These articles released this week Absolutely confirm a number of facts ....... Mesoblast is certainly on the right track and is many many years ahead of the field (Someone suggested on another sc thread msb has taken so long to get where they are ).(.tks.m4me good post ) Thats because we have done all the front running work very successfully and as we did we have securly looked all the gates (patents ) behind us ..I have a feeling that this technolgy is rushing towards us very fast so hang on .... Stem cell research on the brink of regrowing damaged human bone and tissue
Stem cell research has potential to heal wounds, chronic back injuries, bad bone fractures
Repair system works in similar way to how salamanders can regrow legs or tails
Using patient's own cells means less chance of tissue rejection
The team from the University of New South Wales said the stem cell repair system works in a similar way to how a salamander is able to regrow a leg or its tail when they are removed.
It is a technique that has the potential to heal wounds, chronic back injuries and bad bone fractures.
UNSW Associate Professor John Pimanda said the technique uses a patient's own cells so there is less chance of tissue rejection, and removes the ethical concerns surrounding the use of embryonic stem cells.
Associate Professor Pimanda said his team took mouse and human bone and fat cells, and converted them into "induced multipotent stem cells".
"What's different about these multipotent stem cells is that once we transplanted them into areas of tissue damage, they seem to demonstrate controlled tissue repair," he said.
"They only repaired the tissues that are damaged.
"So in these particular models that we used, we damaged muscle [and] bone and the cells were regenerating the muscle, regenerating bone, they were generating their own blood supply.
"And what was most amazing and most important for us is it was context dependent — we were not seeing tissues we didn't want to see, we were not seeing tumours."
He said it remained unclear exactly how these cells knew exactly what to regenerate and where.
"I think the cell ... loses its hardwired identity, the fat cell forgets what it is. And it certainly seems to be responding to surrounding cues from the cells.
"So although there's a lot of work to be done to actually understand what the exact nature of this process is, it seems to be responding to signals." Will humans be able to one day regrow limbs?
Associate Professor Pimanda said he and his team were expecting human trials to start next year.
"In the first instance we want to focus on muscular skeletal problems, repairing degenerated discs, it's a huge problem in our communities," he said.
"But also these cells tend to generate their own blood supply and I think that's quite significant, because we have people whose blood vessels are damaged, their tissues are dying because they don't get enough blood and I think we can regenerate both the lost tissue as well regenerate their blood supplies."
UNSW have used the example of the salamander in their outline of the research, and Associate Professor Pimanda said that while that was not an incorrect analogy, they were still a long way away from being able to regenerate an entire human limb.
"I think the analogy of the salamander is that these animals tend to regenerate their limbs by their mature cells at the site where the limb detaches ... going back in time and then proliferating and then going forwards again to make the skin and the fat and the muscle and bone etcetera that's been lost," Associate Professor Pimanda said.
"So I think the analogy is correct in that our cells reject fat cells and we actually go back in time, we make a stem cell that has a potential of ... making various sorts of tissues.
"So it goes back and it goes forwards and I guess that's what the salamander does."
The research has been published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... SCIENTIFIC METHODhttp://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-05/stem-cell-research-close-regrowing-human-bone/7300832 / SCIENCE & EXPLORATION
Essence of stem cells found: Key ingredients protect, heal the brain
Outside of cells, components spare tissue and cognition from irradiation effects.
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Human stem cells. Nissim Benvenisty
For years, stem cell-based therapies have promised myriad breakthroughs in healthcare—from cancer treatments and re-growing teeth to preventing brain damage and degeneration. While some therapies have met with much more success than others, they all face the same challenge of working with live cells. This work can be tricky.
But for one promising stem cell therapy—one that thwarts brain damage—scientists may have found a way around the problems.
By extracting molecular bundles called microvesicles from stem cells, scientists can harness the same neuro-protective and healing properties seen with whole stem cell treatments. Microvesicles normally act like cell-to-cell mail, and they bud from one cell, bearing proteins and snippets of genetic material that tame the immune system and coordinate neighboring cells. In rats with irradiated brains, the bundles safeguarded brain structures, reduced inflammation, and preserved cognitive functions compared with rats that didn’t get the cellular cargo, researchers report.
The findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer a proof-of-principle that microvesicle therapies could one day sidestep the challenges of cell-based treatments for brain damage, injury, or degeneration.
Those researchers, all based at the University of California, Irvine, began looking into microvesicles as a way to treat patients with brain cancer—particularly child patients. Current treatments to zap tumors in the brain can include powerful irradiation, which can be effective but comes with weighty side effects such as lifelong cognitive dysfunction.
In previous studies, the authors found that treatments with stem cells can dodge those effects, yet they came with the standard concerns of using whole cells. But, they noticed that other studies had hinted that stem cell microvesicles can help heal brains, too. In those studies the packages helped heal the damage from stroke and traumatic injuries.
To see if the microvesicles could shield against the effects of radiation, the researchers set up a study in rats with and without head-only radiation exposure. For some of the irradiated rats, the researchers injected microvesicles from human neural stem cells into their brains two days after the exposure. Then they put all the rats through cognitive tests that evaluated memory and learning. The rats with stem cell packages performed just as well as rats that weren’t exposed to radiation at all, while the irradiated rats showed cognitive decline.
When the researchers looked more closely at the rodents' brains, they found that the microvesicles had dispersed through their noggins. That dispersal protected their nerve cells and brain tissue from damage, the researchers found. The irradiated rats injected with microvesicles also had less brain inflammation than their irradiated counterparts.
If the data holds up in further testing, the results suggest that stem cell microvesicles could deliver on the promises of stem cell treatments to protect the brain from a host of injuries and traumas—without the fuss of cells.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-.............................................Vin
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PHOTO: Associate Professor Pimanda said there was still a while to go before humans would be capable of regrowing lost arms and legs.
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