategies that could also be investigated as breast cancer prevention agents.”--Geoff Lindeman at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute.
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7 ]% Q  z7 G  b8 h% s9 Y' Y( W"Therapies that repair damage are the missing link in treating multiple sclerosis. In this study we have identified a means by which the brain's own stem cells can be encouraged to undertake this repair, opening up the possibility of a new regenerative medicine for this devastating disease."--Prof Robin Franklin, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, who led the latest work.
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“While research in mice and other animals serves as a guide, ultimately you have to study human tissue and humans to really understand disease in people. While the general signaling pathways active in mice and people are very similar, the individual genes are quite different. This is not something we would have predicted. It’s a good demonstration that you can’t use mouse studies to fully dictate what kinds of therapeutics should be used in people.”--Goldman, who is also co-director of Rochester’s Center for Translational Neuromedicine.8 l0 @2 H# T0 P1 g/ r

( m; M; r- \5 k' l( [0 l; p( h8 n"MSC are recruited to the sites of infection. What happens is these stem cells make a barrier ... between the T-cells that are supposed to kill the bacteria, and the bacteria."--Gobardhan Das, staff scientist at the International Center for Genetic Engineering and Biology in New Delhi.
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“The decision to end the Beike Holdings joint-venture was a mutual and purely strategic one. While we continue to believe that making Beike’s stem cell therapies more widely available through international partnerships makes sense, at this time it is more important for Beike to focus our efforts on our business inside of China. We have the greatest respect for our colleagues at SiriCell and we will continue to explore synergies between our two companies.”--Beike Chief Executive Officer Dr. Sean Hu.- S8 @" L' P0 w" [
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"We intend to use safer, better-quality iPS cells in our experiments so that clinical trials of the treatment method (on humans) will become possible."--professor Hideyuki Okano of Keio University.
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This issue:
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