“This whole thing is a win-win,” says the cancer survivor, who had surgery using stem cells
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Suzanne Somers Gets Experimental Breast Reconstruction
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., Feb. 1, 2012 /PRNewswire/ – Cosmetic Surgeon, Nathan Newman, MD, has innovated a scar -free, knife-free procedure that can restore a youthful appearance to up to TEN body parts …
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Dr. Nathan Newman's STEM CELL LIFT® Rejuvenates 10 Body Parts in ONE Scar-free, Knife-free Procedure
Just last week, military brass vowed that the force of the future would be “smaller and leaner.” Apparently, the Army’s taking that pretty damn literally. They want smaller, leaner soldiers. Their best idea to do it? Give GIs transplants of extra fat cells.
Seriously. In the Army’s latest round of small-business research awards, they’ve green-lit a proposal to manufacture transplantable brown fat cells, all in an effort to catalyze rapid weight loss. Portlier soldiers, you might recall, are turning into a major dilemma for top brass. An estimated 75 percent of today’s young Americans are either too fat, too sickly or too dumb to serve. The Army’s even overhauled their fitness program, in part to accommodate softer recruits, by swapping long runs and grueling drills for yoga and calisthenics.
Leg lifts and downward dogs, however, don’t offer much of a calorie-burning boost. Brown fat tissue, however, does. At first glance, the idea of adding fat to get rid of fat doesn’t exactly add up. After all, thousands of Americans dole out mad cash to have flab sucked out, not put back in.
The distinction comes down to varieties of fat: Humans carry pockets of conventional fat, or white adipose tissue. They also carry brown adipose tissue. And recent research has confirmed that the stuff’s pretty damn special: It burns a ton of calories — around 250 calories over three hours in one study group — and actually sucks energy out of conventional fat cells to fuel its fire. Research even suggests that additional pockets of brown fat can be created by exercise.
The Army, however, would rather see soldiers drop pounds like the Real Housewives — with as little effort as possible. They’re funding a team at the University of Boston to “generate human [brown adipose tissue]” for subsequent human transplantation. “Obesity and its associated metabolic complications…are becoming increasingly prevalent in military personnel,” the Army’s research award notes. “Increasing [brown fat] by about 50 grams in obese patients could induce strong weight loss and improve metabolic status.”
Researchers plan to isolate a brown adipose progenitor cell — cells that, similarly to stem cells, are able to differentiate into more specific types — and then generate additional brown adipose cells in the lab. From there, they’d be able to offer “transplantation therapy” to portly personnel.
Of course, plenty of uncertainty about brown fat’s promise still lingers. For one, researchers aren’t sure whether appetite’s increase in conjunction with brown fat stores, keeping weight in stasis. And they don’t know how brown fat affects metabolism and weight loss in the long-term.
But if brown fat really can catalyze weight loss and permanently boost the body’s own metabolic rate, military personnel are hardly the only ones who’d line up for treatment. And civilian companies have already taken note: One Boston company, Ember Therapeutics, recently raised $34 million in capital funding to investigate pharmaceuticals that’d convert white fat to brown.
That said, fat losses aren’t synonymous with fitness gains. In other words, the soldiers of the future might very well be smaller and leaner. But without rigorous exercise, they’ll still, sadly, totally suck at CrossFit.
Photo: Courtesy of Out of Regs
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Army’s New Weight-Loss Plan: Transplant Soldiers With Extra Fat
Public release date: 27-Jan-2012
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Contact: Daniel Kane
dbkane@ucsd.edu
858-534-3262
University of California – San Diego
Stem cells derived from fat have a surprising trick up their sleeves: Encouraged to develop on a stiff surface, they undergo a remarkable transformation toward becoming mature muscle cells. The new research appears in the journal Biomaterials. The new cells remain intact and fused together even when transferred to an extremely stiff, bone-like surface, which has University of California, San Diego bioengineering professor Adam Engler and colleagues intrigued. These cells, they suggest, could hint at new therapeutic possibilities for muscular dystrophy.
In diseases like muscular dystrophy or a heart attack, “muscle begins to die and undergoes its normal wounding processes,” said Engler, a bioengineering professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. “This damaged tissue is fundamentally different from a mechanical perspective” than healthy tissue.
Transplanted stem cells might be able to replace and repair diseased muscle, but up to this point the transplants haven't been very successful in muscular dystrophy patients, he noted. The cells tend to clump into hard nodules as they struggle to adapt to their new environment of thickened and damaged tissue.
Engler, postdoctoral scholar Yu Suk Choi and the rest of the team think their fat-derived stem cells might have a better chance for this kind of therapy, since the cells seem to thrive on a stiff and unyielding surface that mimics the damaged tissue found in people with MD.
In their study in the journal Biomaterials, the researchers compared the development of bone marrow stem cells and fat-derived stem cells grown on surfaces of varying stiffness, ranging from the softness of brain tissue to the hardness of bone.
Cells from the fat lineage were 40 to 50 times better than their bone marrow counterparts at displaying the proper proteins involved in becoming muscle. These proteins are also more likely to “turn on” in the correct sequence in the fat-derived cells, Engler said.
Subtle differences in how these two types of cells interact with their environment are critical to their development, the scientists suggest. The fat-derived cells seem to sense their “niche” on the surfaces more completely and quickly than marrow-derived cells. “They are actively feeling their environment soon, which allows them to interpret the signals from the interaction of cell and environment that guide development,” Choi explained.
