SNU To Release Hwang Probe Next Tuesday

According to the Korea Times, Seoul National University has announced it will release the results of its probe into Dr. Hwang Woo-suk next Tuesday (Monday for us in the Western hemisphere). I'll keep you posted. The Pitt News has a summary of the story and an update on the Dr. Gerald Schatten angle--results of the University of Pittsburgh's probe will be released at the end of the month.

Indian Clinic Follow-up

Indian Clinic Follow-up

On November 17, in a post called “Stem Cell Successes?” I blogged about a clinic in India:

Indian officials are concerned about an Indian clinic which claims to have helped 100 people with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and paralysis. The treatment was done with embryonic stem cells. The Indian government said that the protocols of stem cell therapy and the operation details need to be developed so that research and treatment takes place effectively and “quackery” is not tolerated.

Yesterday the clinic owner, Dr. Geeta Shroff appeared before a group of experts on stem cell research but again failed to provide any scientific proof that her treatments had worked, according to an article on Delhi Newsline. She did not give any details of the meeting but reportedly agreed to provide the required data sometime.

I have my doubts.

Here's another link to a heart article

This is another story on the Theravitae procedure of using adult stem cells to treat weak hearts that I blogged on recently. Not much new treatment or research info, but there's one interesting quote:

"Several opponents previously have claimed that any adult stem cell could turn into any other tissue," rendering embryonic stem cell research unnecessary, said Irving Weissman, director of the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in recent comments on the Web site, mednews.stanford.edu. "Although this notion has been thoroughly disproved by several independent groups, those advocates persist in their claims."

Theravitae, on the other hand, says that the stem cells already in the body are all that is needed to promote healing.

The story is on Reuters and has been picked up by other media sources.

Stem Cells May Cure Heart Defects

Stem Cells May Cure Heart Defects

Well, October 2004 is VERY old news by now, but ther'es an interesting story from researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. It emerged today as news on the Hindustan Times, so I went to the Sloan site to find the original release from October 8. (The Hindustan Times is way behind on some other stories too.) The researchers found that embryonic stem cells injected into “early embryos of mice whose hearts were genetically predisposed to develop a lethal defect, rescued the heart from developing the disorder by not only producing normal daughter cells that were incorporated into the defective embryonic heart but also by releasing biological factors into the nearby vicinity.”

The researchers described the embryonic stem cells as acting as “nurses,” helping to heal the sick cells; 50% of the mice who would normally have died in the womb survived. The researchers had previously identified a protein known as Id, which was involved in the normal growth of blood vessels. In this study, they found that the stem cells were dependent on the Id protein to do their work in healing the defective cells. They also identified two different molecules which the stem cells apparently used in signaling; one molecule had a short range action, so that the mice survived gestation but died a few days after birth, and another had a longer action and fully corrected the flaw in genetic expressions.

Obviously more research has to happen before we can see if this would be applicable to humans, but it’s promising.