Paralyzed Rats Walk Again After Stem Cell Transplant

Technology Review Published by MIT

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/429222/paralyzed-rats-walk-again-after-stem-cell/

The rodent recovery spurs hope that humans could one day benefit from similar treatments.

Susan Young  <http://www.technologyreview.com/contributor/susan-young/>

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Rats once paralyzed from complete surgical cuts through their spinal cords can walk again after stem cells were transplanted into the site of the injury, report <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867412010185> researchers today in the journal Cell. The results suggest that stem cells might work as a treatment for patients even if they have completely severed cords, a potential therapy that has been viewed skeptically by many in the
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Neural stem cells, derived from aborted fetal spinal cord tissue, were
implanted onto each side of the spinal cord injury in the rats along with a supportive matrix and molecular growth factors. The human stem cells grew into the site of injury and extended delicate cellular projections called axons into the rats spinal cord, despite the known growth-inhibiting environment of the injured spinal cord. The rats’ own neurons sent axons into the transplanted material and the rats were able to move all joints of their hind legs.

The cells are produced by a Rockville, Maryland company called Neuralstem <http://www.neuralstem.com/> . The same cells are also being tested in ALS patients (see “New Cells for ALS Patients
<http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428956/new-cells-for-als-patients/> “) where they have shown some promise of stabilizing the progressive disease. Last month, the company announced
<http://investor.neuralstem.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=203908&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1463178&highlight> that it has asked to FDA to approve a trial to test the cells in spinal cord-injured patients.

Researchers are currently testing neural stem cells from a Newark,
California-based company called StemCells Inc. <http://www.stemcellsinc.com/> , in spinal cord injured patients; two of the three patients have reported the recover of some sensation (see “Human Stem Cells Found to Restore Memory <http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428532/human-stem-cells-found-to-restore-memory/> ” for an overview of the company).

Stem Cells Help Rats Recover Lower-Body Movement

Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News |
www.genengnews.com

GENNewsHighlights <http://www.genengnews.com/gen-news-highlights/>

Sep 13, 2012

Stem Cells Help Rats Recover Lower-Body Movement

http://www.genengnews.com/gen-news-highlights/stem-cells-help-rats-recover-l
ower-body-movement/81247315/

A half-dozen paraplegic rats recovered movement in all lower joints after being transplanted with <http://www.genengnews.com/keyword/neuralstem/3100> Neuralstem’s <http://www.genengnews.com/keyword/nsi-566/8579>  NSI-566
spinal cord <http://www.genengnews.com/keyword/stem-cells/304>  stem cells-a result the company said could aid in treating human <http://www.genengnews.com/keyword/spinal-cord-injury/692>  spinal cord injury.

The six were among 12 rats experiencing lower-body paralysis after
undergoing complete spinal transections. The six were assessed over seven
weeks and compared to a control group that had not received transplants.
Neuralstem published results of its spinal cord stem cell transplant in the
journal Cell, in a paper titled “Long-Distance Growth and Connectivity of
Neural Stem Cells After Severe Spinal Cord Injury: Cell-Intrinsic Mechanisms
Overcome Spinal Inhibition.”

According to the study, rats treated with NSI-566 showed significant
locomotor recovery, with most (57%) of the grafted cells turned into
neurons. Also significant, according to the company, was the number of axons
that emerged, extending over 17 spinal segments both above and below the
point of spinal cord lesion. The axons expressed synaptic proteins in the
host gray matter, suggesting they made synaptic contact with host spinal
neurons.

“The fact that these cells induce regeneration of axons and partial recovery
of motor function makes them relevant for testing for the treatment of human
spinal cord injury,” Karl Johe, Ph.D., Neuralstem’s chairman and CSO, said
in a statement.

According to the paper, retransecting the spinal cord immediately above the
graft abolished functional gain, a finding that Neuralstem said indicated
that the regeneration of host axons into the human stem cell graft was
responsible for the functional recovery.

Neuralstem has submitted an application to the FDA for a trial to treat
chronic spinal cord injury with NSI-566. The cells were used in a recently
completed Phase I clinical trial for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or
Lou Gehrig’s disease).

