Scientific American Topic - Stem Cells

Medicine looks ahead at TED MED

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:57:00 EST

“If you open your minds and let your imaginings run wild, you can see.” J. Craig Venter, the genomic scientist and founder of the J. Craig Venter Institute, was speaking yesterday about the potential for techniques involved in the field of synthetic life to improve medicine, but his words could have been applied to the all the talks during the opening session of TED MED (“TED” is for technology, entertainment, design). The conference is running from October 27 through 30 at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego. Speakers also described advances in using stem cells for regenerative medicine and tissue engineering.

Venter reviewed recent advances in “software building its own hardware.” That is, by inserting DNA from one organism into another , scientists have been able to use existing cellular machinery to read that DNA--transforming one species to another. He mentioned Phase II clinical trials of a vaccine for meningitis developed with the technique.

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The Root of Thought: What Do Glial Cells Do?

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EST

Andrew Koob received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Purdue University in 2005, and has held research positions at Dartmouth College, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Munich, Germany. He's also the author of The Root of Thought , which explores the purpose and function of glial cells, the most abundant cell type in the brain. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Koob about why glia have been overlooked for centuries, and how new experiments with glial cells shed light on some of the most mysterious aspects of the mind.

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Beating Heart Tissue from Stem Cells

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:57:08 EST

[ The following is an exact transcript of this podcast. ]

One of the goals of regenerative medicine is to make tissue to replace our own damaged body parts. That’s still a ways off. But starting with mouse embryonic stem cells, researchers have succeeded in creating heart muscle that actually beats. The study appears in the October 16th issue of the journal Science .

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Stem Cells from Fat Used to Grow Teen's Missing Facial Bones

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:15:00 EST

Stem cells so far have been used to mend tissues ranging from damaged hearts to collapsed tracheas . Now the multifaceted cells have proved successful at regrowing bone in humans. In the first procedure of its kind, doctors at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center replaced a 14-year-old boy's missing cheekbones--in part by repurposing stem cells from his own body. [More]

Unraveling the Ribosome: Chemistry Nobel Awarded to Modelers of Cells' Protein-Maker [Update]

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 07:20:00 EST

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be split among three researchers who, over the course of the past two decades, puzzled out--at the atomic level--the function of the ribosome in piecing together proteins. [More]

Breakthrough: Bone Graft Grown in Exact Shape of Complex Skull-Jaw Joint

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:10:00 EST

Bones often come in complex, delicate shapes, making it hard to find matching natural replacements for them in patients suffering from injuries, diseases or birth defects. Now researchers have grown bone grafts in the exact shape of a desired bone, an advance that could help provide doctors with just what they need for face , skull and other skeletal reconstructions.

Although missing bone can be replaced by titanium , "there is no better substitute for lost tissue than living tissue," bioengineer Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic at Columbia University explains. "Although titanium is better than nothing--you need something to help bear loads--real bones also have bone marrow inside that has many important metabolic functions."

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Work on Telomeres Wins Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 3 U.S. Genetic Researchers [Update]

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:30:00 EST

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine will go to three Americans who discovered telomeres , the genetic code that protects the ends of chromosomes, and telomerase , the enzyme that assists in this process, findings that are important in the study of cancer, aging and stem cells. [More]

Stem cells bring new insights to future treatment of vision--and neural--disorders

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:30:00 EST

BALTIMORE--Deep in the brain, buried in the hippocampus and subventricular zone, reside adult neural stem cells , cells that retain the ability to become other types of neural cells and could serve as possible treatments for ailments ranging from vision impairment to Parkinson's to spinal cord injuries. Doctors, scientists and patients, however, are understandably hesitant to go digging around for them, their location being "a great deterrent," Sally Temple , founder of the New York Neural Stem Cell Institute, said at the 2009 World Stem Cell Summit here on Wednesday. [More]

Cancer stem cell research gains traction, tackles new targets

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 07:30:00 EST

BALTIMORE--In the decades-long war on cancer, as of late, researchers had been making little progress in comparison to colleagues treating other conditions, such as cardiac or infectious diseases. "Cancer research has really plateaued out," William Matsui , an associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine, said at the 2009 World Stem Cell Summit here on Tuesday. But pushing cancer stem cell research "gives us a novel way to study cancer," said Matsui, who also runs a lab at the university's Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center . [More]

Where There Was Smoke, There's Science

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:00:08 EST

Wake Forest University School of Medicine neuroscientist Dwayne Godwin talks about the the Winston–Salem area's adoption of biomedical research as well as meetings with Congress about science funding and his comic strip contributions to Scientific American Mind . Plus, we'll test your knowledge of some recent science in the news.

