StemCell Therapy

Dentists can be at the forefront of the emerging field of regenerative medicine by offering Store-A-Tooth™ dental stem cell banking.

This service enables families to save their own adult stem cells from teeth that are naturally coming out or being extracted. Dental professionals play a role in making patients aware of this option, giving families the choice to safely and securely store their stem cells today – in a convenient and affordable way – so that they can take advantage of future therapies in regenerative medicine and dentistry.

Provia Laboratories, LLC will be exhibiting its Store-A-Tooth™ dental stem cell preservation service during the Chicago Midwinter Meeting at booth # 3346.

Lexington, MA (PRWEB) February 15, 2012

Provia Laboratories, LLC will be exhibiting during the Chicago Midwinter Meeting at booth # 3346 to showcase its Store-A-Tooth™ dental stem cell preservation service.

The Store-A-Tooth service enables families to save their own adult stem cells – from baby teeth ready to fall out; teeth pulled for orthodontic reasons; and wisdom teeth being extracted. Dental professionals play a role in making patients aware of this option, giving families the choice to safely and securely store their stem cells today – in a convenient and affordable way – so that they can take advantage of future therapies in regenerative medicine and dentistry.

The company partners with dental offices to make it easy to educate and inform patients about the option to preserve their family’s dental stem cells. For those interested in the service, Provia works with the dental team to provide high quality tooth collection, and arranges for the sample to be sent overnight to the lab, where the stem cells are harvested, tested and cryopreserved for future potential use.

“New stem cell therapies are going to change medicine as we know it, and dentists will play a leading role in enabling this transformation,” states Howard Greenman, Provia Labs CEO. “There’s been a lot of media buzz about stem cell research in general, but most people are unaware that a very potent and plentiful source of viable stem cells exits in the dental pulp of healthy teeth.”

Dental stem cells have already successfully been used in people to regenerate alveolar jaw bone and to treat periodontal disease. “One of the first routine applications in the oral cavity for the use of mesenchymal stem cells from teeth will be to promote bone growth around implants so they integrate more quickly, similar to how cellular bone matrix products are used today,” says Dr. Nicholas Perrotta, DMD, who started providing the Store-A-Tooth service in 2011.

“In addition to potential applications in regenerative dentistry, dental stem cell research may lead to new treatments for a wide range of medical conditions, including type 1 diabetes, stroke, cardiovascular disease, spinal cord injuries, and Parkinson’s disease, to name a few,” explains Peter Verlander, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer for Provia Labs. “Dental stem cell collection and preservation gives parents the peace of mind that they are now equipped to take advantage of the breakthroughs in stem cell therapies that will arise from the research community.”

“Store-A-Tooth is less expensive than collecting stem cells from umbilical cord blood. In fact, we hear from many of our customers that they are thankful to have this opportunity to store their stem cells, especially if they missed the chance to save cord blood,” states Greenman. “Our mission is to make stem cell banking accessible to the millions of children losing teeth every year.”

There are no fees or costs to dentists who wish to become an authorized Store-A-Tooth provider; in fact dentists can generate incremental revenue for assisting with tooth collection. Provia Labs supplies all participating practices with patient education materials, practice tools and dedicated support; training is simple and there is minimal impact to existing workflow.

Dental professionals share Store-A-Tooth educational materials with their patients, who enroll directly with Provia Labs. The day of the appointment, the dentist simply places the extracted tooth into the Store-A-Tooth collection kit, which includes a proven transport device called Save-A-Tooth®. In use by thousands of dentists for over 20 years, the Save-A-Tooth is an FDA-approved and ADA-accepted device for transporting avulsed teeth for reimplantation. The Store-A-Tooth collection kit is shipped overnight to the Provia Laboratories facility, where the stem cells are processed and stored.

The Store-A-Tooth service is currently available to dental offices throughout the United States and internationally. To become a provider, visit http://www.store-a-tooth.com or call 877-867-5753.

About Provia Laboratories, LLC

Headquartered in Lexington, MA, Provia Laboratories, LLC (http://www.provialabs.com) is a healthcare services company specializing in high quality biobanking (preservation of biological specimens). The company’s Store-A-Tooth™ service platform enables the collection, transport, processing, and storage of dental stem cells for potential use in future stem-cell therapies. The company advises industrial, academic, and governmental clients on matters related to the preservation of biological specimens for research and clinical use. In addition, Provia offers a variety of products for use in complex biobanking environments to improve sample logistics, security, and quality. For more information on dental stem cells, call 1-877-867-5753, visit http://www.store-a-tooth.com or http://www.facebook.com/storeatooth, or follow via twitter @StoreATooth.

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Store-A-Tooth
Provia Laboratories, LLC
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Provia Labs Makes Chicago Midwinter Meeting Debut and Launches Store-A-Tooth™ Dental Stem Cell Preservation, Enabling ...

14 February 2012 Last updated at 19:10 ET By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News

Bone marrow stem cell therapy offers "moderate improvement" to heart attack patients, according to a large UK review of clinical trials.

The analysis by the Cochrane Collaboration looked at 33 trials involving more than 1,700 patients.

It said longer-term studies were needed to see if the experimental therapy affected life expectancy.

The review comes a day after doctors reported the first case of using heart cells to heal heart attack damage.

If a patient survives a heart attack, dead heart muscle is replaced with scar tissue - leaving the patient weaker and possibly on a lifetime of medicine.

Researchers are beginning to show that taking cells from a heart, growing millions of new heart cells in the laboratory and pumping those back into the heart may reduce scar tissue and lead to new heart muscle.

Continue reading the main story “Start Quote

Stem cell therapy may also reduce the number of patients who later die or suffer from heart failure, but currently there is a lack of statistically significant evidence based on the small number of patients treated so far”

End Quote Dr Enca Martin-Rendon Lead researcher

However, the trials are at a very early stage and in only a handful of patients. Using a similar technique with cells taken from the bone marrow, which is a prime source of stem cells, has a much longer pedigree.

The report by Cochrane pooled the data from all 33 bone marrow trials which had taken place up to 2011.

It concluded that bone marrow therapy "may lead to a moderate long-term improvement" in heart function which "might be clinically very important".

Longer life uncertain

It said there was still no evidence of "any significant effect on mortality" in comparison with standard treatment. However, this may be due to the size of the studies and that patients were followed for a short period of time.

Lead author Dr Enca Martin-Rendon, from NHS Blood and Transplant at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, said: "This new treatment may lead to moderate improvement in heart function over standard treatments.

"Stem cell therapy may also reduce the number of patients who later die or suffer from heart failure, but currently there is a lack of statistically significant evidence based on the small number of patients treated so far."

Prof Anthony Mathur, from Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, is leading the largest ever trial of stem cells in heart attack patients.

It starts this year, however, he told the BBC that the results could come quite quickly. Three thousand patients across Europe will take part. They will be injected with stem cells five days after a heart attack and then followed for two years to see if the therapy affects life expectancy.

Prof Peter Weissberg, medical director at the British Heart Foundation, said: "This review reflects the consensus of opinion about these trials - cell therapy has a modestly beneficial effect.

"Despite that, no-one knows why, or even if, cell therapies will translate into better survival or sustained improvement in damaged hearts. It's much too early to judge the likely long-term benefits."

