Stem cells 'seek and destroy' cancer cells

Genetically engineered stem cells from bone marrow showed promise as a potential new way to deliver a cancer-killing protein to tumors.

Experiments in cell cultures and in mice showed the adult stem cells -- a type known as mesenchymal stem cells -- could home in on cancer cells and deliver a lethal protein that attacked only the cancer while sparing normal healthy tissue.

"We've developed cells which specifically target cancer through the body and deliver an anti-cancer protein to where it is needed in a seek-and-destroy approach," said Dr. Michael Loebinger of University College London, who presented his findings at the American Thoracic Society conference in San Diego.

"Essentially, we've combined two pieces of research. The first is that mesenchymal stem cells have an innate ability to seek out tumors throughout the body," Loebinger said in a telephone interview.

Loebinger, Dr S M Janes and colleagues altered the cells to express or make the cancer-killing protein called TNF-related apoptosis-inducing ligand or TRAIL.

"This protein has the ability to cause the death only of cancer cells. By combining these two approaches, we have a cell which has the ability to go around the body and find and destroy tumors," Loebinger said.

Studies in cell cultures showed the cells were able to find and kill cells from lung, squamous, breast and cervical cancer. "Lots of cancer have sensitivity to this TRAIL protein," Loebinger said.

They also injected the cells into mice with breast tumors and showed they were able to safely kill the tumors but leave healthy tissue intact.

"When we delivered this therapy, 38 percent of the tumors were completely eliminated."

He said the goal would be to develop a cell-based cancer treatment for humans that specifically targets cancer cells.

An attractive property of these cells is that they are "immunoprivileged," meaning the body will not reject them as foreign invaders. That means they can be made in batches instead of having to make custom stem cell treatments for each patient, Loebinger said.

He said a number of safety studies would be needed, but the team hopes human trials could begin in two or three years.

Source: Reuters 21 May 2009

$18.9 million awarded for stem cell research in Maryland USA

The Maryland Technology Development Corp. awarded $18.9 million this week to dozens of researchers involved in stem cell research at private and public institutions across the state. The state has been formally funding stem cell research since legislators passed the Maryland Stem Cell Research Act of 2006. 

Stem cell research is widely regarded as having the potential to deliver groundbreaking cures to a broad range of health problems and help fuel the state's efforts to become a hub for the biotechnology industry. Fifty-nine projects received funding in the latest round of awards. The researchers work at numerous public and private organizations across Maryland, including the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, Hugo W. Moser Research Institute at Kennedy Krieger and GlobalStem. 

Source: www.baltimoresun.com 16 May 2009

Paul pins hopes on stem cell therapy to save eyesight

A Brisbane resident is pinning his hopes on experimental stem cell therapy in China to save his failing sight.

Paul Smith was born with a condition that will probably lead to blindness.

He is fundraising to undergo the controversial treatmena in six-months.

Earlier this year Paul heard about Irish girl Dakota Clarke, whose sight was partially restored after a visit to the same China clinic he intends to visit.

Mr Smith suffers from hydrocephalus, commonly known as fluid on the brain. A stint drains the fluid from his skull but one of the side affects of the illness is damage to his optic nerves, which he hopes injections of stem cells will repair.

Mr Smith said a specialist told him hypothetically he was likely to lose his site by the age of 40. Faced with such a bleak prognosis, he said he is willing to try the treatment which involves cells from donated umbilical cord blood.

“I’m nervous but that’s what keeps me going,” he said.

“I need to try and do something. I’m not just going to play the victim and just let the blindness happen.”

Mr Smith said even if his sight didn’t improve it could stave of blindness. His wife Mandi will accompany him on the trip to Qingdao for the treatment by Beike Biotechnology.

He said the trip and treatment would cost $64,000 and he is registering the name Pesos for Paul’s Peepers.

To donate to Mr Smith’s appeal call 0414719486.

Source: http://city-south-news.whereilive.com.au 25 May 2009

Teflon Knees: New replacements for torn and worn-out cartilage include freeze-dried collagen

It seems as though modern humans and their knees aren't particularly well adapted to each other. We pound them down jogging on pavement, and we rip them up chasing inflated balls around a court or a field or zipping down snowy mountains on fiberglass planks. If we manage to escape this kind of trauma somehow, we just wear them out by living so long.

With all the practice repairing knees, orthopedic surgeons have made incredible progress over the past 25 years in learning new ways to reconstruct and replace knees. Ligament tears that once ended athletic careers now earn a lenient sentence of outpatient arthroscopic surgery and six months of rehab.

