Spinal Cord Anecdotes

Spinal Cord Anecdotes

These are single incidents and do not necessarily represent the usual results. Further, the press release is from the involved biotech company, which obviously has a vested interest in spinning good news. There is no referenced publication to a peer-reviewed journal, and there is no statement of how many people have not had successes with this treatment. All those caveats now stated, here’s the story:

A Romanian man and an American man who suffered from spinal cord injuries showed improvement after receiving umbilical cord stem cells in China. The American’s injury was about four years old, while the Romanian had suffered his injury 10 years earlier. Both injuries were incomplete spinal cord injuries at the c5-c6 vertebrae, meaning that the men had some functioning in their bodies below the site of the injury. The American had a surgical implantation of the stem cells, while the Romanian received his through injections and an IV. Both men reported that they have regained some of their lost functioning and have increased mobility, as well as a higher quality of life. They have been also been receiving physical therapy since the treatments.

Good news for them, and I hope it lasts. It’s only been a few months, so I don’t think anyone can say for certain yet that the improvement is permanent. It’s possible that the stem cells also promoted healing and reduction of inflammation around the site of injury, although that certainly doesn’t account for all their improvements.

Before you go off to China to try this yourself, however, try to get more information from an objective (relatively, at least) source about complications and the success rate of the treatment. If 70 other people have also been treated and had no improvement, the odds are not good. Just because something is not FDA approved does not mean that it does not work, since the FDA is a bureaucracy that takes time, but any experimental procedures should be subject to rigorous assessment from some other body.

Hematopoietic Stem Cell Findings

Hematopoietic Stem Cell Findings

A short HealthDay News article printed in Forbes reports that bone marrow stem cells—at least those that have been purified in culture and come from mice—can identify bacteria and virus within the blood. Researchers in Oklahoma and Japan, working together, have discovered not only that the stem cells can detect infectious agents but also that once they do, they create necessary cells to protect the body. According to the researchers, this has implications for the treatment of autoimmune disorders; understanding the mechanisms behind this might lead to an ability to shut down response to one’s own body and, conversely, to boost the immune system against diseases.

No scientific details in the article; it would be interesting to know not only what the signaling system is but also how much the stem cell niche plays a role.

Legislative Updates

Legislative Updates

I haven’t reported much on politics lately, partly because I’m a bit tired of it and partly because there hasn’t been much. However, the New Jersey stem cell bills in the state Assembly that would provide $ 480 million or more in research grants and facilities, is now officially stalled. The Newark Star-Ledger reported that the focus in the Assembly is on getting a budget before the recess. The state Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee has voted by an 8-3 count to put one of the two measures on the ballot as a referendum, but it will probably not even be discussed until the fall, meaning it will not appear in this November’s election. Another article, in the Cherry Hill Courier-Post, reports that scientists and other supporters believe the delay will mean a loss of people to the West Coast and other states where stem cell research is well-funded. Opponents cite the state’s debt, but most are also opposed to embryonic stem cell research. One opponent thinks the referendum does not have clear enough ballot language, so we may see a redux of the Missouri situation when the referendum eventually appears.
Meanwhile, back at the Capitol, there’s a UPI story saying that a Senate vote on the long-delayed stem cell bill may come in July. In the interim, Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum (R), who is trailing in his re-election bid, has sponsored another bill promoting alternative nuclear transfer technology, in which DNA is injected into an egg which then divides and dies. Santorum also supports various extraction methods of obtaining stem cells from a defective embryo (which would itself remain in storage) or directly from a blastomere that goes on to develop normally.

If you have DNA inserted into an egg, how is that different from a regularly fertilized egg? Are supporters arguing that human life is only human when it comes about from regular conception and that artificial conception produces something that is not human? Does this mean that humanity is defined by sperm? Or is there no conception in this egg? It seems to me that if the cells have human DNA in them, they are potential humans, regardless of how the DNA got there. I don’t believe in biological determinism, I believe that people are more than their DNA (which is partly why I don’t think several cells containing DNA are people), but the genetic code is the fundamental basis for our existence.

More on Nanog and Some News on DNA

More on Nanog and Some News on DNA

Nanog, that all-important protein, has been shown to be important in keeping cells from differentiating; it has now also been shown to be useful in turning embryonic cells that had begun differentiating back into pluripotent stem cells, according to an article on Medical News Today. (The story also contains the factoid that “Nanog is named for the legendary Celtic land Tir nan Og where people remained forever young.”) Researchers from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have a forthcoming paper explaining how the cells can revert to a more primal state.

The researchers already knew that BMP, which is a bone muscle growth agent, was the likely cause of cultured embryonic stem cells beginning to differentiate into muscle cells, and that when they were forced to produce Nanog they reverted back. The current study explains what Nanog is actually doing: it binds with another protein called Smad1. Smad1 is then unable to activate necessary co-activators in the cell and thus can’t express the muscle-forming gene.

One of the implications of the research is that it might be possible to cause differentiated cells in a body to return to a stem-cell state, thus allowing regeneration of tissue. It would clinically be pretty complicated even if possible, so don’t expect this soon. But it’s still pretty cool to think about turning back the cellular clock.
Related to the issue of cellular states is the age of DNA. News-Medical.Net reports that researchers at the Pasteur Institute have shown that stem cells retain their DNA; errors in copying may occur when the cell divides, but the errors show up in the daughter cell and not in the new stem cell. The researchers tracked the development of mouse muscle both in culture and in actual mice and showed the stem cell and the daughter cell contained different DNA. The lead researcher was quoted as saying, “It appears that the cellular machinery distinguishes old from new when it comes to DNA, and it may use this distinction to protect the body from mutations and cancer. It is also possible that this mechanism is used to silence gene expression in the stem cell.”

I’m wondering if either or both of these studies will eventually connect to telomeres in some fashion; since stem cells keep their telomeres but dividing normal cells lose bits off the end with every division, until they can no longer divide, perhaps telomere length is related to the signals that cause the cell to differentiate and then divide. It would also be interesting to combine these two studies and find out if cells that were differentiated back into the stem cell state contained the DNA of the original stem cell or if it had already altered.