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Bone gives 'some' heart healing

Public release date: 14-Feb-2012
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Contact: Jennifer Beal
healthnews@wiley.com
44-124-377-0633
Wiley-Blackwell

Stem cell therapy moderately improves heart function after a heart attack, according to a systematic review published in The Cochrane Library. But the researchers behind the review say larger clinical trials are needed to establish whether this benefit translates to a longer life.

In a heart attack, the blood supply to parts of the heart is cut off by a blocked artery, causing damage to the heart tissue. The cells in the affected area start to die. This is called necrosis and in the days and weeks that follow, the necrotic area may grow, eventually leaving a large part of the heart unable to contract and increasing the risk of further heart problems. Stem cell therapy uses cells from the patient's own bone marrow to try to repair and reduce this damage. Currently, the treatment is only available in facilities with links to scientific research.

The authors of the review drew together all the available evidence to ask whether adult bone marrow stem cells can effectively prevent and repair the damage caused by a heart attack. In 2008, a Cochrane review of 13 stem cell therapy clinical trials addressed the same question, but the new review adds 20 more recent trials, drawing its conclusions from all 33. By incorporating longer follow up, the later trials provide a better indication of the effects of the therapy several years after treatment.

The total number of patients involved in trials was 1,765. All had already undergone angioplasty, a conventional treatment that uses a balloon to open the blocked artery and reintroduce the blood supply. The review's findings suggest that stem cell therapy using bone marrow-derived stem cells (BMSCs) can produce a moderate long-term improvement in heart function, which is sustained for up to five years. However, there was not enough data to reach firm conclusions about improvements in survival rates.

"This new treatment may lead to moderate improvement in heart function over standard treatments," said lead author of the study, Enca Martin-Rendon, of the Stem Cell Research laboratory, NHS Blood and Transplant at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, UK. "Stem cell therapy may also reduce the number of patients who later die or suffer from heart failure, but currently there is a lack of statistically significant evidence based on the small number of patients treated so far."

It is still too early to formulate guidelines for standard practice, according to the review. The authors say further work is required to establish standard methods, including cell dosage, timing of cell transplantation and methods to measure heart function. "The studies were hard to compare because they used so many different methods," said Martin-Rendon. "Larger trials with standardised treatment procedures would help us to know whether this treatment is really effective.

Recently, the task force of the European Society of Cardiology for Stem Cells and Cardiac Repair received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (EU FP7-BAMI) to start such a trial. Principal Investigator for the BAMI trial, and co-author of this Cochrane review, Anthony Mathur, said, ''The BAMI trial will be the largest stem cell therapy trial in patients who have suffered heart attacks and will test whether this treatment prolongs the life of these patients."

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Stem cell treatments improve heart function after heart attack

By FOX News

February 14, 2012

LOS ANGELES -- When a piece of muscle in a person's heart dies from lack of blood flow, it scars over and is lost.

But a team of researchers from the Cedars Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles has proven that those muscles may not necessarily be gone forever.

In a study that may change how heart attacks are treated, Eduardo Marban and his team used stem cells to re-grow damaged heart muscle. In the 17 patients who received the therapy, Marban measured an average 50 percent reduction in the size of the scar tissue.

"One of the holy grails in medicine has been the use of medicine to achieve regeneration," Marban said. "Patients that were treated not only experienced shrinkage of their scars, but also new growth of their heart muscle, which is very exciting."

The stem cells were not derived from embryos, but instead were developed from the patients' own hearts. Marban's team inserted a catheter into the diseased hearts and took a small biopsy of muscle. In the laboratory, the tissue was manipulated into producing stem cells to re-inject into the patients' hearts.

Over the course of a year, the cells took root in cardiac tissue, encouraging the heart to create new muscle and blood vessels. In other words, the heart actually began to mend itself.

While similar research has been done using stem cells from bone marrow, this is the first time that stem cells derived from a patient's own cardiac tissue have been used.

Marban believes this therapy could be broadly used in many of the five to seven million Americans who suffer from heart disease every year. And he said the applications could go well beyond diseased hearts.

"If we can do that in the heart, I don't see any reason, conceptually, why we couldn't do it in kidneys for example, or pancreas or other organs that have very limited regenerative capacity," Marban said.

While the procedure may be a revolutionary medical technique, there are still a few more puzzling questions about the research that Marban would like to investigate further.

For example, while the patients grew new heart muscle and saw a dramatic reduction in scar tissue, the actual function of their hearts did not show a significant improvement. And it appeared the stem cells themselves may not have turned into cardiac muscle, but rather they stimulated the heart to produce new muscle cells.

Nonetheless, the potential success of this research could hold a lot of promise for the millions of Americans who suffer from heart disease each and every year, which is the leading cause of death in the United States.

If his future experiments yield the same results as this initial study, Marban believes he could be offering this therapy to patients within four years -- and that could go a long way in mending all of America's broken hearts.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/02/14/stem-cells-could-potentially-fix-broken-hearts/#ixzz1mNGKYMvI

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Stem cells could potentially fix broken hearts

When a piece of muscle in a person’s heart dies from lack of blood flow, it scars over and is lost.  But a team of researchers from the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles has proven that those muscles may not necessarily be gone forever.

In a ground-breaking study that may change how heart attacks are treated, Dr. Eduardo Marban and his team used stem cells to re-grow damaged heart muscle.  In the 17 patients who received the therapy, Marban measured an average 50 percent reduction in the size of the scar tissue

“One of the holy grails in medicine has been the use of medicine to achieve regeneration,” Marban said.  “Patients that were treated not only experienced shrinkage of their scars, but also new growth of their heart muscle, which is very exciting.”

The stem cells were not derived from embryos, but instead were developed from the patients’ own hearts.  Marban’s team inserted a catheter into the diseased hearts and took a small biopsy of muscle.  In the laboratory, the tissue was manipulated into producing stem cells.  After a few weeks of marinating in culture, researchers had enough stem cells to re-inject them into the patients’ hearts.  Over the course of a year, the stem cells took root in cardiac tissue, encouraging the heart to create new muscle and blood vessels.  In other words, the heart actually began to mend itself.

Click here to see an animation of how the process works.

“We’ve achieved what we have achieved using adult stem cells – in this case – actually specifically from a patient’s own heart back into the same patient.   There’s no ethical issues with that – there’s no destruction of embryos.  There’s no reason to worry about immune rejection."

While similar research has been done using stem cells from bone marrow, this is the first time that stem cells derived from a patient’s own cardiac tissue have been used.

Marban believes this therapy could be broadly used in many of the 5 to 7 million Americans who suffer from heart disease every year.  And he said the applications could go well beyond diseased hearts.

“If we can do that in the heart, I don’t see any reason, conceptually, why we couldn’t do it in kidneys for example, or pancreas or other organs that have very limited regenerative capacity,” Marban said.

While the procedure may be a revolutionary medical technique, there are still a few more puzzling questions about the research that Marban would like to investigate further.  For example, while the patients grew new heart muscle and saw a dramatic reduction in scar tissue, the actual function of their hearts did not show a significant improvement.  And it appeared the stem cells themselves may not have turned into cardiac muscle, but rather they stimulated the heart to produce new muscle cells.

Because this was a “Phase 1” study, it was really meant to measure whether the procedure was safe.  Of the 17 patients who were given the stem cell injections, six experienced “serious adverse events,” but only one was regarded to be possibly related to the treatment.  

The potential success of this research could hold a lot of promise for the millions of Americans who suffer from heart disease each and every year, which is the leading cause of death in the United States.  If his future experiments yield the same results as this initial study, Marban believes he could be offering this therapy to patients within four years – and that could go a long way in mending all of America’s broken hearts.

