The time when body organs become replaceable is just around the corner.  Soon enough, scientists will be able to extend the life span of a human being dozens of years through his or her stem cells.

The first step has been taken already, with a 10-year-old boy receiving a revolutionary tracheal transplant in London, at the Great Ormond Street Hospital.

An organ that will grow inside the boy’s body through his stem cells has substituted the windpipe, bendable tube connecting the nose, mouth and lungs.

The boy was born with a condition known as long segment tracheal stenosis, which is a weakening condition that leaves the person with an airway of 1mm in width, putting him at risk of suffocation and death.

Previously, the boy was treated with stents, but these collapsed, interrupted the airflow and harmed the boy’s aorta.  After the child could barely breathe, his doctors called Paolo Macchiarini, at Careggi University Hospital in Florence, who decided to try a dangerous but bold procedure: re-growing the organ inside the boy’s body using stem cells.

Macchiarini’s team took a donor’s windpipe and removed all cells to prevent immune response.  The tissue was successfully implanted after having been seeded with the child’s stem cells and with a blend of chemicals that promote growth.  The patient responded well, he breathed normally and started talking right after the procedure.

This is truly a milestone in more than one way, because besides the implications it has for human life and health, this is the first time a child has received stem-cell organ treatment, it is the longest airway that has been substituted ever, and by letting the boy’s own cells re-grow the tissue, the costs were lowered considerably, by tens of thousands of pounds.

This success opens the door for stem-cell organ transplants to be performed in other medical facilities besides highly specialized hospitals, and although it won’t replace conventional transplants shortly, it most certainly can be applied to some aspects of these types of surgeries.

Regenerative medicine must become an important part of healthcare, and things are moving in that direction.  The next possible and intrepid step will be to perform larynx or esophagus stem cell transplants.

For now, doctors are waiting to see how the boy further responds to the transplant and if his recovery is as successful as expected.  If he recovers completely, as it is believed he will, we will have moved a step closer to immortality.

Talk to your life sciences consulting firm to learn about the latest developments in the pharmaceutical industry and to find the best ways to take advantage of the stem cell miracles that are unfolding around the world today.

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A group of top researchers is focusing on understanding how an embryo’s developing pancreas recognize which cells produce insulin and which ones have other functions.  This understanding is crucial in the use of stem cells, developed into beta cells that produce insulin, to treat type-1 diabetes.

Today, Lund University scientists have new discoveries to announce in this regard, and they will do it in the journal Cell, which is one of the top biomedical journals.

Diabetes researcher Henrik Semb’s team has been analyzing two vital scientific questions:

1.    How are tubes formed in organs where they fulfill vital functions?  For example, the tubes that filter urine in the kidneys, the tubes that carry blood in the blood vessels, and the tubes that carry air in the lungs.

2.    How is the differentiation of cells, the development of immature cells into various mature ones, related to the formation of tubes?

These two processes are known to happen simultaneously in an embryo, but it was not known if they were related, until now.  Henrik Semb’s research team can explain step by step how certain cells in the developing pancreas form miniature cavities that join together to create a system of tubes, and how cells that end up in different parts of this tube system are exposed to different environments, thus they develop in separate ways.  Some produce insulin, others, enzymes that digest food in the intestines, and yet others take part in the tube’s construction.

This research team also discovered that there is a critical gene related to these processes, it is called Cdc42.  They found this out through knock-out mice that had this gene removed.  The lack of Cdc42 blocks the formation of tubes in the pancreas, thus, the dominant environment is like the one around enzyme-producing cells instead of the most important insulin-producing beta cells one.

These discoveries provide knowledge that is critical for the future of medical treatments.  A new door has opened for the research on stem cell treatment for type-1 diabetes, given the new understanding of how immature cells grow into beta cells.  This knowledge will also be valuable for diseases where cyst formation in the tubes produces organ failure, for example, in kidneys and liver.

Every important article published in Cell requires committed and lengthy research, and this is exactly what the Lund scientists have done.  They have devoted years to studying tube formation, cell differentiation, and the role of Cdc42 in the mentioned processes.

Their secret resides in the team itself, formed by amazing scientists capable of keeping their passion alive and energy focused even when they were tempted to publish several partial findings in other journals.  They definitely knew better.

If you wish to know more about stem cell research and their future medical potential, talk to your pharmaceutical consultants; they should be on top of the latest developments and market opportunities.

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Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed a new stem cell technology to aid in the better and faster healing of complicated bone fractures.

This technology, which involves the isolation of stem cells from the bone marrow, has been already used successfully in the treatment of severe fractures in seven patients at the Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem.

Up to today, the standard treatment in clinical orthopedics for serious bone loss has encompassed basically two options: amputation or long periods of disability.  Equally, prosthetic implants have proven inefficient in the long term.  When there is too much loss of bone, the fracture may not heal, and this is the case of more than a million people per year, just in the United States.

In the last years, there have been promising advances for biological therapy to treat complicated fractures and skeleton disorders, specifically by using mesenchymal or multipotent stem cells (MSC’s), which can differentiate between various cell types.  These cells are unique adult stem cells that can be rapidly isolated from various places in the body, mainly bone marrow and fat tissues, and used to repair different injured tissues like bone, cartilage, tendons, intervertebral discs, and even heart muscle.

The way in which MSC isolation is normally conducted is lengthy, expensive, and also harmful to the healing quality of the cells, because it requires long periods of growth inside incubators.  It was urgent to find a way that would allow for the immediate use of stem cells; the regenerative medicine field was begging for one, and the Hebrew University heard them.

The technology this group developed is called immuno-isolation.  Basically, MSC’s are sorted out in a bone marrow sample by using a specific antibody.  It was proven that this technique made it possible to immediately use the cells to create new bone tissue in lab animals.  After this discovery, several scientists from different interested parties joined forces to establish a clinical-grade protocol for the use of immuno-isolated MSC’s.

The head of orthopedics at Hadassah University Hospital, the Good Manufacturing Practice facility at Hadassah, and the Gazit group at the Faculty of Dental Medicine, conducted a clinical trial in order to establish the foundation for the use of immuno-isolated MSC’s in orthopedic surgery.

Seven patients have benefited so far from the treatment of combining their own immuno-isolated MSC’s and blood products.  The procedure lasted a few hours and didn’t require the growing of cells in a lab.

This success is expected to touch other skeleton injuries, like degenerated intervertebral disks and torn tendons.  It is expected that this treatment will help tackle morbidity in patients with skeletal fractures and diseases, and will help re-establish function and quality of life for many people.

In hopes of making this technology available to many more, the university has licensed the immuno-isolation technology to TheraCell Inc. in California since July 2009.  This organization will develop and commercialize this technology thoroughly for advanced regenerative medical purposes, like spinal fusion.

The mission of life sciences consulting firms is to help pharmaceutical companies land opportunities like this one, where they are able to change lives for the better, showing care and respect for patients in need, while staying at the head of innovation.

If you liked this article, tell all your friends about it. They’ll thank you for it. If you have a blog or website, you can link to it or even post it to your own site (don’t forget to mention www.smartconsultinggroup.com as the original source).