Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Information

The truly differentiates regenerative medicine from many current therapies is that regenerative medicine has the potential to provide a cure to failing or impaired tissues.

What is regenerative medicine?
Regenerative medicine is an applied field of tissue engineering that holds the realistic promise of regenerating damaged tissues in vivo (in the living body) and externally creating �tissues for life� available for implantation. Through research and products developed from this field, previously untreatable diseases will become easily and routinely cured.

How regenerative medicine works
Regenerative medicine is the application of tissue science, tissue engineering, and related biological and engineering principles that restore the structure and function of damaged tissues and organs. This new field encompasses many novel approaches to treatment of disease and restoration of biological function through the following methods:
* Using therapies that prompt the body to autonomously regenerate damaged tissues
* Using tissue engineered implants to prompt regeneration
* Direct transplantation of healthy tissues into damaged environments

Collectively, these treatments allow for two substantial advances over current medicine. The first advance is the potential to in vivo (in the living body) regenerate currently irreparably damaged tissues so that they return to full functionality. The second advance is to be able to produce tissues in vitro (in the laboratory) to be used for transplantation purposes when regeneration is not possible. This technology has the potential to cure diseases ranging from diabetes (through regeneration of islets) to the repair of cancerous tissues (by replacing the removed cancerous tissue with externally grown healthy tissue). By creating these tissues for life, regenerative medicine treatments will undoubtedly lead to a tremendous improvement in quality of life and healthcare.

Regenerative medicine helps natural healing processes to work faster, or to repair missing or damaged tissue that would not ordinarily have regrown. Strategies include transplants of stem cells, the use of scaffold materials, and biochemical orders issued to cells. Regenerative therapies have been demonstrated (in trials or the laboratory) to heal broken bones, bad burns, blindness, deafness, heart damage, nerve damage, Parkinson's disease and other conditions. Work continues to bring these advances to patients.

Regenerative medicine will help to produce extended healthy longevity, as we will be able to repair some of the damage caused by aging, organ by organ. Aging damages every part of our bodies, however - including the stem cells required for regenerative therapies! Until we can address the root causes of age-related degeneration, we must learn how to regenerate every part of the human body. We must also become capable of reliably preventing and defeating cancer in all its forms and repairing age-related damage to the brain in situ - increasing risk of cancer with age cannot be prevented through regenerative medicine, and the brain cannot simply be replaced with new tissue.

These tasks will be a mammoth undertaking. Nonetheless, like all great advances in medicine, it is a worthy, noble cause. Today, hundreds of millions of people live in pain and suffering - and will eventually die - as a result of degenerative conditions of aging. Today, we stand within reach of alleviating all this death and anguish, preventing it from ever occuring again. We should rise to the challenge!

All of the most impressive demonstrations of regenerative medicine since the turn of the century have used varying forms of stem cells - embryonic, adult, and most recently induced pluripotent stem cells - to trigger healing in the patient. A great deal of press attention, for example, has been given to successes in alleviating life-threatening heart conditions. However, successes have been demonstrated in repairing damage in other organs - such as the liver, kidneys, and so forth.

Improvements made in engineering heart repair patches from stem cells

Univ. of Washington (UW) advisers accept succeeded in engineering animal tissue patches chargeless of some problems that accept balked stem-cell adjustment for damaged hearts.

Video clips show that the heart repair patch was engineered from a mix of stem cells in the University of Washington laboratory of Dr. Charles Murry. The tissue patch is shown beating spontaneously and synchronously in a lab dish.

The annular patches can be bogus in sizes alignment from beneath than a millimeter to a half-inch in diameter. Until now, engineering tissue for affection adjustment has been bedfast by beef dying at the displace core, because nutrients and oxygen accomplished the edges of the application but not the center. To accomplish affairs worse, the axle abstracts to position the beef generally accepted to be harmful.

Heart tissue patches composed alone of affection beef beef couldn't abound big abundant or survive continued abundant to booty authority afterwards they were built-in in rodents, the advisers acclaimed in their article, appear aftermost ages in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The advisers absitively to attending at the achievability of architecture new tissue with accumulation curve for the oxygen and nutrients that active beef require.