While the progress is appreciated, there is hardly a middle-aged athlete alive who doesn't wish more could be done, especially with the most nettlesome of knee problems: torn or worn-down cartilage. (Full disclosure: I have sampled heavily from the buffet of knee surgeries--a pair of ligament replacements, a pair of meniscus trimmings and an attempted cartilage repair job. The cartilage repair surgery was the hardest to recover from and sapped the most from a once-respectable vertical leap.)

A series of three recent papers in the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research outline an approach that could make one type of cartilage repair more successful. The paper's authors, researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cambridge University in the U.K., describe a way to create a layered scaffolding of materials very similar to those already in bone and cartilage that can be placed in a torn section of cartilage to entice new cartilage to grow there.

Lorna Gibson, a professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT and one of the leaders of the research, says the teams' scaffolding improves on other similar approaches because it closely mimics the bone and cartilage interface in the human body.

The researchers' work is directed at a type of smooth cartilage that covers the ends of bones like Teflon, allowing hinged joints to glide open and closed easily. It's called articular cartilage, and it is strange stuff. Myron Spector, a Harvard Medical School professor and director of tissue engineering at VA Boston Healthcare System, describes articular cartilage cells as being "imprisoned in their own matrix."

The cells are thick with a tough, fibrous protein called collagen. They are unserviced by blood vessels or nerve cells. When there's a tear, there is no bleeding, no clotting, and no place for cells to migrate to and regrow. In fact, the fluid that lubricates the joint, called synovial fluid, is designed specifically to prevent clots, because scar tissue would gum up joints.

Spector says his work on cartilage can be more frustrating than his work on central nervous system problems. "You'd expect cartilage to be a no-brainer," he says, intending the pun. "But it's tough. It gets disheartening."

Investor-funded research could bring march of science to a standstill

As private concerns increasingly tread on the territory of academic researchers, the result could be secrecy, delay and the pursuit of quick financial returns.

Dr. Philip H. Schwartz spent six years providing university researchers with neural stem cells cultured by a method he had helped invent at the Salk Institute in La Jolla.

He figured this was a win-win. His technique provided biomedical scientists with live tissue, an improvement over the dead cells, harvested from the brains of deceased patients, that had been the standard fare. Science marched ahead, bringing novel neurological applications closer to reality. The principles of wide dissemination of knowledge and scientific collaboration were served. 

Then his employer, Children’s Hospital of Orange County, got a letter from Palo Alto-based StemCells Inc. The firm warned that Schwartz's program infringed its patents in the neural stem cell field and it wished to, er, discuss a licensing arrangement.

The hospital's lawyers advised Schwartz to stop sending out cells until they could make a deal with the company. 

That was two years ago. There's still no licensing deal, and there haven't even been talks for more than a year. 

"The long and the short of it," Schwartz told me last week, "is that I'm dead in the water."

On the surface, there shouldn't be a huge obstacle to a deal between StemCells and CHOC. 

Both say they're open to an agreement. There isn't much overlap among their core clienteles: The company "is not in the business of selling cells to researchers" in basic science, according to its general counsel, Ken Stratton. Conversely, CHOC's Children's Research Institute is interested in supporting only "academic noncommercial researchers," says its director, Brent A. Dethlefs.

But in the biotech world, where millions or even billions of dollars in profits beckon to those who can assert ownership of important discoveries, good intentions and purely scientific goals don't matter like they used to. Access by basic researchers to the essential building blocks of biomedical advances has been shrinking for years, thanks to a land rush by entrepreneurs wielding patent portfolios. 

As the conflict between CHOC and StemCells suggests, the penetration of private investment concerns into what used to be largely academic pastures threatens to hobble, rather than hasten, the march of science. The harvest may be secrecy, delay and the directing of research only toward developments that promise quick financial returns. 

In the stem cell field, "the pendulum may have swung too far" toward private enterprise and away from open research, says Gregory D. Graff, a patent expert at Colorado State University.

As it happens, StemCells has good reason to support the needs of academic researchers. For one thing, progress in fundamental stem cell research is likely to "improve the value of their [patent] portfolio," Schwartz observes. 

For another, the company's founders include three leading academic stem cell scientists: Irving L. Weissman of Stanford University, David J. Anderson of Caltech andFred Gage of Salk -- in whose very lab Schwartz developed his method. 

None of the three appears to have gotten directly involved in the discussions, although one might think they would be especially sensitive to the need to balance the interests of private enterprise and academia. (None answered my requests for comment.)

So there has been no progress. The company says it did not explicitly threaten a lawsuit or even demand that CHOC cease distributing neural stem cells. But considering the firm's access to litigation firepower -- it's been waging a patent battle in court with another firm, Neuralstem Inc., since 2006 -- Dethlefs is probably wise to see its letter as a "veiled threat" and CHOC's lawyers prudent in suspending Schwartz's program. 

