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- Parent Category: Cancer
- Category: Treatments
by Amber Dance
A biotech start-up sees stem cells as targets, not transplants
When Captain Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise travel back in time to the 1980s in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Dr. McCoy runs across an elderly woman with kidney failure languishing in the hospital. He offers her a pill to swallow. Minutes later, the cured patient rejoices before her baffled physicians: "The doctor gave me a pill and I grew a new kidney!"
To physician Leonard Zon of Harvard Medical School in Boston, the scene parallels his goals for the company he helped found, Fate Therapeutics. Fate, located in La Jolla, California, launched in 2007 with a US$12 million budget. Fate aims to develop small molecules and biologics that stimulate a patient's own stem cells, marrying the tried-and-true methodology of drug development to the relatively new science of stem cells.
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- Parent Category: Cancer
- Category: News
by Simone Alves
Chromosome instability is a problem for long-term culture of human embryonic stem cells
Long-term culture of human embryonic stem (hES) cells can cause them to gain or lose large sections of chromosomes, report two papers in Nature Biotechnology. This instability can lessen the reproducibility and reliability of experimental results, and, by raising the specter of cancer, could hinder the clinical application of stem cells.
Checking cell lines in practice is not always easy, experimentally or logistically, says Anselme Perrier of The Institute for Stem Cell Therapy in Evry, France. He and his colleagues discovered that long-term culture of five hES cell lines resulted in a genomic amplification of the 20q.11.21 locus in four cases. "We discovered this mutation during routine quality control" says Perrier, "and it was happening too frequently for it to simply be an artefact".
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- Parent Category: Cancer
- Category: News
by Monya Baker
The ISSCR hopes its handbook will prompt regulators and governments to shut shady clinics
Worried that profit-hungry quacks are exploiting patients and endangering clinical research by offering risky stem cell procedures, the International Society for Stem Cell Research has published documents to warn patients away from fraudulent clinics and to spur government authorities to shut the clinics down.
The society condemned stem cell tourism, saying that shady clinics exploit patients' hopes and could jeopardize "legitimate progress of translational stem cell research."1 Researchers worry clinics promote unreasonable expectations for how quickly mainstream work will progress and generate bad publicity that could tarnish the entire field. Patients and patient advocates often express worry that the scientific community is moving too slowly and say patients should be free to try all options.
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- Parent Category: Cancer
- Category: Treatments
by Sorapop Kiatpongsam and Douglas Sipp
Costs, risks, benefits, and a call for regulation
For some patients with debilitating illnesses, hope seems only a plane ride away. Though the scientific mainstream has dismissed stem cell clinics operating outside standard medical practice, patients continue to go. Patients and providers accuse the biomedical establishment of inaction and excessive caution; the biomedical establishment accuses providers of selling false hope to patients who have exhausted all available options. The resulting impasse arguably stands as the greatest current threat to the advancement of stem cell therapies, and the strongest evidence of the need for regulatory frameworks capable of addressing the needs of the diverse stakeholders in the 'offshore' stem cell drama.
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- Parent Category: Cancer
- Category: News
by Monya Baker
Healthy and cancerous stem cells protect their DNA
Recent studies in cancer treatments point to an ugly truth: the best cells to destroy are the most resistant to attack. Work in several human cancer types indicates that only a subset of cancer cells is capable of regenerating tumours when transplanted into mice. Michael Clarke of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, one of the first researchers to identify such a subset in a solid tumour1, hypothesized that these cancer stem cells would be less susceptible to chemotherapies than the other cells in the tumour.
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- Parent Category: Cancer
- Category: Detection
Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have identified a new biological marker present in the urine of patients with prostate cancer that indicates whether the cancer is progressing and spreading.
In experiments reported in the February 12, 2009, issue of the journal Nature, the scientists identified 10 metabolites that become more abundant in prostate cells as cancer progresses. Their studies showed that one of these chemicals, sarcosine, helps prostate cancer cells invade surrounding tissue.
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