This month in the journal Cellular Immunology, researchers describe success in using a patient's own fat stem cells for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.

 

Medistem Inc., in collaboration with the company Vet-Stem Inc, the University of Western Ontario, and the University of California San Diego, reports that it used a patient's own body fat stem cells for "reprogramming" the immune system of patients with autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. The researchers provide a case report of a 67-year-old American woman who recovered from rheumatoid arthritis after intravenous treatment with adult stem cells. Vet-Stem has been using stem cell therapy to treat pets with both osteo- and rheumatoid arthritis successfully for several years.

 

Rheumatoid arthritis affects about 1% of the world's population, and three times more women suffer from it than men. In the disease, the body's own immune system attacks joints, causing extremely painful and disabling symptoms that interfere with a patient's daily activities. The disease can also affect other areas of the bodies, including internal organs.

 

 

Yale University scientists report success in using stem cells to grow partly functioning rat lungs in the laboratory, offering new hope for human lung transplants. 

 

Because of complications and organ rejection, lung transplant patients have less successful survival rates. Using a patient's own stem cells to regrow lung tissue would raise this rate because the risk of rejection would decrease dramatically.

 

The technique Yale scientists used was to remove all cells from a rat lung and then "reseed" the remaining connective tissue scaffold with the rat's stem cells. They found that the cells repopulated the framework with functional lung cells, in effect growing a new lung. When implanted back into rats, the engineered lung exchanged oxygen and carbon dioxide similarly to natural lungs for up to three hours.

 

This technique could be used with lung transplant patients. Researchers caution, however, that it could be years or even decades before such experiments could be tried in people. The study was funded by Yale and the National Institutes of Health.

 

See the Yale news article. 

 

 

A team of Japanese scientists showed that dental pulp stem cells extracted from wisdom teeth can be coaxed into what is called a "pluripotent" state--that is, stem cells that have the potential to turn into different types of cells. 

 

Researchers have been studying baby teeth and extracted wisdom teeth as possible sources of stem cells for several years. Now the Japanese scientists have shown that dental pulp--the soft living tissue inside teeth--can become these pluripotent stem cells.

 

Read the Discovery News article. 

 

Bone marrow stem cells

 

Treating disease and degeneration with adult stem cells might seem like futuristic science fiction to some people. But some stem cell treatments have already been used successfully outside of the laboratory, helping real patients get better.

 

Perhaps the most well-known treatment is using bone marrow to combat leukemia and other types of cancer; this treatment has existed for more than 50 years. Stem cells taken from donor bone marrow replace the patient's own bone marrow stem cells, and the new stem cells start producing healthy white blood cells to replace the abnormal cells that are cancerous.

 

But what about using a person's own stem cells to help him or her fight disease and degeneration? That's the next step that current researchers are investigating in a wide variety of experiments and clinical trials. To do this, they must also discover more specifically how stem cells work. The National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), is leading efforts to study stem cells in clinicial treatments of disease as well as learning more about their potential use in slowing the aging process.

 

According to the NIA, these versatile cells intrigue investigators because they are capable of transforming themselves into many different kinds of body tissue. Because of this flexibility, stem cells hold enormous potential for cell replacement or tissue repair in many age-associated degenerative disorders where loss of cells is currently irreversible, including diabetes, stroke, heart disease, MS, and Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. With millions of older Americans suffering from these conditions, gerontologists are scrambling to discover how these cells will yield any practical interventions that might help promote healthy aging.

 

Investigators suspect that embryonic stem cells can develop into almost any of the many known specialized cell types in the body, including bone, blood, and brain cells. However, adult stem cells are not embryos and cannot themselves develop into embryos. Adult stem cells apparently help repair or replace those tissues lost through natural attrition, or when they are damaged by injury or disease. Adult stem cells in bone marrow, for instance, regularly replenish the body's supply of red blood cells. Similarly, intestinal stem cells help maintain the lining of the intestines, which is frequently sloughed off in a natural process.

 

As investigators delve more deeply into how and why we age, its secrets are being deciphered at an unparalleled rate. Scientific understanding of the genetic, biochemical, and physiological aspects of this dynamic process has never been greater.