Perhaps most surprisingly, muscle cells grown from the fat stem cells fused together, forming myotubes to a degree never previously observed. Myotubes are a critical step in muscle development, and it's a step forward that Engler and colleagues hadn't seen before in the lab.
The fused cells stayed fused when they were transferred to a very stiff surface. “These programmed cells are mature enough so that they don't respond the environmental cues” in the new environment that might cause them to split apart, Engler says.
Engler and colleagues will now test how these new fused cells perform in mice with a version of muscular dystrophy. The cells survive in an environment of stiff tissue, but Engler cautions that there are other aspects of diseased tissue such as its shape and chemical composition to consider. “From the perspective of translating this into a clinically viable therapy, we want to know what components of the environment provide the most important cues for these cells,” he said.
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Co-authors for the Biomaterials study “Mechanical derivation of functional myotubes from adipose-derived stem cells” include Ludovic G. Vincent and Andrew R. Lee in the Department of Bioengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, and Marek K. Dobke from the Division of Plastic Surgery, UC San Diego School of Medicine. The research was funded by the Human Frontier Science Program and the National Institutes of Health Common Fund.
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Need muscle for a tough spot? Turn to fat stem cells, UC San Diego researchers say
(PhysOrg.com) — Stem cells derived from fat have a surprising trick up their sleeves: Encouraged to develop on a stiff surface, they undergo a remarkable transformation toward becoming mature muscle cells. The new research appears in the journal Biomaterials. The new cells remain intact and fused together even when transferred to an extremely stiff, bone-like surface, which has University of …
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Need muscle for a tough spot? Turn to fat stem cells
Allan Wu, MD, co-founder and chief scientific officer of The Morrow Institute’s Non-Controversial Stem Cell Research Lab in Rancho Mirage, CA, has been invited to present his research findings at Stem Cells 2012, a global conference in San Diego, CA.
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Morrow Institute’s Allan Wu, MD, to Present at Stem Cells 2012 Conference
People with eye degeneration report better vision after controversial treatment based on human embryonic stem cells
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Blindness eased by historic stem cell treatment
London, Jan 25 (ANI): Researchers hope that stem cells treatment may help men who have Peyronie's disease, the condition which makes the penis difficult to achieve a straight erection. About 3 to 9 per cent of men have the disease that damages the membrane surrounding the chambers within the penis that swell with blood during arousal.
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Stem cells treatment restores erectile function
05-01-2012 13:43 Dr. Genecov, the founder of BioLife Cell Bank discusses the concept of fat banking and cell banking when you remove fat from a patient and preserve it for future use for both cosmetic purposes and use in regenerative medicine procedures
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Dr. Genecov Discusses The Concept Behind BioLife Cell Bank – Video
Discovered: A tasty, pork based nose-bleed remedy, stem cells work, magnetic soap, cancer doesn't stop smokers, and the very real benefits of monogamy.
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A Bacon Nose Bleed Remedy; Stem Cell Breakthrough
( Journal of Clinical Investigation ) This release contains summaries, links to PDFs, and contact information for papers to be published Jan. 24, 2012, in the JCI: Brown fat burns calories in adult humans; Therapeutically useful stem cell derivatives in need of stability; Understanding acute kidney injury to identify potential therapeutics; and Triple A rating for gene regulatory molecule miR-29b.
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JCI online early table of contents: Jan. 24, 2012
Damage to parts of the penis vital for proper erections has been repaired for the first time with the help of stem cells.
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Erectile function restored with stem cells
SAN DIEGO, CA–(Marketwire – Jan 24, 2012) – Cytori Therapeutics ( NASDAQ : CYTX ) announced today the publication of previously reported six-month outcomes from APOLLO, the Company's European clinical trial evaluating adipose-derived stem and regenerative cells (ADRCs) in patients with acute myocardial infarction (heart attack or AMI), as Research Correspondence in the Journal of the American …
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Adipose Stem Cell Heart Attack Trial Data Published in Journal of the American College of Cardiology; Cytori's APOLLO …
JUPITER, Fla., Jan. 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ – BioRestorative Therapies, Inc. (OTCQB: BRTX.PK – News) (“BRT”) today announced that it will be presenting at the Seventh International Conference on Cell Therapy …
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BioRestorative Therapies to Present at 7th International Conference on Cell Therapy for Cardiovascular Disease
Advances in the study of stem cells have fueled hopes that someday, via regenerative medicine, doctors could restore aging people’s hearts, livers, brains and other organs and tissues to a more youthful state. A key to reaching this goal — to be able to provide stem cells that will differentiate into other types of cells a patient needs — appears to lie in understanding “epigenetics,” which …
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01-12-2011 14:30 www.Innovationsmedical.com Dr. Bill Johnson of Innovations Medical talks about how our favorite celebrities have aged over the past years
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Researchers have developed easy-to-use “microtweezers” that can pull out tiny splinters and much more, such as plucking a cluster of stem cells from a petri dish and building all sorts of little mechanical devices.
South Florida doctors are using a growing array of procedures — from fat injections to stem cells — to help rejuvenate your face.
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From Sound waves to stem cells: Face rejuvenation treatments of the future