Welcome to the Hotel California

Welcome to the Hotel California

Enough assorted articles have come out about California for them to merit their own blog post today. The San Francisco Chronicle had an editorial today about Prop 71, arguing that the CIRM and State Senator Deborah Ortiz (who is running for Secretary of State in the June 6 primary) should work out their differences about regulation outside of legislation. Ortiz has proposed a bill that would add regulations to the CIRM but requires voter approval. The paper sees her as flexible so far.

Meanwhile, a San Francisco Business Times story reprinted on MSNBC reports that the applications for stem cell training are inundating various facilities through California. UCSF, for example, has received 70 applications for 16 slots. The expectation for the CIRM-funded training grants is that much more training will have to occur with other funding but that these get the ball rolling, so to speak. Part of the grants involves instituting specialized stem cell curricula courses, including ones on ethics and issues. One researcher said the effects of the CIRM in focusing research on stem cells is already being seen.

The San Jose Mercury News (may require log-in) reported Saturday that another British stem cell company hopes to open a location soon somewhere in the Bay Area. This is seen as a sign that California will attract stem cell technology rather than suffering a brain drain.

Finally, last week Wisconsin Technology Network had an article saying that some California stem cell advocates see a recent Supreme Court ruling about e-Bay as weakening the strength of the stem cell patents held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. The WARF disputes that analysis of the ruling. I’m not going to go on at length about this because it will be settled in a court at some point and what I or any other ordinary citizen thinks really doesn’t matter very much on this one. The article does provide some background on the issue, if intellectual property law is of interest to you. Perhaps I should go get my law degree now so I can take part in the fight?

Stem Cells Help Incontinence

Stem Cells Help Incontinence

In two widely reported studies about a common medical problem, stem cell injections helped women with urinary incontinence due to weak sphincter muscles, usually caused by childbirth, menopause, or pelvic surgery.

For one study, a press release reports that researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto isolated and expanded stem cells from skeletal muscle tissue, then injected these into the area surrounding the urethra. The cells came from the patients themselves, so there was no rejection issue. Five of the seven women who were treated reported improvement in their bladder control. The patients for whom the treatment had effectiveness were those who received the stem cell injections either from a 10 mm needle or a periurethral injection; an 8 mm needle was apparently insufficient for the stem cells to go deep enough into the tissue. The study had previously been demonstrated on mice; this was a small safety trial. No serious side effects were reported. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that one woman feels that she is 100% improved after 9 months, though not all patients had complete reduction of urinary incontinence. Both the harvesting of the stem cells from the thigh and the injections were done as outpatient procedures and are considered minimally invasive. The researchers hope that they have found a good solution to improve the quality of life without women having to resort to surgery, which is sometimes ineffective. (Men who have prostate surgery sometimes also suffer from incontinence.) They hope to begin a larger trial this summer.

A Knight Ridder story on the South Carolina web page The State reports that in another study, done by researchers at the Medical University of Innsbruck, in Austria, a similar procedure is considered a cure, as 153 of the 186 patients treated in that study were free of urinary leakage a year later. In the Austrian study, the stem cells were taken from the upper arm rather than the thigh, and they were mixed with a “small amount” of collagen. No serious side effects were reported. A short article on MedPage Today about this study says that it involved isolating both myoblasts (muscle stem cells) and fibroblasts (connective tissue cells) and that the fibroblasts create scaffolding for the myoblasts, thus strengthening the sphincter.