Original post:
Stem cells a fix for 'broken hearts'?

When a piece of muscle in a person's heart dies from lack of blood flow, it scars over and is lost.

But a team of researchers from the Cedars Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles has proven that those muscles may not necessarily be gone forever.

In a study that may change how heart attacks are treated, Eduardo Marban and his team used stem cells to re-grow damaged heart muscle. In the 17 patients who received the therapy, Marban measured an average 50 percent reduction in the size of the scar tissue.

"One of the holy grails in medicine has been the use of medicine to achieve regeneration," Marban said. "Patients that were treated not only experienced shrinkage of their scars, but also new growth of their heart muscle, which is very exciting."

The stem cells were not derived from embryos, but instead were developed from the patients' own hearts. Marban's team inserted a catheter into the diseased hearts and took a small biopsy of muscle. In the laboratory, the tissue was manipulated into producing stem cells to re-inject into the patients' hearts.

Over the course of a year, the cells took root in cardiac tissue, encouraging the heart to create new muscle and blood vessels. In other words, the heart actually began to mend itself.

While similar research has been done using stem cells from bone marrow, this is the first time that stem cells derived from a patient's own cardiac tissue have been used.

Marban believes this therapy could be broadly used in many of the five to seven million Americans who suffer from heart disease every year. And he said the applications could go well beyond diseased hearts.

"If we can do that in the heart, I don't see any reason, conceptually, why we couldn't do it in kidneys for example, or pancreas or other organs that have very limited regenerative capacity," Marban said.

While the procedure may be a revolutionary medical technique, there are still a few more puzzling questions about the research that Marban would like to investigate further.

For example, while the patients grew new heart muscle and saw a dramatic reduction in scar tissue, the actual function of their hearts did not show a significant improvement. And it appeared the stem cells themselves may not have turned into cardiac muscle, but rather they stimulated the heart to produce new muscle cells.

Nonetheless, the potential success of this research could hold a lot of promise for the millions of Americans who suffer from heart disease each and every year, which is the leading cause of death in the United States.

If his future experiments yield the same results as this initial study, Marban believes he could be offering this therapy to patients within four years -- and that could go a long way in mending all of America's broken hearts. Read more: FOXNews

Read the rest here:
Stem Cells Might Fix Broken Hearts

SAN FRANCISCO -- Stem cells grown from patients' own cardiac tissue can heal damage once thought to be permanent after a heart attack, according to a study that suggests the experimental approach may one day help stave off heart failure.

In a trial of 25 heart-attack patients, 17 who got the stem cell treatment showed a 50 percent reduction in cardiac scar tissue compared with no improvement for the eight who received standard care. The results were published Tuesday in the medical journal Lancet.

The study, by researchers from Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, tested the approach in patients who recently suffered a heart attack, with the goal that repairing the damage might help stave off failure. While patients getting the stem cells showed no more improvement in heart function than those who didn't get the experimental therapy, the theory is that new tissue regenerated by the stem cells can strengthen the heart, said Eduardo Marban, the study's lead author and director of Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute.

The stem cells were implanted within five weeks after patients suffering heart attacks. Doctors removed heart tissue, about the size of half a raisin, using a minimally invasive procedure that involved a thin needle threaded through the veins. After cultivating the stem cells from the tissue, doctors reinserted 12.5 million to 25 million cells using a second minimally invasive procedure.

A year after the procedure, six patients in the stem cell group had serious side effects.

While the main goal of the trial was to examine safety, the decrease in scar tissue in those treated merits a larger study that focuses on broader clinical outcomes, researchers said.

"If we can regenerate the whole heart, then the patient would be completely normal," Dr. Marban said. "We haven't fulfilled that yet, but we've gotten rid of half of the injury, and that's a good start."

First published on February 15, 2012 at 12:00 am

Read more from the original source:
Heart's stem cells used to mend attack damage

Click here to listen to this podcast

Valentine's Day can lead to plenty of broken hearts. But for cardiac wounds that time alone won't heal, science has made some major advances. When it comes to heart attack, for example, a big development is emerging from a tiny source. Stem cells are coming of age. 

Stem cells, harvested from a patient's own bone marrow, have been heralded as a potential quick fix for damaged heart tissue. But can these progenitor cells actually work to heal massive muscle damage?

A new review of 33 studies assessed data from more than 1,700 heart attack patients. The review researchers found that those patients treated with stem cells—in addition to the standard care of angioplasty—had stronger tickers for years to come than those who had not gotten stem cell therapy. The review article is published in The Cochrane Library. [David Clifford et al., Stem Cell Treatment for Acute Myocardial Infarction, link to come]

It's too early to say whether those with stem cell treatments will live longer, according to the new analysis. But for affairs of the heart, it's more evidence that good things can come in very small packages.

—Katherine Harmon

[The above text is a transcript of this podcast]  
 

Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs. Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.
© 2012 ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved.

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Stem Cells Help Heal Broken Hearts

WHEN a piece of muscle in a person's heart dies from lack of blood flow, it scars over and is lost.

But a team of researchers from the Cedars Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles has proven that those muscles may not necessarily be gone forever.

In a study that may change how heart attacks are treated, Eduardo Marban and his team used stem cells to re-grow damaged heart muscle. In the 17 patients who received the therapy, Mr Marban measured an average 50 per cent reduction in the size of the scar tissue.

"One of the holy grails in medicine has been the use of medicine to achieve regeneration," he said. "Patients that were treated not only experienced shrinkage of their scars, but also new growth of their heart muscle, which is very exciting."

The stem cells were not derived from embryos, but instead were developed from the patients' own hearts. Mr Marban's team inserted a catheter into the diseased hearts and took a small biopsy of muscle. In the laboratory, the tissue was manipulated into producing stem cells to re-inject into the patients' hearts.

Over the course of a year, the cells took root in cardiac tissue, encouraging the heart to create new muscle and blood vessels. In other words, the heart actually began to mend itself.

While similar research has been done using stem cells from bone marrow, this is the first time that stem cells derived from a patient's own cardiac tissue have been used.

Mr Marban believes this therapy could be broadly used in many of the five to seven million Americans who suffer from heart disease every year. And he said the applications could go well beyond diseased hearts.

"If we can do that in the heart, I don't see any reason, conceptually, why we couldn't do it in kidneys for example, or pancreas or other organs that have very limited regenerative capacity," he said.

While the procedure may be a revolutionary medical technique, there are still a few more puzzling questions about the research that Mr Marban would like to investigate further.

For example, while the patients grew new heart muscle and saw a dramatic reduction in scar tissue, the actual function of their hearts did not show a significant improvement. And it appeared the stem cells themselves may not have turned into cardiac muscle, but rather they stimulated the heart to produce new muscle cells.

Nonetheless, the potential success of this research could hold a lot of promise for the millions of Americans who suffer from heart disease each and every year, which is the leading cause of death in the United States.

If his future experiments yield the same results as this initial study, Mr Marban said he could be offering this therapy to patients within four years - and that could go a long way in mending all of America's broken hearts.

Read more here.

See more here:
Stem cells could fix broken hearts

For the first time, researchers have used stem cells from a patient’s own heart to repair the damage to the muscle that occurs during heart attack.

Dr. Eduardo Marban, director of the Cedars Sinai Heart Institute, and his team report in the journal Lancet that 17 patients who received an injection of their own heart cells grown from their stem cells saw the scarring on their hearts shrivel by 50% over a year. Eight patients who received usual care had no change.