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Neuralstem Gains on Stem Cell Therapy for Paralyzed Rats

By Ryan Flinn on September 13, 2012

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-09-13/neuralstem-gains-on-stem-cell-therapy-for-paralyzed-rats

Neuralstem rose (CUR) 40 percent to $1.40 at 12:43 p.m. in New York, after earlier increasing as much as 51 percent in its largest intraday gain since Sept. 21, 2009. The Rockville, Maryland-based company’s shares had risen 3.6 percent this year through yesterday.

Prior to captivating this medicine, regard as to cautiously appraise all the feasible dangers and advantages connected with it. discount cialis is the best and most proficient generic key for combating erectile dysfunction. It is a simple, effective way to resolve those tense situations where one child is trying to control or hurt or trespass on another and it is highly, highly effective. http://www.energyhealingforeveryone.com/gcp/GCS.pdf buy cheap cialis “Just walk away.” When a bully tries to steal your child’s emotional well-being, realize that that bully really does not have access to it, your child does. Chiropractic thought is reliant when the relative between the body nervous system and the skeletal online prescription viagra or bone structure. These kinds of cures are the best choices to go with as it comes in three types of consumption like jelly, tablet, and soft tablet and remain demanding medicine by ED men. viagra sales in uk Researchers severed the spinal vertebrae of 12 rats, then gave half of them Neuralstem’s stem cells a week after the injury, according to the study published today in the journal Cell. The rats that received the injections gained “significant locomotor recovery,” according to a company statement.

Neuralstem also is testing its therapy in early human clinical trials for
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and for
depression.

Advances in regenerative medicine may let patients grow own transplants

Modern medicine:

Advances in regenerative medicine may let patients grow own transplants

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48976348/ns/health-mens_health/

By Maggie Fox

NBC News

A few years ago, Dr. Anthony Atala’s lab at Wake Forest University got good at making ears. They were growing new ears on a scaffold using patient’s cells, because so many soldiers were losing their ears in explosions. Now the Department of Defense has a project that’s closer to Atala’s heart: making new genitals for soldiers who have stepped on bombs.

Other labs are still moving forward with the ear project for the military.  But Atala has special expertise dating back to his days as a pediatric urologist. He’s already grown bladders using a patient’s own cells, and he’s made penises that rabbits were able to put to their proper use, fathering litters of new little bunnies. He hopes to use this expertise to help rebuild the bodies of veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as men and boys injured in car accidents.

Atala is one of the pioneers of regenerative medicine. But the field has
taken off in a big way, attracting biotechnology companies, the U.S.
military and academic labs, which are working to literally make the blind see and the lame walk again. They’re perfecting spray-on skin and to mass-produce new body parts using bioprinters based on the jet printers attached to your home computer.

“Right now, the way these organs are made is creating them one by one. By bringing the bioprinting in, we can scale it up,” says Atala, whose lab has contracts with the four-year-old Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM), biotechnology companies and private foundations.

All of this technology is years away from the doctor’s office. The most
advanced treatments have just begun the very earliest stages of human testing. But all evidence points to the tantalizing prospect of
grow-your-own organs and possibly even limbs within a decade or so, and some approaches, such as muscle transplants and spray-on skin, are helping a lucky few now.

Atala’s lab in 2006 made the first full organ ever grown and implanted into a human – the bladder – and the rabbit penises were the first solid organs. A new bid from AFIRM caught his eye. It called for experts in rebuilding the lower abdomen, the genitals, the pelvic area and the bladder.

These injuries are among the least talked-about but among the most horrible affecting war veterans. The improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, planted by insurgents across Iraq and Afghanistan blow off feet, legs and arms, and they can especially damage the pelvic areas that are difficult to protect with body armor.

Atala’s lab is also working to make kidneys, muscle implants, and even to find ways to get fingers to regenerate on their own. (It has to do with waking up some very powerful DNA that goes to sleep soon after a fetus develops). AFIRM’s mission is to align labs like Atala’s with others around the country, getting them to collaborate on projects rather than compete.  AFIRM currently funds around 50 research labs, including leaders such as the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Rutgers University, the Cleveland Clinic and Rice University.

“We don’t really feel that other groups are competition at all,” Atala says “Our interest is really to get these technologies into patients. We consider the disease the competition.”

