Leuven, Belgium – Immunologist Johan Van Weyenbergh (KU Leuven) and his Belgian-Brazilian colleagues have shown that a drug used to fight arthritis also stops the process that allows the tuberculosis bacillus to infect and hijack blood stem cells.
Riverside, CA, USA – Neural crest cells, embryonic cells in vertebrates that travel throughout the body and generate many cell types – have been thought to originate in the ectoderm, the outermost of the three germ layers formed in the earliest stages of embryonic development
Amsterdam, The Netherlands – Huntington's disease (HD) is a fatal hereditary disease for which there is no cure. A novel study from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, USA, using pluripotent stem cells advances understanding of how the disease develops and may help pave the way for identifying pathways for future treatments. Results are published in the Journal of Huntington's Disease.
Tokyo, Japan – Pluripotent stem cells are specialized cells that can become almost any type of cell or tissue in the body. Because of this potential, they are often used in research to study disease. One way this is done is by coaxing stem cells to form organoids, which resemble organs but can be more easily studied in a laboratory. Researchers centered at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC) and Tokyo Medical and Dental University(TMDU) have devised a better way to make one particular organoid to aid in studies of the liver, bile duct and pancreas.
Sapporo, Japan – A compound effective in killing chemotherapy-resistant glioblastoma-initiating cells (GICs) has been identified, raising hopes of producing drugs capable of eradicating refractory tumors with low toxicity.
Houston, TX, USA – During embryonic development, the entire nervous system, the skin and the sensory organs emerge from a single sheet of cells known as the ectoderm. While there have been extensive studies of how this sheet forms all these derivatives, it hasn’t been possible to study the process in humans – until now.
La Jolla, CA, USA – Gene therapy has broadened the treatment possibilities for those with immune system deficiencies and blood-based conditions, such as sickle cell anemia and leukemia. These diseases, which once would require a bone marrow transplant, can now be successfully treated by modifying patients’ own blood stem cells to correct the underlying genetic problem.
Santa Cruz, CA, USA – Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have demonstrated a new, rapid method to obtain donor stem cells for bone marrow transplants using a combination of Viagra and a second drug called Plerixafor. Bone marrow transplants, used mostly in the treatment of cancer, are life-saving procedures to restore the stem cells that generate new blood cells throughout a person's life. These blood-forming cells (called "hematopoietic stem cells") normally reside only in the bone marrow.
Cambridge, UK – In a world first, scientists have created the human developmental liver cell atlas that provides crucial insights into how the blood and immune systems develop in the foetus. It maps changes in the cellular landscape of the developing liver between the first and second trimesters of pregnancy, including how stem cells from the liver seed other tissues to support the high demand for oxygen needed for growth.
Los Angeles, CA, USA – USC researchers have successfully grown human, testosterone-producing cells in the lab, paving the way to someday treat low testosterone with personalized replacement cells. In Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists describe how they transformed stem cells into functioning Leydig cells – the cells in the testes that produce the male sex hormone.