The scientists testing this idea are from the UW Center for Cardiovascular Biology and the UW Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, under the guidance of senior author Dr. Charles "Chuck" Murry, professor of pathology and bioengineering. The lead author is Dr. Kelly R. Stevens, a UW doctoral student in bioengineering who came up with solutions to the problems observed in previous grafts. The study is part of a collaborative tissue engineering effort called BEAT (Biological Engineering of Allogeneic Tissue).

Stevens and her fellow researchers added two other types of cells to the heart muscle cell mixture. These were cells similar to those that line the inside of blood vessels and cells that provide the vessel's muscular support. All of the heart muscle cells were derived from embryonic stem cells, while the vascular cells were derived from embryonic stem cells or a variety of more mature sources such as the umbilical cord. The resulting cell mixture began forming a tissue containing tiny blood vessels.

"These were rudimentary blood vessel networks like those seen early in embryonic development," Murry said.

In contrast to the heart muscle cell-only tissue, which failed to survive transplantation and which remained apart from the rat's heart circulatory system, the pre-formed vessels in the mixed-cell tissue joined with the rat's heart circulatory system and delivered rat blood to the transplanted graft.

"The viability of the transplanted graft was remarkably improved," Murry observed. "We think the gain in viability is due to the ability for the tissue to form blood vessels."

Equally as exciting, the scientists observed that the patches of engineered tissue actively contracted. Moreover, these contractions could be electronically paced, up to what would translate to 120 beats per minute. Beyond that point, the tissue patch didn't relax fully and the contractions weakened. However, the average resting adult heart pulses about 70 beats per minute. This suggests that the engineered tissue could, within limits, theoretically keep pace with typical adult heart muscle, according to the study authors.

Another physical quality that made the mixed-cell tissue patches superior to heart muscle-cell patches was their mechanical stiffness, which more closely resembled human heart muscle. This was probably due to the addition of supporting cells, which created connective tissues. Passive stiffness allows the heart to fill properly with blood before it contracts.

When the researchers implanted these mixed celled, pre-vascularized tissue patches into rodents, the patches grew into cell grafts that were ten times larger than the too-small results from tissue composed of heart muscle cells only. The rodents were bred without an immune system that rejects tissue transplants.

Murry noted that these results have significance beyond their contribution to the ongoing search for ways to treat heart attack damage by regenerating heart tissue with stem cells.

The study findings, he observed, suggest that researchers consider including blood vessel-generating and vascular-supporting elements when designing human tissues for certain other types of regenerative therapies unrelated to heart disease.

One of the major obstacles still to be overcome is the likelihood that people's immune systems would reject the stem transplant unless they take medications for the rest of their lives to suppress this reaction. Murry hopes someday that scientists would be able to create new tissues from a person's own cells.

"Researchers can currently turn human skin cells back to stem cells, and then move them forward again into other types of cells, such as heart muscle and blood vessel cells," Murry said. "We hope this will allow us to build tissues that the body will recognize as 'self.'"

While the clinical application of tissues engineered from stem cells in treating hearts damaged from heart attacks or birth defects is still in the future, the researchers believe progress has been made. This study showed that researchers could create the first entirely human heart tissue patch from human embryonic cell-derived heart muscle cells, blood vessel lining cells and fiber-producing cells, and successfully engraft the tissue into an animal.

Video about Adult Stem Cells and the End of Aging

I believe therapies like those Dr. Rosenthal described -- using adult stem cells as opposed to embryonic stem cells, which are at the heart of the stem cell controversy -- are and will continue to be a major, exciting part of the future of medicine, especially anti-aging medicine.

As you age, your stem cells diminish in quality and quantity, so just when you require strong stem cells the most, you’re becoming deficient. Hence your organs and tissues eventually wear out and need to be restored or replaced.
In addition to eventually helping restore internal organs, immune systems and more, adult stem cell therapies hold the promise of restoring old skin.

Stem Cells Bank or Stem Cell Storage

By storing stem cells taken from your baby’s umbilical cord you are insuring your newborns future health against diseases and injuries such as cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular and blood disorders.

Stem cells are the foundation for every organ, tissue and cell in the human body. These amazing cells of life can be used for life threatening treatments today, and may offer the possibility of regenerative medicine in the future for your baby and your family.