During a heart attack, some of the heart’s muscle is cut off from its oxygen supply, so within seconds these cells start to die. The body’s immune system treats the change like a trauma and begins to wall off the dying tissue, creating an ever-thickening layer of scarring; eventually, the scar tissue hampers the heart’s ability to pump blood efficiently throughout the body. Keeping this scarring to a minimum, or even reversing it is the Holy Grail of heart attack research: maintaining as much healthy and active heart muscle as possible increases patients’ chances of recovering quickly and completely.

“Heart disease is still the number one killer of men and women, so there is a dire need for new therapies to be tested,” says Dr. Deepak Srivastava, director of the Gladstone Institute Cardiovascular Disease, who is a leader in heart stem-cell research and was not involved in the current study. “I applaud them carrying through with a clinical trial, which is great.”

MORE: Stem Cell Miracle? New Therapies May Cure Chronic Conditions Like Alzheimer’s

The heart has a natural ability to fix minor defects by regenerating new muscle cells to replace dying ones. About 1% to 2% of heart cells die each year, and are replaced this way. This process can’t come close to regenerating the one-third of heart muscle that is typically affected by a heart attack, however, so Marban and his team decided to give the process a boost. The researchers extracted some of the naturally healing stem cells from the heart and nurtured them in a lab dish. The hope was to inject a large enough population of the cells back into the heart to trigger a broad-scale repair of the muscle after heart attack.

“We were gratified to see that the scars shrank in patients who had gotten the cells,” Marban says. “Not only that, but these patients also had a big increase in living heart muscle. The regeneration of living tissue, or regrowth of lost tissue, which is what we were able to achieve, is encouraging.”

All of the patients were enrolled in the trial within 1.5 months of having a heart attack, and had their hearts scanned with an MRI. Seventeen of the patients had a biopsy of their heart tissue so the researchers could extract the heart’s stem cells and expand them in the lab; the researchers then re-infusing 12 million to 25 million new heart cells into each patient’s heart artery 1.5 months to 3 months later. The control patients received standard care of medications and monitoring to recover from their heart attack.

At six months and again at one year into the study, Marban and his colleagues took additional MRIs of the patients’ hearts, to measure any changes in the size of their scar tissue. The patients who had received the heart cells showed markedly smaller scars and more living tissue over time, compared with those who received standard therapy. In fact, new tissue formation increased by 60% on average, compared with scar shrinkage.

Unfortunately, however, the patients did not show any change in heart function, as measured by the ejection fraction, or the ability of the heart to pump blood. In patients who got the stem cells, their ejection fraction went from 39% at the start of the study to 41% a year later; healthy hearts pump at about 50% or greater efficiency.

MORE: Rethinking the Framingham Score: Is There a Better Way to Predict Heart Disease?

But Marban isn’t discouraged by that, noting that although he wasn’t able to show that the heart functioned better overall in the stem-cell patients, he did find that in the areas where the scars had shrunk, the muscle appeared to be working more efficiently. “When you zoom in and look at regional function, there was big improvement,” he says. “We believe that the changes we see in the amount of scar tissue, even though it’s dramatic and unmistakable and significant, still aren’t enough to tilt the balance toward complete repair of the heart.”

Will it take more cells, or more time, or different types of cells to generate that type of complete repair? That’s impossible to tell from this study, but the results are encouraging enough to trigger more work into such cell-based treatments. “This is part of a series of important steps toward ultimately moving to cell-based therapy that will someday create new muscle in the heart,” says Srivastava.

Future studies could answer some critical questions about exactly how the infused cells are helping to shrink scars and prompt the growth of new heart muscle. Srivastava notes that it’s unlikely that the new cells are turning into heart muscle themselves, but are more likely helping existing heart muscle generate new tissue. If that’s the case, then researchers can refine the technique to help heart attack patients months or even years after their event to repair their scarred hearts. “The real objective is to offer treatment for people who have a long-standing injury to the heart, and more severe heart disease,” says Marban.

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Alice Park is a writer at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @aliceparkny. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.

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Healing a Broken Heart: Stem Cell Breakthrough Repairs Scars

Dr. Uma Lakshmipathy speaks at various conferences about work on the creation of integration-free induced pluripotent stem cells at high efficiency with Sendai Virus using the CytoTune™ -iPS Reprogramming Kit. Uma Lakshmipathy's next speaking engagement will be in Mid February at the Stem Cell Banking Conference in London.

Carlsbad, California (PRWEB) February 14, 2012

Uma's last presentation about the Generation of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells summarized here was also recorded for viewing and placed on the Life Technologies website. (http://find.lifetechnologies.com/stemcells/umavideo/article)

The CytoTune™ - iPS Reprogramming Kit is a high efficiency, integration- free, easy-to-use somatic cell reprogramming kit used in the generation of induced pluripotent stem cells. This kit utilizes Sendai Virus particles of the four Yamanaka factors, which have been shown to be critical in the successful generation of induced pluripotent stem cells.

In her presentations, Uma Lakshmipathy discusses two current challenges faced when generating iPSC including low efficiency and expertise of users.

Low Efficiency

The most common method for generation of induced pluripotent stem cells is the transfection of the four Yamanaka factors using lentivirus or retrovirus. One of the biggest challenges for scientists right now is the low efficiency of iPSC generation. With difficult to transfect cell types or cells from older patients, efficiencies can be 0.001% or lower when using lentiviral or retroviral methods.

Expertise of Users

The second challenge is for users with little expertise that have a difficult time detecting these emerging iPSC colonies. When looking for pluripotent stem cells, people can either pick them up really easily or have trouble deciding what clones to place their bet on.

Efficiency & Safety of IPSC Generation

There are several methods which improve reprogramming efficiency including viral non-integrating and small molecule methods such as mRNA, microRNA and small molecules. The developers of the CytoTune™ -iPS Reprogramming Kit concentrated on a non-integrating viral method utilizing Sendai Virus, a negative sense RNA virus. Sendai Virus is able to infect a wide variety of cell types and generates induced pluripotent stem cells at efficiencies 100-fold higher than lentiviral or retroviral methods.

When comparing efficiency vs. safety of reprogramming methods, small molecules like microRNA, RNA and protein which don’t leave a footprint are safer for cell therapy research; however, the efficiency of generating induced pluripotent stem cells with these methods is pretty low at this point in time.

The highest efficiency so far has been achieved with viral methods such as Retrovirus and Lentivirus. More recently the CytoTune™ -iPS Reprogramming Kit actually exceeds the efficiency that can be obtained with these traditional viral systems and at the same time it is much safer because it is a non-integrating RNA virus. Therefore it will not leave a footprint in the iPSCs that are created.

The CytoTune™ -iPS Reprogramming Kit will:

    Reduce hands on time - enables successful iPS reprogramming in one simple transduction     Generate more cells - high efficiency reprogramming offers more iPS cells from a single experiment     Use in a broad range of experiments - lack of genomic integration and viral remnants allows use from basic to clinical research

Ease of Use

The CytoTune™ -iPS Reprogramming Kit provides a simple system for somatic cell reprogramming. For most cell types, the CytoTune™ -iPS Reprogramming Kit requires only one application of the virus for successful cell reprogramming, unlike other methods such as Lentivirus and mRNA which can require multiple rounds of transduction to produce iPS cells. Selection of colonies is also easier with the CytoTune™ –iPS Reprogramming Kit due to the lower number of non-induced pluripotent stem cells that are generated.