Podcast Transcription

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Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Created from Fat Cells

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:35:00 EST

The standard way to make induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells for medical research is to scrape skin cells and mix up their internal clocks, coaxing them back into pluripotency over a matter of weeks. But now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have turned their attention to another cell type in abundant supply: fat cells. The team of cardiologists and plastic surgeons found adipose fat cells to be much more efficient than skin cells at turning back into stem cells. [More]

Divide to Conquer: Infection-Specific T Cells Multiply to Fight Infection

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:30:00 EST

When the body contracts a new virus or bacteria, specific white blood cells --T lymphocytes--are recruited to fight back. Each T cell is only programmed, however, to recognize a specific viral or bacterial strain, so out of every 100,000 T cells, only one might match a novel pathogen. Therefore, once the matches are found, those few cells need to multiply in a hurry to stave off illness. [More]

Researchers Design Patches of Cells to Repair Damaged Hearts

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:30:00 EST

Clinical trials are underway for stem cell injections to quicken healing of the cardiac muscle after a heart attack. Although promising results trickle in, other researchers are looking for a speedier way to renew a damaged area of the organ: patches of cardiac cells. One patch is getting a leg up from a temporary stay in stomach tissue, and another is using a biodegradable mesh to help the heart rebuild itself. [More]

Leukemia Cells Flash Fake Protein "ID" to Dupe the Immune System

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:30:00 EST

Bone marrow continually makes blood stem cells, which turn into new blood cells to replace spent ones, but the process is not perfect: Some blood stem cells can develop into abnormal versions, although the immune system usually stamps them out. In acute myeloid leukemia, however, the immune system seems unable to recognize malformed blood cells, which proliferate quickly and become cancerous. [More]

Whatever Happened to the Mars Rovers?

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:00:00 EST

Natural Quasicrystals First cooked up in the lab in 1984, quasicrystals are unusual substances that lie somewhere between the crystalline and the amorphous. Specifically, they display ordered arrangements and symmetries but are not periodic--that is, they are not defined by a single unit cell (such as a cube) that repeats itself in three dimensions [see “Quasicrystals”; SciAm, August 1986].

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Man Receives His Own Stem Cells as a Treatment for Heart Failure

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 15:45:00 EST

The first person to receive a new cardiac stem cell treatment in a U.S. Food and Drug Administration clinical trial is doing well, it was announced last week. [More]

Meet "Tiny," a mouse grown from induced stem cells

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:25:00 EST

Thanks to a little mouse named Tiny, researchers have now shown that full, living mammals can be grown from so-called induced pluripotent stem cells--cells from an adult that act in many ways like embryonic stem cells . [More]

New Zealand Company Injects Insulin-Making Cells from Pigs into Diabetic Humans

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:55:00 EST

On Thursday the New Zealand-based Living Cell Technologies began giving type 1 diabetes patients a pig cell treatment, which promises to suppress disease symptoms. [More]

Government-funded researchers can now study hundreds of embryonic stem cell lines

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:00:00 EST

This morning marks a rebirth of a U.S. stem cell research program, now that government-funded researchers can take advantage of many of the 700 stem cell lines that exist around the world. [More]

Is there such a thing as "cell phone elbow"?

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:35:00 EST

As CNN and others are reporting, an increasing number of cell phone gabbers are complaining of an ailment called "cell phone elbow." Here are the symptoms: pain or numbness in the hand--especially the pinky and ring fingers. Not to be confused with tennis or golfer's elbow (forms of tendonitis), this new diagnosis stems from the nerves that run through the elbow. [More]