Stem Cells

Expectant parents must make several important medical decisions. Among them: whether to have prenatal genetic testing, request pain medication during labor, strive for a natural birth or circumcise a male baby? Perhaps one of the most overlooked parts of childbirth preparation is whether to save or donate the infant's umbilical cord blood. Umbilical cords are usually discarded as medical waste.

Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, reported Tuesday that they had removed skin cells from two patents with heart failure, returned those cells to an embryonic state, and then transformed them into beating heart cells that could communicate with the patients' existing heart tissue. “We have shown that it is possible to take skin cells from an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young - the equivalent to this stage of his heart cells when he was just born,” study leader Dr. Lior Gepstein said in a statement.

Taking the next step in a series of breakthrough stem cell experiments, scientists have cured sickle cell anemia in mice by rewinding their skin cells to an embryonic state and manipulating them to create healthy, genetically matched replacement tissue.

The proposal is pretty simple: Levy a $1-a-pack tax on cigarettes in California and spend most of the proceeds on medical research. Voters might base their decisions on the matter on questions as simple as whether they oppose any new taxes, or whether they're glad to see a revenue producer that, by raising the price of cigarettes, is sure to lower smoking rates. But it's also possible that Californians will ponder some deeper questions -- chief among those is whether they want to spend the money to fund research on cancer and cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases.

Ushering in a new era in medicine, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Friday that it had cleared the way for the world's first clinical trial of a therapy derived from human embryonic stem cells. By early summer, a handful of patients with severe spinal cord injuries will be eligible for injections of specialized nerve cells designed to enable electrical signals to travel between the brain and the rest of the body.

With the stroke of a pen, President Obama cleared the way Monday for the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies to fund research using all kinds of human embryonic stem cells. "Scientists believe these tiny cells may have the potential to help us understand, and possibly cure, some of our most devastating diseases and conditions," Obama said at the signing ceremony. Obama's executive order removes funding restrictions put in place by President George W.

Alone at his computer, drool sliding down his chin, Tom Hill searched the Internet for anything that could save him. His 55-year-old body was gradually shutting down. His muscles twitched uncontrollably. He could no longer talk, so he scribbled notes to communicate with his wife, Valerie. Seven months earlier, he had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease — an incurable deterioration of the nervous system that spares the cognitive parts of the brain, leaving its victims sharply aware as they slowly die. The doctors told him there was no way to reverse the disease — no drugs, no surgeries, no other therapies.

Making good on a popular campaign pledge, President Obama will sign an executive order Monday rescinding restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research, administration officials said Friday -- instantly making hundreds of millions of new dollars available for the controversial science.

News that Chinese researchers have succeeded in growing healthy living mice from mouse skin cells takes scientists a significant step closer to human cloning, experts say, and is thus likely to reopen debate about the ethics of such reproductive techniques. The new feat -- in which animals were grown from cells that had been reverted back to their embryonic state -- is technically different from cloning. But the outcome is the same in both cases: a genetically identical copy of the donor animal.

The government issued final rules Monday expanding taxpayer-funded research using embryonic stem cells, easing scientists' fears that some of the oldest batches might not qualify and promising a master list of all that do.

Patients who are lucky enough to get a transplant for a failed organ usually face a lifetime on anti-rejection drugs, which are expensive, dangerous and not always effective. But in the future, those drugs may not be needed. A new study suggests that patients receiving an organ that's less than a perfect match can be protected against rejection by a second transplant — this time of the organ donor's imperfectly matched stem cells. Though preliminary, the new study is being hailed as a potential game-changer in the field of transplantation, a mystifying development that could offer hope to hundreds of thousands of patients who await or have received donor kidneys and depend on a harsh regimen of daily anti-rejection pills.

Researchers have used cardiac stem cells to regenerate heart muscle in patients who have suffered heart attacks, also known as myocardial infarction. The small preliminary study, which was conducted by the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, involved 25 patients who had suffered heart attacks in the previous one and a half to three months.  Seventeen of the study subjects received infusions of stem cells cultured from a raisin-sized chunk of their own heart tissue, which had been removed via catheter.

Like blood and plasma, stem cells are usually obtained through an easy procedure, and the people who donate them quickly generate more. But in other ways, they're markedly different. There might be only one or two potential donors who are a good match for a patient in need of stem cells. That means donors who are less than entirely altruistic are in a good position to demand thousands of dollars for their stem cells, which would make the life-saving transplant, sometimes used in the treatment of certain cancers and autoimmune diseases, available mainly to the rich.

Two patients with vision problems who received injections of retinal cells made from human embryonic stem cells have seen marked improvement in their vision four months later, according to a preliminary study on the safety and efficacy of the pioneering treatment. The report , published online Monday in the journal Lancet, is the first to describe results of an actual treatment derived from human embryonic stem cells. The patients -- one with dry age-related macular degeneration and the other with a pediatric version of the disease called Stargardt's macular dystrophy -- were treated at UCLA over the summer.

For years, Geron Corp. had claimed to be in the vanguard among California companies engaged in stem cell research. So it was something of a stunner when it announced Nov. 14 that it was abandoning the stem cell field completely. Geron's shares fell 20% the next day, but that was probably nothing compared with how far spirits must have fallen at the California stem cell agency, which just a few months earlier had made its highest-profile investment ever by awarding Menlo Park-based Geron a $25-million loan to help fund the first human trial of stem cell-based spinal cord therapy.

Last week, as the 2012 election season heated up, three researchers reported on American attitudes toward federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Their conclusion: If American politicians listen to majority opinion, federal funding for stem cell funding is more secure than if they heed the party lines, in which case the field may be in for more turmoil. Robert J. Blendon, Minah Kang Kim and John M. Benson, all affiliated with the Harvard School of Public Health, wrote the perspective article, which was published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.  The piece described a polling review project sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

In the annals of wrongheaded things done with the best intentions, the California stem cell program has always been in a category of its own. The $6-billion program was enacted by voters in 2004 as Proposition 71 after a campaign of exceptional intellectual dishonesty, featuring vignettes of sufferers from diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other heartbreaking diseases for which it seemed to promise imminent cures through research into embryonic stem cells.

Scientists reported Thursday that for the first time they have made human embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos, a development that the government's top stem cell official said would make the controversial research eligible for federal funding. Story Landis, who chairs the National Institute of Health's stem cell task force, said that with certain safeguards, the new method appeared to comply with federal restrictions that have largely cut scientists off from the $28 billion the government spends on medical research each year.

For patients paralyzed by spinal cord injuries, Geron Corp.'s stem cell research was the shining hope. The biotech firm showered scientists with millions of dollars to develop a treatment to reverse spinal damage. The therapy was the first treatment derived from embryonic stem cells to be cleared by the Food and Drug Administration for testing in humans. But last week, Geron abruptly pulled the plug on its pioneering trial and the rest of its stem cell business, including early work on treatments for heart ailments, diabetes and other diseases.

Biotech company Geron Corp. announced Monday that it would cease work on its stem cell programs, citing financial reasons. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based biotech company was a leader in the field and had been conducting a Phase 1 clinical trial of a human embryonic stem cell-based therapy for patients with spinal cord injuries.  Four patients had participated thus far in that effort, which was designed to test the new treatment's safety.  GRNOPC1, as...