To view this presentation visit http://find.lifetechnologies.com/stemcells/umavideo/article

Uma Lakshmipathy's protocol, "Transfection of Human Embryonic Stem Cells" can be seen here http://bit.ly/y91Gpd

###

Jennifer Hornstein
Life Technologies
(760) 602-4577
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Life Technologies Scientist Uma Lakshmipathy presents, "Solving Challenges in the Generation of Induced Pluripotent ...

Public release date: 14-Feb-2012
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Contact: Joseph Caspermeyer
Joseph.Caspermeyer@asu.edu
Arizona State University

Blood tests have been a mainstay of diagnostic medicine since the late 19th century, offering a wealth of information concerning health and disease. Nevertheless, blood derived from the human umbilical cord has yet to be fully mined for its vital health information, according to Rolf Halden, a researcher at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute.

In a new study appearing in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, Halden's team performs detailed analyses of umbilical cord blood (UCB), identifying a total of 1,210 proteins using mass spectroscopy. The findings represent a 6-fold increase in the number UCB proteins thus far described?a significant advance: "Mapping of the full spectrum of proteins detectable in cord blood is the first, crititcal step in the discovery of biomarkers to improve human health," Halden says.

The proteins identified are associated with 138 different metabolic and disease pathways and provide invaluable information for the identification of biomarkers?early warning indices of disease, toxic exposure or disruptions in cellular processes. In addition to presenting intriguing candidates for new biomarkers in UCB, the study also identified 38 proteins corresponding to existing FDA-approved biomarkers for adult blood.

The UCB samples were pooled from 12 newborns, whose maternal backgrounds varied in terms of ethnicity, educational background, body weight, exposure to environmental toxins and also, to cigarette smoke. The research improves prospects for early disease diagnosis, by prioritizing biomarkers based on known proteins linked with disease.

According to Halden, the use of UCB as a diagnostic tool offers a number of attractive advantages. It is a readily acquired diagnostic biofluid?no invasive procedures are needed and relatively large volumes of fluid can be easily obtained. With the aid of modern high-throughput mass spectroscopy, UCB can be rapidly screened to reveal hundreds of proteins in parallel from a single sample having a volume of as small as 1/125th of an ounce. Most importantly, such early screening may provide critical information on likely health trajectories for newborns.

For a wide variety of diseases, early detection offers the best prospect for successful intervention and treatment. Further, many adult afflictions including chronic heart and kidney disease, diabetes and obesity may have their roots in fetal and early childhood development. Previous research has already established a well-documented link between fetal exposure to certain environmental contaminants and unfavorable health outcomes, for example in the case of in utero exposure to cigarette smoke constituents.

Halden's team hoped to expand knowledge of the UCB protein content or proteome, using a limited starting volume of fluid. This is important, as cord blood is a precious resource, exploited for other medical uses. Stem cells obtained from UCB for example are used for bone marrow transplantation and other therapeutic purposes. Once UCB proteins were identified in the tested sample pool, they were compared with known and proposed biomarkers in order to produce a concise list of candidate proteins of diagnostic value in medicine.

The team sought to comprehensively evaluate the diagnostic potential of the UCB proteome, with minimal bias relating to individual health histories. To do this, samples from the 12 newborns were combined into a composite. Among the UCB donors, 6 were African American, 5 were Caucasian and one was Asian.

Of the proteins detected in UCB, around 25 percent were previously detected in adults. Halden's group was able to obtain the protein data with as little as 240 microliters of blood. He emphasizes that new methods for evaluating UCB for newborns are highly desireable, given a spectrum of disorders of rising incidence in the general population, including diabetes, chronic heart and kidney disease and obesity.

The highest priority proteins examined in the current study were those already approved for adult diagnoses by the FDA. These biomarkers include those associated with thyroid deficiencies, chronic kidney dysfunction, and cardiovascular diseases. Future research will determine if such biomarkers are diagnostically appropriate for infants as well.

A second priority was to identify proteins of known function associated with disruptions of normal cell processes. While these proteins have not been FDA approved for diagnostic purposes, they are nevertheless linked with particular diseases or with toxic exposure. These include proteins involved with cardiac arrhythmia and sudden heart failure, maturity onset diabetes of the young (MODY), acute kidney injury, lymphoblastic leukemia, pancreatic cancer and other serious diseases.

Mass spectroscopic analysis of UCB offers the prospect of a global approach to assessing health risks in newborns, allowing the simultaneous observation of numerous indicators of health and disease. The technique should be an invaluable aid to early diagnosis for a range of conditions, with the potential to dramatically improve health outcomes.

###

The study is a multi-institutional effort involving researchers from Arizona State University, Johns Hopkins University, and George Washington University. It was conducted with funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).

Rolf Halden is the Associate Director of the Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology at the Biodesign Institute and Co-Director of the Center for Health Information and Research. He holds a professorship in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at ASU.

Written by: Richard Harth
Science Writer: The Biodesign Institute
richard.harth@asu.edu

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

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Following a trail of blood: A new diagnostic tool comes of age

Stem cells harvested from a patient's own heart can be used to help repair muscle damaged during a heart attack, according to a preliminary study published online Monday in The Lancet. While it's too soon to know if the technique will help patients live longer, the study is the second small, promising study of cardiac stem cells in three months.

The new study involved 25 patients who had suffered very serious heart attacks; 24% of their heart's major pumping chamber had been replaced by scar tissue. One year later, doctors saw no improvement in those randomly assigned to get standard care. Among the 17 given stem cells, however, "we reversed about half the injury to the heart," said study author Eduardo Marban, director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, in an e-mail. "We dissolved scar and replaced it with living heart muscle."

Warren Sherman, director of stem cell research and regenerative medicine at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, says the study was an important proof of the potential of stem cells - harvested from patients, grown in the lab, then injected back into patients' hearts.

Doctors don't yet know exactly how the stem cells reduce the size of the dead zone of scar tissue, says Kenneth Margulies, director of heart failure and transplant research at the University of Pennsylvania. And while the shrinking suggests that the stem cells are replacing dead cells with living ones, doctors can't definitely prove that without doing a biopsy of the actual cells, he says.

The new study's encouraging results seem to confirm the findings of another small study of heart stem cells, published in The Lancet in November, which also showed an improvement in heart-attack survivors who received the treatment, Margulies says. On the other hand, a third study, found no benefit from stem cells created from patients' own bone marrow.

Four stem-cell patients developed serious complications, compared to only one of the other patients, the study says. That suggests stem-cell therapy has a "satisfactory" safety record, but "is not risk-free," Margulies says.

The idea of regenerating heart tissue "was a pretty far-out idea" only 10 to 20 years ago, Margulies says. There's some evidence that heart tissue is capable of making some small repairs on its own, although not enough to help people who've had a heart attack.

Marban developed the process of growing heart stem cells while working at Johns Hopkins University, which has filed an application for a patent on the idea and licensed it to a company in which Marban has a financial interest. No money from that company was used to pay for the study, which was funded by Cedars-Sinai and the National Institutes of Health.

About 1.3 million Americans have a heart attack each year.

