jtotheizzoe:

curiositycounts:

Brian Dettmer’s surgical book sculptures, meticulously carved into vintage volumes and hand-cut one page at a time.

This is simply one of the greatest creations, repurposed or not, that I have ever seen. I can not fathom how long this would take. Bravo.

sciencecenter:

Helpful fetuses donate stem cells to their mother 

This is a pretty astounding finding. Researchers have long discussed the potential for stem cells to be used to replace dead or damaged tissue, but, once again it appears that nature has beaten us to the punch. A team from the Mt Sinai School of Medicine bred male mice whose cells expressed GFP (a fluorescent protein, allowing for the cells to be tracked) and mated them with normal female mice. This meant that the fetus cells, with half of the male’s genetic material, would also be tagged fluorescently. Then the researchers induced a heart attack in half of the female mice. When they checked the heart afterwards, they found lots of glowing green stem cells which had to have been donated by the fetus. Incredibly, some of the cells had even differentiated into, for example, smooth muscle cells responsible for beating. 

Fetal stem cells have already been implicated in helping human mothers heal from heart disease. Hopefully more research along these lines can finally deliver on the promise of stem cells.

jtotheizzoe:

Stem cells transformed into brain cells to treat Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease is a debilitating condition where dopamine-producing cells (dopamine is a chemical messenger in the brain) in a region of the brain called the substantia nigra die off. This region of the midbrain is important to basic movments, and the symptoms include tremors and shaking (like Michael J. Fox).

Although we still don’t know why they die, it’s long been a goal to try and replace these damaged neurons with healthy ones. Stem cells, you say?

Oh yeah, we’re all over that, as reported in Nature this week:

In a series of experiments, the team gave animals six injections of more than a million cells each, to parts of the brain affected by Parkinson’s. The neurons survived, formed new connections and restored lost movement in mouse, rat and monkey models of the disease, with no sign of tumour development. The improvement in monkeys was crucial, as the rodent brains required fewer working neurons to overcome their symptoms.

On the prospect of future human trials, Dr Studer said: “We now have the right cells, but to put them into humans requires them to be produced in a specialised facility rather than a laboratory, for safety reasons. We have removed the main biological bottleneck and now it’s an engineering problem.”

(via guardian.co.uk, image of dopamine-producing neural stem cells from Sonja Kriks/Lorenz Studer)

ohyeahdevelopmentalbiology:

ucsdhealthsciences:

An idea from which hope stems

In a commentary to be published in today’s issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell, UC Davis researcher Paul S. Knoepfler and colleagues note the vast and still-expanding possibilities of creating stem cells from a patient’s own skin cells, then using them to treat a diverse range of conditions, from Parkinson’s disease to cancer.

Their enthusiasm is understandable and justified. In the five years since the first scientific paper appeared describing the development of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), significant progress has been made, much of it fueled by funding and support from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, itself only seven years old. 

UC San Diego and its stem cell scientists have been among the leaders in iPSC research. For example:

• David Traver and colleagues have identified the gene and key signaling pathways needed to make hematopoietic stem cells (the cells that create all blood cell types) using iPSCs.
• Kang Zhang’s lab has created stable, self-renewing neural stem cells
• Alysson Muotri and colleagues have created a model of an “autistic neuron” using iPSCs taken from patients with Rett syndrome.
• Muotri and international collaborators have also generated new insights into the causes of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) using iPSCs.

To be sure, many questions and obstacles remain. Kun Zhang and colleagues at several research institutions, for example, reported earlier this year finding troubling mutations in iPSCs, enough to suggest more rigorous screening procedures will be needed before the cells can be used clinically. Similar genetic abnormalities were reported in a January 2011 paper by a multinational team that included UC San Diego researchers.  And research by biology professor Yang Xu indicates therapies based upon iPSCs could provoke immune rejection problems.

Such discoveries do not undermine the promise and potential of iPSCs. Indeed, they are necessary to ensure that progress toward tangible stem cell-based treatments and achievements is real.