Each side says it's waiting for the other to make an offer, but things may be moving backward. On Jan. 23, Dethlefs sent out a memo explaining to researchers that because of the "unresolved legal issue," it wouldn't be distributing cell lines that might come under the StemCells patents for the foreseeable future. The memo was postedlast month by John Simpson, a stem cell policy advocate, on his blog atconsumerwatchdog.org.

The problem affects more than just biotech. This month, former Intel Corp. Chief Executive Andrew Grove told a Silicon Valley audience that the evolution of patents into investment assets controlled by speculators threatens to stifle innovation in many industries. 

AT&T's decision to license the transistor for a nominal $25,000 fee after its invention at Bell Labs, Grove maintained, helped launch the electronics industry and led, eventually, to the invention of the microprocessor. Today, the transistor would be tied up in a web of patent claims and its license priced for short-term profits.

The corralling of scientific discoveries behind patent walls is connected to the trend of major universities viewing their own labs as potential profit centers. 

This trend rose up to bite academia on the behind in 2002, when Duke University lost an important case in federal court. To fend off a claim that its physics lab infringed on a former professor's patents, Duke asserted the "experimental use" exemption in patent law, which gave researchers doing purely academic work immunity from patent infringement claims. 

But a federal appeals court found that Duke was, at heart, a business -- albeit one largely devoted to academic research. The judges pointed out that the university wasn't shy about "pursuing an aggressive patent licensing program" of its own. They narrowed the experimental use exemption to a pinprick, applying it only to research done "solely for amusement, to satisfy idle curiosity, or for strictly philosophical inquiry." The Supreme Court upheld the interpretation in 2003, jacking up the cost of basic research for everyone.

Navigating through patent thickets has become a permanent, and costly, part of any researcher's existence, especially in the life sciences. 

Graff says this phenomenon is becoming especially pronounced in stem cell science, which is especially dependent on collaboration but is already being cordoned off by commercial entities claiming property rights to essential research. The best solution, he says, may be for academic institutions -- where 45% of all stem cell research is performed -- to create collaborative patent pools so they can more freely disseminate information and technology without giving up all their potentially lucrative patent rights.

Until that happens, however, programs like CHOC's will remain at the mercy of patent holders. Dethlefs says he believes that neural stem cells could be an important therapeutic tool and that Schwartz's program fed directly into CHOC's responsibility to serve its patients. Meanwhile, he says, "we're considering our options," which is the sort of thing you hear from people who don't have many options. 

Source: Latimes.com 25 May 2009

Stem cell research gets £4m boost

A GRANT of £4 million has been awarded by the government to scientists researching potential stem cell treatments for broken bones.

Over the next five years, teams at Imperial College London and the universities of Nottingham, Southampton and Keele will look at how stem cell technology can be used to repair human skeletal tissue.

Source: news.scotsmen.com 25 May 2009

Medical Council of Thailand finalises stem cell regulation

The Medical Council of Thailand has completed a draft regulation on clinical trials using stem cell technology to provide consumers with better protection.

A panel of researchers from medical schools and private hospitals and a representative of the Food and Drug Administration agreed on the draft regulation on Friday after years of delaying a decision amid fears the regulation would block the benefits of using stem cell technology for lab research.

"The purpose of this regulation is to protect consumers from deceptive stem cell therapies," council president Somsak Lohlekha said. "So they don't have to unnecessarily pay huge sums of money for any treatment which is still at the experimental stage."

The draft regulation will be submitted to the public health minister for approval and published in the Royal Gazette. The process will take about three months before the country's first regulation on medical ethics regarding stem cell research for human treatment will be put into effect, he said. The regulation requires all studies on stem cell treatment, except for blood diseases, to be approved by an "ethics and academic panel" as well as the ethics committee of each medical school and hospital where any stem cell research would be undertaken.

Dr Somsak said panel members would be central to decisions on whether stem cell studies on humans at medical schools and hospitals met scientific and ethical standards. He said the panel would be made up of impartial experts on stem cell technology from medical universities.

Doctors conducting stem cell studies would be required to register with the Medical Council for monitoring and consumer protection purposes.

Dr Somsak said private clinics, especially dermatology clinics, providing expensive stem cell treatment were mushrooming, mainly due to a loophole in the drug bill.

The law could not be enforced against dermatologists formulating individual medications for patients or manufacturers and importers of cosmetics having animal stem cells as ingredients.

He also warned people about businesses that offer storage of stem cells at birth, which can cost as much as 200,000 baht.

Such services are reportedly popular among wealthy people who believe technological advancements will allow the cells to be used for treating future diseases.

He said scientific innovations could retrieve stem cells from blood for treatment at much cheaper cost. A warning on these misleading advertisements would be published on the Medical Council website, he said.

Source: Bangkok Post 25 May 2009