USA Today

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Stem Cells Help Regrow Heart Tissue

More Topics: Choose a Sector Accounting Firms Advertising/Media/Communications Capital CEO/Board General Business Health/Biotech Internet/Technology Investment Firms Law Firms Mergers & Acquisitions Money Managers People Private Companies Public Companies Venture Capital

Posted February 14, 2012

SUNRISE, Fla., -- Bioheart, Inc. (BHRT.OB) announced today that it has acquired the worldwide exclusive rights to Ageless Regenerative Institute's adipose (fat) derived therapeutic cell technology for use in the cardiac field.

"The Ageless adipose stem cell technology will allow us to broaden our portfolio of product candidates for cardiac patients," said Mike Tomas, President and CEO of Bioheart. "We have successfully treated patients in Mexico and now we are ready to expand into the US."

Adipose tissue is readily available and has been shown to be rich in microvascular, myogenic and angiogenic cells. Bioheart has recently applied to the FDA to begin trials using adipose derived stem cells or LipiCellTM in patients with chronic ischemic cardiomyopathy. Transplantation of LipiCellTM will be accomplished through endocardial implantations with the MyoStarTM Injection Catheter under the guidance of the NOGA® cardiac navigation system by Biosense Webster, Inc. - A Johnson & Johnson Company.

Under the terms of the agreement, Bioheart will have a worldwide exclusive license to all of Ageless technology for use in the heart attack and heart failure markets. The agreement provides for upfront and milestone equity payments to Ageless.

Ageless' President and Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Sharon McQuillan, MD added, "We are excited about this collaboration with Bioheart, a leader in developing cell therapies for cardiovascular disease. Together with Bioheart, we can help to revolutionize cardiovascular medicine and improve the current standard of care for these patients."

About Bioheart, Inc.

Bioheart is committed to maintaining its leading position within the cardiovascular sector of the cell technology industry delivering cell therapies and biologics that help address congestive heart failure, lower limb ischemia, chronic heart ischemia, acute myocardial infarctions and other issues. Bioheart's goals are to cause damaged tissue to be regenerated, when possible, and to improve a patient's quality of life and reduce health care costs and hospitalizations.

Specific to biotechnology, Bioheart is focused on the discovery, development and, subject to regulatory approval, commercialization of autologous cell therapies for the treatment of chronic and acute heart damage and peripheral vascular disease. Its leading product, MyoCell, is a clinical muscle-derived cell therapy designed to populate regions of scar tissue within a patient's heart with new living cells for the purpose of improving cardiac function in chronic heart failure patients.

For more information on Bioheart, visit http://www.bioheartinc.com.

About Ageless Regenerative Institute, LLC

The Ageless Regenerative Institute (ARI) is an organization dedicated to the standardization of cell regenerative medicine. The Institute promotes the development of evidence-based standards of excellence in the therapeutic use of adipose-derived stem cells through education, advocacy, and research. ARI has a highly experienced management team with experience in setting up full scale cGMP stem cell manufacturing facilities, stem cell product development & enhancement, developing point-of-care cell production systems, developing culture expanded stem cell production systems, FDA compliance, directing clinical & preclinical studies with multiple cell types for multiple indications, and more. ARI has successfully treated hundreds of patients utilizing these cellular therapies demonstrating both safety and efficacy. For more information about regenerative medicine please visit http://www.agelessregen.com.

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Bioheart Acquires Exclusive Rights to Ageless Regenerative Institute's Adipose Cell Technology

Stem cells are proving themselves beneficial once again after scientists used the controversial building blocks to resurrect dead, scarred heart muscle damaged by recent heart attack.

Results from a Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute clinical trial show that treating heart attack patients with an infusion of their own heart-derived cells helps damaged hearts re-grow healthy heart muscle.

Reporting in The Lancet medical journal, the researchers said this is the clearest evidence yet that broken hearts can heal. All that is needed is a little help from one’s own heart stem cells.

“We have been trying as doctors for centuries to find a treatment that actually reverses heart injury,” Eduardo Marban, MD, PhD, and lead author of the study, told WebMD. “That is what we seem to have been able to achieve in this small number of patients. If so, this could change the nature of medicine. We could go to the root of disease and cure it instead of just work around it.”

Marban invented the “cardiosphere” culture technique used to create the stem cells and founded the company developing the treatment.

“These findings suggest that this therapeutic approach is feasible and has the potential to provide a treatment strategy for cardiac regeneration after [heart attack],” wrote University of Hong Kong researchers Chung-Wah Siu and Hung-Fat Tse in an accompanying editorial of Marban’s paper.

The British Heart Foundation told James Gallagher of BBC News that this could “be great news for heart attack patients” in the future.

A heart attack occurs when the heart is starved of oxygen, such as when a clot is blocking the blood flow to the organ. As the heart heals, the dead muscle is replaced by scar tissue, which does not beat like heart muscle. This in turn reduces the hearts ability to pump blood around the body.

Doctors have long been searching for ways to regenerate damaged heart muscle, and now, it seems heart stem cells are the answer. And the Cedars-Sinai trial was designed to test the safety of using stem cells taken from a heart attack patient’s own heart.

The researchers found that one year after receiving the treatment, scar size was reduced from 24 percent to 12 percent of the heart in patients treated with heart stem cells. Patients in the control group, who did not receive stem cells, did not experience a reduction in their heart attack scar tissues.

“While the primary goal of our study was to verify safety, we also looked for evidence that the treatment might dissolve scar and re-grow lost heart muscle,” Marban said in a statement. “This has never been accomplished before, despite a decade of cell therapy trials for patients with heart attacks. Now we have done it. The effects are substantial, and surprisingly larger in humans than they were in animal tests.”

“These results signal an approaching paradigm shift in the care of heart attack patients,” said Shlomo Melmed, MD, dean of the Cedars-Sinai medical faculty and the Helene A. and Philip E. Hixon Chair in Investigative Medicine. “In the past, all we could do was to try to minimize heart damage by promptly opening up an occluded artery. Now, this study shows there is a regenerative therapy that may actually reverse the damage caused by a heart attack.”

Marban cautioned that stem cells do not do what people generally think they do. The general idea has been that stem cells multiply over and over again, and, in time, they turn themselves and their daughter cells into new, working heart muscle.

But Marban said the stem cells are actually doing something more amazing.

“For reasons we didn’t initially know, they stimulate the heart to fix itself,” he told Daniel J. DeNoon of WebMD. “The repair is from the heart itself and not from the cells we give them.”

Exactly how the stem cells invigorate the heart to do this was a matter of “feverish research” in the lab.

The CArdiosphere-Derived aUtologous stem CElls to reverse ventricUlar dySfunction (CADUCEUS) clinical trial was part of a Phase I study approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

Marban used 25 volunteer patients who were of an average age of 53 and had recently suffered a heart attack that left them with damaged heart muscle. Each patient underwent extensive imaging scans so doctors could pinpoint the exact location and severity of the scars. Patients were treated at Cedars-Sinai in LA and at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Eight of the 25 patients served as a control group, receiving conventional medical treatment. The other 17 patients who were randomized to receive the stem cell treatments underwent a minimally invasive biopsy, under local anesthesia. Using a catheter inserted through a vein in the neck, doctors removed a small sample of heart tissue, about half the size of a raisin. The heart tissue was then taken to the lab at Cedars-Sinai and cultured and multiplied the cells using specially developed tools.

The doctors then took the multiplied heart-derived cells — roughly 12 million to 25 million of them per patient — and reintroduced them into the patient’s coronary arteries during another minimally invasive catheter procedure.