Stem beef are currently acclimated for alleviative some diseases, and action achievement of a approaching cure for abounding of today's cureless diseases. Parents are now able to accept claret or beef from the umbilical bond of their bairn adolescent stored for the child's approaching ache treatments. This commodity gives an overview of the action of axis corpuscle storage.

Stem cell storage is acceptable a added and added accepted best amid parents of bairn children, and is almost accepted in the USA. It is now acceptable more accepted in the UK. These beef accept been acclimated for cartilage bottom transplants back 1988. They may, in the future, action a cure for abounding diseases for which there is anon no cure. Altitude and injuries such as affection disease, academician damage, deafness, amaurosis and diabetes. Even beard accident and missing teeth could be treatable in the future.

The abstraction abaft storage of your child's axis beef is that they will accept a accumulation of accordant corpuscle types to be acclimated in the analysis of any disease, abrasion or action that they ability ache from in the future. Obviously, this additionally depends on advances actuality fabricated in medical procedures application these cells. If a cure for this action has not been apparent by the time the adolescent has developed it, again they are of no use for analysis purposes. The accepted ambit of altitude treatable with axis beef is almost small, however, cogent time and money is actuality put into this breadth of analysis and approaching cures assume to be awful likely.

The storage action begins at the bearing of the child, application an umbilical bond claret accumulating kit supplied by the bond claret accumulator company. A healthcare able (a phlebotomist, doctor, assistant etc.) collects claret from the umbilical bond application the accumulating kit. The action is accessible for both mother and baby, and is absolutely controllable to both. The claret is again transported to the class for processing by the technicians. In some laboratories the accomplished claret is frozen, but added laboratories abstract the axis beef afore freezing. The sample is arctic application aqueous nitrogen at about bare 190 degrees Celsius, and can be stored in the accumulator catchbasin at this temperature indefinitely. Some accumulator tanks use aqueous appearance nitrogen and some use vapour appearance nitrogen. Vapour appearance nitrogen appears to be more accepted as there has been some affirmation of aqueous appearance nitrogen appointment communicable diseases from one sample to others.

Myelodysplastic syndrome - Stem Cell Disorder

Myelodysplastic syndromes are cartilage bottom axis corpuscle disorders consistent in chaotic and abortive hematopoiesis (blood production) embodied by irreversible quantitative and qualitative defects in hematopoietic (blood-forming) cells. In a majority of cases, the advance of ache is abiding with gradually deepening cytopenias due to accelerating cartilage bottom failure. Approximately one-third of patients with MDS advance to AML aural months to a few years.

The myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS, aforetime accepted as "preleukemia") are a assorted accumulating of hematological altitude affiliated by abortive assembly (or dysplasia) of myeloid claret beef and accident of transformation to astute myelogenous leukemia (AML).[1] MDS has been begin in humans, bodies and dogs. Anemia astute abiding claret admixture is frequently present. Astronomer Carl Sagan, biographer Roald Dahl, applesauce saxophonist Michael Brecker and extra Nina Foch died of this condition.

Signs and symptoms

The average age at analysis of a MDS is amid 60 and 75 years; a few patients are adolescent than 50; MDS diagnoses are attenuate in children. Males are hardly added frequently afflicted than females. Signs and affection are all-embracing and about accompanying to the claret cytopenias:
* Anemia—chronic tiredness, conciseness of breath, algid sensation, sometimes chest pain
* Neutropenia (low neutrophil count) —increased susceptibility to infection
* Thrombocytopenia (low platelet count) —increased susceptibility to bleeding and ecchymosis (bruising), as able-bodied as subcutaneous hemorrhaging consistent in purpura or petechia[2]

Many individuals are asymptomatic, and claret cytopenia or added problems are articular as a allotment of a accepted claret count:
* neutropenia, anemia and thrombocytopenia (low corpuscle counts of white and red claret cells, and platelets, respectively);
* splenomegaly or rarely hepatomegaly;
* aberrant granules in cells, aberrant nuclear appearance and size; and/or
* chromosomal abnormalities, including chromosomal translocations and aberrant chromosome number.

Although there is some accident for developing astute myelogenous leukemia, about 50% of deaths action as a aftereffect of bleeding or infection. Leukemia that occurs as a aftereffect of myelodysplasia is awfully aggressive to treatment.