Spray-on skin One area of intense competition – or collaboration – is in spraying on new skin. AFIRM is funding several projects testing a product that uses a patient’s own skin cells, so that rejection is not an issue. Old-fashioned skin grafts may close a wound or a burn, but they don’t heal prettily.  ReCell is a product, more of a process really, that uses a small plug of a patient’s own skin, broken down into a soup using enzymes. Cells known as keratinocytes, which give skin its structure, and the melanocytes, which give color, are pulled out, mixed into a liquid suspension and then sprayed over the damaged area.

It’s a thin layer but the cells quickly multiply and, if the process is done right, form an even layer of new skin within days. The result is much more natural-looking than a graft.

Skin is easier to heal because it’s a relatively simple organ and on the
surface of the body. Limbs are more complicated – they are made up of bone, muscle, nerves, connective tissue and also skin.

Labs are taking a more traditional approach in trying to restore limbs, by transplanting them. But even there regenerative medicine can play a role.  This is where stem cell research comes in. Stem cells are the body’s master cells, and there are several kinds. People have stem cells known as adult stem cells all through their bodies, and they are already partly “educated” to become blood, muscle, bone or nerve cells.

These cells divide and multiply to produce muscle, bones and blood, and they also secrete compounds that help existing tissue and cells regenerate. Some of the projects on AFIRM’s wish list include calls for labs that can combine techniques used to build new body parts with the use of stem cells to help them generate and integrate with the rest of the body.

More powerful cells come from embryos that have barely begun to develop. An entire human body, the collection of muscle, bone, brain, blood, nerves and organs, all develops from the ball of just a few cells that forms days after fertilization. Each one of these cells, known as human embryonic stem cells, contains all the coding needed to make every cell type in the body.
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Helping the blind see In January, scientists at Advanced Cell Technology, a company based in Massachusetts, reported they had used some of these human embryonic stem cells to partially restore vision in two legally blind patients. First they “trained” the cells by incubating them in a nourishing soup of chemicals designed to make them differentiate into retinal cells. The stem cells, infused directly into the eye, regenerated cells known as retinal pigment epithelium cells.

One patient said she can thread needles again and another has been able to resume shopping on her own. ACT has since gotten permission to treat more patients with higher doses of the cells, now that they have at least been shown not to cause any harm. They’re going after patients with degenerative eye diseases such as age-related macular degeneration and Stargardt disease.  In both conditions the cells in the retina gradually die and patients go slowly and irreversibly blind.

They’ve treated 11 more patients, says ACT’s chief medical officer Dr.
Robert Lanza. “In all the patients we have been seeing a very real
biological signal,” Lanza told NBC News. “We have been very pleased because we are talking about very advanced stage patients, and there’s really no treatment for them.”

The experiments, known as clinical trials, are strictly regulated. In the
early stages of human testing, where ACT is now with stem cells, Stage 1 trials recruit only volunteers with advanced, severe disease who have little to lose. The tests are not aimed at showing whether the treatment works, but to ensure that it doesn’t do any harm. Showing efficacy is a big bonus.

“We are far enough along now that we can go into patients with better
vision. That is where we think we will see a very dramatic improvement,” said Lanza.

It doesn’t always go this well. ACT was neck and neck with another company called Geron to be the first to test human embryonic stem cells in people. Geron got there first in 2010, infusing the cells into a young man injured in a car accident, as well as three others. The hope was to regenerate their severed spinal cords. Again, these first patients were treated experimentally only to show the approach was safe and no one dared hope they’d actually improve. And none of them did. Geron dropped its stem cell program in November 2011, saying it wanted to focus on cancer drugs instead.

Lanza said the eyes are a great place to test new treatments because
researchers can literally look in there and see what’s happening. The
spine’s a little harder, but other labs are trying to help there, too.

‘I was afraid it would be a dream’ Ted Harada had a second infusion of stem cells last month. The 40-year-old former Fedex employee has Lou Gehrig’s disease, medically known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS. It attacks nerves called motor neurons, gradually and inexorably paralyzing its victims. It’s always fatal as patients lose every bit of their ability to move, even to breathe. There’s no treatment and no cure.