The process used in the trial was developed earlier by Marban when he was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins. Johns Hopkins has filed for a patent on the intellectual property and has licensed it to a company in which Marban has a financial interest. However, no funds from that company were used to support the clinical study. All funding was derived from the National Institutes of Health and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

This study followed another in which doctors reported using cells taken from the heart to heal the heart. That trial reported in November 2011 that cells could be used to heal the hearts of heart failure patients who were having heart bypass surgery.

And another trial is about to get underway in Europe, which will be the largest ever for stem cell therapy in heart attack patients.

The BAMI trial will inject 3,000 heart attack patients with stem cells taken from their bone marrow within five days of the heart attack.

Marban said despite the heart’s ability to re-grow heart muscle with the help of heart stem cells, they found no increase in a significant measure of the heart’s ability to pump — the left ventricle ejection fraction: the percentage of blood pumped out of the left ventricle.

Professor Anthony Mathur, a coordinating researcher for the upcoming BAMI trial, said that even if the Marban trial found an increase in ejection fraction then it would be the source of much debate. As it was a proof-of-concept study, with a small group of patients, “proving it is safe and feasible is all you can ask.”

“The findings would be very interesting, but obviously they need further clarification and evidence,” he told BBC News.

“It’s the first time these scientists’ potentially exciting work has been carried out in humans, and the results are very encouraging,” Professor Jeremy Pearson, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, told BBC News.

“These cells have been proven to form heart muscle in a petri dish but now they seem to be doing the same thing when injected back into the heart as part of an apparently safe procedure,” he added. “It’s early days, and this research will certainly need following up, but it could be great news for heart attack patients who face the debilitating symptoms of heart failure.”

—

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See the original post:
Stem Cells Regrow Healthy Heart Muscle In Heart Attack Patients

COMMENTARY | I am willing to bet most people know someone with a damaged heart. I can name two people in my immediate family, but do not have enough fingers and toes to count up all the friends, coworkers and acquaintances who have suffered mild or major heart attacks over the years. The odds are you know several sufferers yourself. In fact, millions of people suffer from heart disease. It is the leading cause of death for Americans.

Re-grow damaged heart tissue

A heart attack causes a piece of the heart tissue to die from lack of blood flow. The scar tissue is all that remains and the person has to deal with the damage. Now, in a ground-breaking study, researchers from the Cedar-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles have discovered a way to re-grow damaged heart muscle.

Stem cell therapy Dr. Eduardo Marban and his team tested stem cell therapy with great results. Out of 17 patients, there was an average reduction of scar tissue by 50 percent. These patients also saw new growth in their heart muscle. Now that is not a total reversal, but for tissue that was presumed lost forever, this is big news.

Marban said, "One of the holy grails in medicine has been the use of medicine to achieve regeneration," Marban said.

Patients' own stem cells

It should be pointed out that the stem cells used did not come from the very controversial embryos, instead the cells used were developed from the patients' hearts. Again, this has huge implications in the treatment of heart disease, and other degenerative diseases for that matter.

"We've achieved what we have achieved using adult stem cells - in this case - actually specifically from a patient's own heart back into the same patient." Marten said, "There's no ethical issues with that - there's no destruction of embryos. There's no reason to worry about immune rejection."

How it works

The process takes several months. A catheter has to first be inserted in the "broken heart" to remove a small biopsy of muscle. The piece is them manipulated in the laboratory and then finally re-injected in the patient's heart. Once the cells take root, the heart will began to mend itself from the inside out.

Far-reaching implications

This revolutionary medical treatment could potentially be used to re-grow damaged kidneys, pancreas or other damaged organs. But, this is only the start of the research. There are still a lot of unknowns in the process. Surprisingly, the stem cells are not doing all the work. "The repair is from the heart itself and not from the cells we give them." said Marban.

Overall the potential for this treatment is great. It will take some more time and study before healing America's broken hearts but the hope is there. Dr. Marban believes the treatment will be available to the general public within four years.

Read this article:
Broken Hearts Healed with Stem Cells

Stanley, Kan. — It’s a special Valentine’s Day gift for Jake the dog.  His family gave him a stem cell treatment that they hope will extend his life.

Jake is an 11-year-old yellow lab.  He’s been part of the LeBlanc family since he was a puppy.  Jake’s owner, Elizabeth LeBlanc, calls him her “first baby.”  But then Mia and Aidan were born and at ages eight and five years old, they love to play with Jake.

When the LeBlanc’s noticed Jake was having trouble getting around they wanted to help.  They tried medication, but say it didn’t work for very long.  Then Mia saw a segment about a stem cell treatment for dogs on t.v. and asked if they could get it for Jake.  The LeBlanc’s called their veterinarian and found out the Stanley Veterinary Clinic in Stanley, Kansas is the only place in the metro where they can do the entire procedure in house.

Dr. Les Pelfrey, D.V.M. explained the procedure.

“We’re going to collect about 20 grams of fat surgically and then we’re going to process it in our lab here in house then we’re going to reintroduce those stem cells after we activate them back into the affected joints,” said Dr. Les Pelfrey.

The procedure can cost $3000. The dog’s fatty tissue has to be sent off to a lab for the stem cells to be extracted.  But at the Stanley Veterinary Clinic they can process the stem cells in their own lab, cutting the cost to $1800.00.

Jake’s arthritis is affecting his hips, knees, one elbow and one shoulder.  Dr. Pelfrey made an incision and removed the fatty tissue from Jake.  Then veterinary technician Stephanie Pierce took it to the lab to break it down, cook it and then spin it.  The final product?  Stem cells that were then re-injected into Jake’s joints to help him grow cartilage.  Pierce says Jake will “act like a puppy again as far as moving around.”

The LeBlancs can’t wait to see the results.

“For 12 years he’s given us love and joy so we just want to give him a better quality of life,” LeBlanc said.

Jake will spend the night at the Stanley Veterinary Clinic.  He should be able to head home tomorrow.  Jake and the LeBlancs should notice results in the next few weeks.

Go here to read the rest:
Dog Receives First-Ever Stem Cell Therapy in Kansas City

February 15, 2012, 12:06 AM EST

By Ryan Flinn

(Adds comment from researcher in 13th paragraph.)

Feb. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Stem cells grown from patients’ own cardiac tissue can heal damage once thought to be permanent after a heart attack, according to a study that suggests the experimental approach may one day help stave off heart failure.

In a trial of 25 heart-attack patients, 17 who got the stem cell treatment showed a 50 percent reduction in cardiac scar tissue compared with no improvement for the eight who received standard care. The results, from the first of three sets of clinical trials generally needed for regulatory approval, were published today in the medical journal Lancet.

“The findings in this paper are encouraging,” Deepak Srivastava, director of the San Francisco-based Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, said in an interview. “There’s a dire need for new therapies for people with heart failure, it’s still the No. 1 cause of death in men and women.”

The study, by researchers from Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, tested the approach in patients who recently suffered a heart attack, with the goal that repairing the damage might help stave off failure. While patients getting the stem cells showed no more improvement in heart function than those who didn’t get the experimental therapy, the theory is that new tissue regenerated by the stem cells can strengthen the heart, said Eduardo Marban, the study’s lead author.

“What our trial was designed to do is to reverse the injury once it’s happened,” said Marban, director of Cedars- Sinai Heart Institute. “The quantitative outcome that we had in this paper is to shift patients from a high-risk group to a low- risk group.”

