What’s new this week in terms of reads includes a stem cell/drug combo for diabetic wonderments healing, more documentation of patient harms from stem cell clinics, and a list of recommending papers.
Adult stem cells/glaucoma drug combo promotes diabetic wound healing in mice
From a team of my UC Davis School of Medicine colleagues led by Rivkah Isseroff, Jan Nolta, Athena Soulika, and Thomas Peavy we have in Stem Cells Translational Medicine this exciting new paper, Combination product of dermal matrix, human mesenchymal stem cells, and timolol promotes diabetic wound healing in mice.
The big picture from the journal editor:
“For this work, scientists have combined adult stem cells with a repurposed drug that improves healing to create a novel bioengineered scaffold that could someday lead to a new treatment for chronic diabetic ulcers,” said Anthony Atala, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of STEM CELLS Translational Medicine and director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. “The outcomes from this study are promising and offer therapy not just for diabetic ulcers, but also for other types of wounds.”
The hope is that these results can hold up in human patients in the future.
Neurologists report side effects from predatory stem cell clinics
From Gizmodo Shady Stem Cell Therapies Can Cause Tumors, Infections, and Death, Doctors Report and here’s the original article “Complications from “Stem Cell Tourism in Neurology.”
And in the big picture, one in four neurologists has had a patient with a bad outcome from stem cell clinic. Then there’s this quote about the broader arena:
“It’s an unethical industry. They use fancy websites promising cures left and right, but which are nothing of the sort. They steal your money but give nothing in return,” says Jaime Imitola, senior author of the paper and director of the Comprehensive Multiple Sclerosis Center at UConn Health.”
I asked Dr. Imitola about their paper and he gave me this additional overall perspective:
“I think that academic neurologists are the last line of defense against “stem cell tourism’, since the majority of patients ask for guidance and have questions regarding stem cells. The results of the survey are not reassuring that university neurologists, that should be more in tune with the latest evidence based-medicine, are fully prepared to deal and counsel patients. Furthermore, the reported complications may be the tip of the iceberg, since many patients due to embarrassment are not going to report negative experiences. This study set up important questions for future research.”
I’m very glad they are doing and probably will continue to do research on this. Plus, they are being vocal about it in a blunt way.
Recommended stem cell and others pubs
- Regenerative Reprogramming of the Intestinal Stem Cell State via Hippo Signaling Suppresses Metastatic Colorectal Cancer. Can we reprogram cancer cells or their niche to stop them?
- Assessment of cognitive and neural recovery in survivors of pediatric brain tumors in a pilot clinical trial using metformin. Talk between metformin and stem cells.
- Cell growth dilutes the cell cycle inhibitor Rb to trigger cell division. Impact of the cell cycle on Rb and, of course, vice versa.
- Aging and Rejuvenation of Neural Stem Cells and Their Niches
- Allele-specific open chromatin in human iPSC neurons elucidates functional disease variants. Not all alleles are created equal.
- Mutation accumulation and developmental lineages in normal and Down syndrome human fetal haematopoiesis
- Stabilization of heterochromatin by CLOCK promotes stem cell rejuvenation and cartilage regeneration. Clock function in MSCs is really interesting, especially how it connects to heterochromatin. See image of part of Figure 1 above from this Cell Research paper.
- Oncogenic Smurf1 promotes PTEN wild-type glioblastoma growth by mediating PTEN ubiquitylation. This seems like a cool paper, but also got me wondering at an incidental level about who named SMURF1. It’s fun that science has so many genes and proteins with goofy names. SMURF1 stands for “Smad ubiquitin regulatory factor 1.”
- DNMT3B deficiency alters mitochondrial biogenesis and α‐ketoglutarate levels in human embryonic stem cells
- Clinical trial in a dish using iPSCs shows lovastatin improves endothelial dysfunction and cellular cross-talk in LMNA cardiomyopathy. Up until now have IPSCs had more impact via disease modeling than clinical use? I’d say definitely “yes”. What do you predict in the long run?
Also check out this past Wednesday’s recommended reads.