Harada is hopeful enough to have tried the highly experimental treatment not once but twice. It’s painful – surgeons have to cut open his spine and infuse the stem cells right into his spinal fluid. But the last time Harada was treated, he went from walking with a cane to running with his kids – a transformation that made him an instant television celebrity.

“The results I saw were nothing short of miraculous,” says Harada, who lives in Georgia and who got treated at Emory University. “Within two weeks I started feeling my legs getting better. I was afraid it would be a dream and I would wake up and it would be gone again.”

And the effects did gradually wear off, Harada says. “All of a sudden I
started noticing fatigue in my legs,” he told NBC News. “I started noticing trembling, shaking in my legs. If you do a lot of weight lifting you know that rubbery feeling your legs get when they are spent?” That’s how he felt.

In August, Harada got a second infusion of stem cells, which are made by a company called Neuralstem, this time in his neck. “There were a lot of reasons to think this could not safely be done. The spinal cord itself is very precious real estate,” says Dr. Eva Feldman, a neurologist at the University of Michigan who is working on the ALS trial. “You are putting a needle into the spinal cord.”

Feldman admits that researchers on the trial don’t fully understand what the cells are doing. In animals, she says, they form new connections with damaged motor neuron cells in the spine. “They essentially nurture the sick cells into health,” she said. They secrete compounds known as growth factors that nourish the cells in the spinal cord. “They go in there and clean it up so that the whole environment looks less inflammatory … We are not letting the fact that we don’t fully understand how they work prevent us from using
them.”

Harada thinks he may already be feeling something but admits it might be wishful thinking. Trained nurses will measure his muscle strength to see if the new treatment has helped. “I am determined and relentless for them to utilize me as their guinea pig to figure out what is helping me and they can translate this into helping all the other cases of ALS,” says Harada. “I don’t want to provide false hope.”

That’s one thing that worries Dr. Paul Knoepfler, a professor of medicine at the University of California Davis. “There are a lot of clinics sprouting up, offering people stem cell treatment for anything that might be ailing you,” Knoepfler said in a telephone interview. “Some of these pop up in a strip mall, even. They might charge $20,000.”

Yet few, if any, have any real medical credibility, says Knoepfler. “For the most part, the science just isn’t there and yet people are talking about spending a whole chunk of their life savings and the clinic could be totally bogus,” he said.

“We are worried not only for specific patients, but it may tarnish the whole field generally if we have patients getting hurt or even killed by so-called stem cell treatments.”

(c) 2012 NBCNews.com Reprints

* Sioux Falls Marathon attracts runners of all ages

KSFY (ABC, Sioux Falls, SD)

Sioux Falls Marathon attracts runners of all ages

http://www.ksfy.com/story/19496437/sioux-falls-marathon-attracts-runners

Posted: Sep 09, 2012 5:35 PM EDT Updated: Sep 09, 2012 7:06 PM EDT

2,000 runners ran a marathon in Sioux Falls today, including Don Wright, 71. He’s running a marathon in each of the 50 states.

He’s a cancer survivor and since his diagnosis 9 years ago, he’s run 66 marathons since being told he had a rare form of blood cancer.

He’s run over 1,500 miles, but he says his biggest complaint in this more than 26 mile race is runner’s knee.

“It’s a goal that keeps me going and it’s important to me and it’s my way of sticking that cancer right in the eye,” Wright said.

Wright is planning to run in Hawaii in December.

He’s also running in Alaska and New Mexico.

He has a blood cancer that affects cells in the bone marrow and can damage bones.
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It cannot be cured but luckily he can avoid chemo by taking medication and he’s able to train for these marathons.

The Sioux Falls marathon takes dozens and dozens of volunteers to make this marathon happen.

Some runners who took part in the race today came from all over the United States and around the country.

Volunteers tell us they met runners from New York and even Sweden.

“When you can get people from all over the U.S. and other countries it’s definitely going to help and Sioux Falls is a prosperous city. It has shown that with the promotion they have been doing,” Dave Tuch said.

Along with the marathon and half marathon today, there was also the Miracle 5k which raises money for the Children’s Miracle Network at Sanford Children’s Hospital.

The money raised will help sick kids in our area.

Some streets were closed in Sioux Falls because of this marathon.

Downtown street like Phillips Avenue, along with parts of Western Avenue.

Even the on and off ramps of Interstate 229.