Bone-repairing stem cell jab hope

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7985142.stm
Thanks to Oliver Witt for link

By Michelle Roberts BBC News health reporter in Oxford

It may be possible to control stem cells with a magnet

Doctors may soon be able to patch up damaged bones and joints anywhere in the body with a simple shot in the arm.

A team at Keele University is testing injectible stem cells that they say they can control with a magnet.

Once injected these immature cells can be guided to precisely where their help is needed and encouraged to grow new cartilage and bone, work on mice shows.

The aim is to treat patients with injuries and arthritis the UK National Stem Cell Network conference heard.

The ultimate aim is to repair cartilage and bone Professor Alicia El Haj Keele University

Professor Alicia El Haj, working with Professor John Dobson, also of Keele University, says the technology, patented by Magnecell, could be tested in humans within five years.

It would provide a way to treat disease without invasive surgery or powerful drugs.

The injection would use the patient's own stem cells, harvested from their bone marrow.

These mesenchymal cells would be treated in the lab to give them a coating of minute magnetic particles.

Use in scans

These same magnetic nanoparticles are already approved in the US where they are routinely used as an agent to make MRI scans clearer to read.

Targeted magnetic fields could then move the cells around the body to the desired place and switch them into action without the need for drugs or other biochemical triggers.

Professor Al Haj said: "The ultimate aim is to repair cartilage and bone. We have been able to grow new bone in mice. Now we will look at whether we can repair damaged sites in goats.

"We should be able to move to human trials within five years."

Meanwhile, experts at the University of Southampton, led by Professor Richard Oreffo, have treated four patients with hip joint problems using stem cell therapy.

The technique combines the patients own bone marrow stem cells with donor bone cells to patch-repair damaged bones that would otherwise need treatment with metal plates and pins.

They say it is only a matter of years before their method could be used routinely to treat some of the 60,000 people who fracture a hip in the UK each year.

Obama lifts research restrictions on embryonic stem cells

reposted from: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16728-obama-lifts-research-restrictions-on-embryonic-stem-cells.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=health

• 23:16 09 March 2009 by Peter Aldhous
• For similar stories, visit the Stem Cells Topic Guide

Stem cell biologists in the US have been waiting for this day for almost 8 years. With the stroke of a pen, President Barack Obama this morning removed the limits on federal funding of research on human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) imposed by his immediate predecessor.

"What happened today is huge," says Kevin Wilson, director of public policy at the American Society for Cell Biology.

"We've gone from having a small number of cell lines eligible for federal funding to having at least a few hundred."

ESCs can develop into any other cell type found in the body, and so have huge potential for use in medicine, to repair lost or damaged tissues. But some people object to their use on moral grounds because the creation of an ESC line usually involves the destruction of a pre-implantation embryo, just a few days old.

Existing cell lines

As a compromise, President George Bush announced on 9 August 2001 that federal funds would only be made available for research on cell lines derived prior to that date.

From the start, critics argued that the policy would impair progress in research. And as scientists scrutinised the list of approved lines, it emerged that there were many fewer than the 60 claimed in Bush's announcement.

"It really has limited people," says Sean Morrison, who heads the Center for Stem Cell Biology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Separate labs

For US biologists who work on human ESCs, Obama's executive order means the end to an administrative nightmare that has seen them set up separate lab space and equipment to ensure that federal dollars are not inadvertently used for research on non-authorised cells.

"The press has just been here taking pictures of us ripping stickers off our incubators," Evan Snyder of the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, California, told New Scientist.

The removal of these restrictions may now convince more researchers to start working on human ESCs. "My own research is on adult stem cells," says Elaine Fuchs of Rockefeller University in New York City. "We haven't worked with human embryonic stem cells in part because of the hurdles involved."

Federal funding restrictions

Obama's executive order gives the National Institutes of Health 120 days to establish new guidelines for research on human ESCs and authorises the agency to back this work "to the extent permitted by law".

This frees biologists to work with a wide range of human ESCs - including cell lines created with state and private funding.

But researchers are not expected to be able to use federal grants to create new cell lines. This is because of a 1996 law called the Dickey-Wicker amendment, attached to the bills approving the NIH's budget, which bans funding for research that involves the destruction, injury or death of a human embryo.