Minimally Invasive

The stem cells were implanted within five weeks after patients suffering heart attacks. Doctors removed heart tissue, about the size of half a raisin, using a minimally invasive procedure that involved a thin needle threaded through the veins. After cultivating the stem cells from the tissue, doctors reinserted them using a second minimally invasive procedure. Patients got 12.5 million cells to 25 million cells.

A year after the procedure, six patients in the stem cell group had serious side effects, including a heart attack, chest pain, a coronary bypass, implantation of a defibrillator, and two other events unrelated to the heart. One of patient’s side effects were possibly linked to the treatment, the study found.

While the main goal of the trial was to examine the safety of the procedure, the decrease in scar tissue in those treated merits a larger study that focuses on broader clinical outcomes, researchers said in the paper.

Heart Regeneration

“If we can regenerate the whole heart, then the patient would be completely normal,” Marban said. “We haven’t fulfilled that yet, but we’ve gotten rid of half of the injury, and that’s a good start.”

While the study resulted in patients having an increase in muscle mass and a shrinkage of scar size, the amount of blood flowing out of the heart, or the ejection fraction, wasn’t different between the control group and stem-cell therapy group. The measurement is important because poor blood flow deprives the body of oxygen and nutrients it needs to function properly, Srivastava said.

“The patients don’t have a functional benefit in this study,” said Srivastava, who wasn’t not involved in the trial.

The technology is being developed by closely held Capricor Inc., which will further test it in 200 patients for the second of three trials typically required for regulatory approval. Marban is a founder of the Los Angeles-based company and chairman of its scientific advisory board. His wife, Linda Marban, is also a founder and chief executive officer.

“We’d like to study patients who are much sicker and see if we can actually spare them early death, or the need for a heart transplant, or a device,” Eduardo Marban said.

--Editors: Angela Zimm, Andrew Pollack

#<184845.409373.2.1.99.7.25># -0- Feb/14/2012 17:13 GMT

To contact the reporter on this story: Ryan Flinn in San Francisco at rflinn@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reg Gale at rgale5@bloomberg.net

Originally posted here:
Scarred Hearts Can Be Mended With Stem Cell Therapy

ScienceDaily (Feb. 14, 2012) — Stem cell therapy moderately improves heart function after a heart attack, according to a systematic review published in The Cochrane Library. But the researchers behind the review say larger clinical trials are needed to establish whether this benefit translates to a longer life.

In a heart attack, the blood supply to parts of the heart is cut off by a blocked artery, causing damage to the heart tissue. The cells in the affected area start to die. This is called necrosis and in the days and weeks that follow, the necrotic area may grow, eventually leaving a large part of the heart unable to contract and increasing the risk of further heart problems. Stem cell therapy uses cells from the patient's own bone marrow to try to repair and reduce this damage. Currently, the treatment is only available in facilities with links to scientific research.

The authors of the review drew together all the available evidence to ask whether adult bone marrow stem cells can effectively prevent and repair the damage caused by a heart attack. In 2008, a Cochrane review of 13 stem cell therapy clinical trials addressed the same question, but the new review adds 20 more recent trials, drawing its conclusions from all 33. By incorporating longer follow up, the later trials provide a better indication of the effects of the therapy several years after treatment.

The total number of patients involved in trials was 1,765. All had already undergone angioplasty, a conventional treatment that uses a balloon to open the blocked artery and reintroduce the blood supply. The review's findings suggest that stem cell therapy using bone marrow-derived stem cells (BMSCs) can produce a moderate long-term improvement in heart function, which is sustained for up to five years. However, there was not enough data to reach firm conclusions about improvements in survival rates.

"This new treatment may lead to moderate improvement in heart function over standard treatments," said lead author of the study, Enca Martin-Rendon, of the Stem Cell Research laboratory, NHS Blood and Transplant at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, UK. "Stem cell therapy may also reduce the number of patients who later die or suffer from heart failure, but currently there is a lack of statistically significant evidence based on the small number of patients treated so far."

It is still too early to formulate guidelines for standard practice, according to the review. The authors say further work is required to establish standard methods, including cell dosage, timing of cell transplantation and methods to measure heart function. "The studies were hard to compare because they used so many different methods," said Martin-Rendon. "Larger trials with standardised treatment procedures would help us to know whether this treatment is really effective.

Recently, the task force of the European Society of Cardiology for Stem Cells and Cardiac Repair received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (EU FP7-BAMI) to start such a trial. Principal Investigator for the BAMI trial, and co-author of this Cochrane review, Anthony Mathur, said, ''The BAMI trial will be the largest stem cell therapy trial in patients who have suffered heart attacks and will test whether this treatment prolongs the life of these patients."

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Journal Reference:

E Martin-Rendon, S Brunskill, C Doree, C Hyde, S Watt, A Mathur. Stem cell treatment for acute myocardial infarction. The Cochrane Library, 2012 DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD006536

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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

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Stem cell treatments improve heart function after heart attack

A promising stem cell therapy approach could soon provide a way to regenerate heart muscle damaged by heart attacks.

Researchers at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute and The Johns Hopkins University harvested stem cells from the hearts of 17 heart attack patients and after prepping the cells, infused them back into the patients' hearts. Their study is published in the current issue of The Lancet.

The patients received the stem cell infusions about three months after their heart attacks.

Researchers found that six months after treatment, patients had significantly less scarring of the heart muscle and also showed a considerable increase the amount of healthy heart muscle, compared to eight post-heart attack patients studied who did not receive the stem cell infusions. One year after, scar size was reduced by about 50 percent.

"The damaged tissue of the heart was replaced by what looks like healthy myocardium," said Dr. Peter Johnston, a study co-author and an assistant professor of medicine at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "It's functioning better than the damaged myocardium in the control subjects, and there's evidence it's starting to contract and generate electrical signals the way healthy heart tissue does."

While this research is an early study designed to demonstrate that this stem cell therapy is safe, cardiologists say it's an approach that could potentially benefit millions of people who have suffered heart attacks. Damage to the heart muscle is permanent and irreparable, and little can be done to compensate for loss of heart function.

"In the U.S., six million patients have heart failure, and the vast majority have it because of a prior heart attack," said Johnston.

The damaged scar tissue that results from a heart attack diminishes heart function, which can ultimately lead to enlargement of the heart.

At best, Johnston said, there are measures doctors can try to reduce or compensate for the damage, but in many cases, heart failure ultimately sets in, often requiring mechanical support or a transplant.

"This type of therapy can save people's lives and reduce the chances of developing heart failure," he said.

Cardiac Regeneration A Promising Field

Other researchers have also had positive early results in experiments with stem cell therapy using different types of cells, including bone marrow cells and a combination of bone marrow and heart cells.

"It's exciting that studies using a number of different cell types are yielding similar results," said Dr. Joshua Hare, professor of cardiology and director of the University of Miami Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute.

The next steps, he said, include determining what the optimal cell types are and how much of the cells are needed to regenerate damaged tissue.

"We also need to move to larger clinical trials and measure whether patients are improving clinically and exhibiting a better quality of life after the therapy."

In an accompanying comment, Drs. Chung-Wah Siu amd Hung-Fat Tse of the University of Hong Kong wrote that given the promising results of these studies, health care providers will hopefully recognize the benefits that cardiac regeneration can offer.

And Hare added that someday, this type of regeneration can possibly offer hope to others who suffered other types of organ damage.

"This stategy might work in other organs," he said. "Maybe this can work in the brain, perhaps for people who had strokes."

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Stem Cells May Help Regenerate Heart Muscle