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SPECIAL REPORT
Multipotent Menstrual Blood Stromal Stem Cells:
Isolation, Characterization, and Differentiation
(English)
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What is a Stem Cell?
A stem cell is a remarkable cell, as it has the amazing ability to change into a
variety of different cell types in the body such as heart muscle cells, brain cells,
and skin cells. Stem cells, which are often referred to as one of the body's "master
cells," can grow into any one of the body's more than 200 cell types. Stem
cells assist the body in maintaining, renewing and repairing tissue and cells damaged
by disease, injury and everyday life. If you think about it, stem cells act as the
internal repair system for the body. Keep reading
Why are Stem Cells Important?
Stem Cell FAQs Stem Cell Resource Links
Real Life Examples
- In March of 2008, a Sacramento, CA family with a two-year old son diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy was treated with cord blood obtained while in-utero. Two-days after the one-hour procedure, the child showed signs of marked improvement. Click here for more information.
- In February of 2003, Cryo-Cell International successfully aided a Tampa, FL client in saving a three-year old boy suffering from T-cell lymphoma. The procedure was made possible through a cell transplant using cryo-preserved hematopoietic stem cells from the child's younger sibling's cord blood. Click here for more information.
- In April of 2002, Spencer Barsh - a 4-year old diagnosed with Adrenoleukodystrophy - is treated with cord blood. Click here for more information.
- In the summer of 1999, Jaclyn Albanese - a 16-year old diagnosed with Myeloid Leukemia - is treated with cord blood. Click here for more information.
- In 1998, cord blood was used for the first time when a six-year old boy from France was suffering from Franconi's anemia. The child was successfully treated using cord blood obtained from his disease free sibling. Click here for more information.
- In December of 1997, doctors from the Fairview-University Medical Center in St. Paul, MN used hematopoietic stem cells from cord blood to save the life of a two-year old boy suffering from Krabbe's disease. Click here for more information.
- In July of 1994, Erik Haines - a 14-year old diagnosed with Globoid Cell Leukodystrophy - is treated with cord blood. Click here for more information.
- In 1993, Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg, of Duke University Medical Center, cured acute lymphoblastic leukemia through the first two successful unrelated donor cord blood transplants. Click here for more information.
- As of today, more than 8,000 patients afflicted by over 70 different diseases have been treated using hematopoietic stem cells. This includes malignant diseases such as leukemia and lymphoma, as well as retinoblastoma and neuroblastoma. Go to diseases treated to read more.
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Recent News
8/16/2008
Women in the city of Chennai will soon have the option of banking their menstrual blood so that it can be used for treatment of serious disorders through stem cell therapy. LifeCell International, in technology partnership with Cryo-Cell International, will set up the facility, which will be the first to store menstrual blood in the country. Menstrual blood contains millions of stem cells that have many properties and characteristics similar to those of stem cells found in bone marrow and embryos. These stem cells exhibit capabilities for self-renewal and multi-potency," says LifeCell International Executive Director, Mayur Abhaya. The biggest advantage of menstrual blood, according to LifeCell Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Ajit Kumar, is that it can be easily harvested in a painless, non-invasive manner. "And it also extends the scope of stem cell therapy to a larger section of the people. Cord blood is an option open to only those who are pregnant or those planning babies," says Dr.
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8/15/2008
Just over a month ago attorney Teresa Walker Mason, daughter of the Rev. Dr. Thomas L. Walker and Joyce N. Walker, began her medical quest to Qingdao, China, to receive stem cell treatments not available in the United States. The debilitating and deadly hereditary condition she was diagnosed with a year ago, at age 39, is Olivopontocerebellar atrophy, a specific form of the neurological condition Ataxia. There is no precise treatment for her condition; therefore, Mason sought treatment at a Chinese hospital that uses stem cells obtained from umbilical cords from live births. Mason said while she has experienced immediate results from the treatments, her doctors in China indicate that it will take two to six months for the stems cells to effectively synchronize with her existing cells. She said there are noticeable improvements, although she still feels herself trembling a little when she is tired, and her gait is not completely smooth.
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8/15/2008
Researchers from Italy have reported that the injection of umbilical cord blood stem cells directly into the pelvic bones of patients with leukemia appears promising. Transplantation of bone marrow, peripheral blood stem cells, and umbilical cord blood stem cells is accomplished by intravenous infusion. The original studies of human bone marrow transplantation were carried out by direct infusion into bone marrow spaces. However, this approach was abandoned as there was no advantage in speed or rate of engraftment over intravenous infusion. Since the early days of transplantation, there have been sporadic attempts to evaluate intra-osseous infusion of stem cells, but no advantage over intravenous infusion was ever found. The reason for this is thought to be that direct infusion of stem cells into the marrow cavity is in fact identical to intra-arterial or intra-venous infusion, and most stem cells enter the general circulation before homing into marrow spaces throughout the body.
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8/14/2008
A team of researchers at Wake Forest University in North Carolina has extracted stem cells from amniotic fluid that have been found able to grow new organ tissue. This could be used, the scientists say, to treat newborns with serious health problems diagnosed in utero. The technique of creating tissue from amniotic fluid and placental stem cells, said Dr. Anthony Atala, could potentially work to cure "any abnormality that would not be lethal before a baby is born." Similar to embryonic stem cells (ESC), AFS cells, like those derived from umbilical cord blood, are "pluripotent," meaning they can potentially be manipulated to become many different types of mature tissues while avoiding not only the killing of embryonic human beings to obtain them, but also the problem of tumor formation immune system rejection. Dr. Atala has also said they are slightly easier to deal with and manipulate in animal trials, than ESC.
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8/14/2008
Dr. Joshua Hare, who leads the University of Miami's new Stem Cell Institute, believes medicine is close to a goal long thought to be impossible, healing the human heart. The solution? Stem cells. "These could be as big as antibiotics were in the last century," said Hare. "Stem cells have the potential to have that kind of impact. Diseases like heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure, liver failure — we will be able to transition them into things you live with." Stem cells, only one-thousandth the size of a grain of sand, are the master cells of the body, the source from which all other cells are created.
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8/10/2008
Advancements in intrabone injections of stem cells from umbilical cord blood show signs of reduced grafting issues and graft-versus-host disease. Cord blood transplantation is an effective treatment for haematological malignancies, but only a small number of adult patients can undergo this procedure due to the high proportion of graft failures that occur and the high incidence of graft-versus-host disease that follows. According to findings, this technique of intrabone injection of umbilical cord blood cells is potentially useful in a large number of adult patients with acute leukemia.
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8/10/2008
A team of scientists from Harvard Medical School, Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the University of Washington, have produced a library of stem cells based on ordinary skin and bone marrow cells from patients. They say they plan to share the discovery with other stem cell researchers. A new laboratory has been created to serve as a repository for the stem cells, and to distribute them to other scientists researching the diseases.
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8/9/2008
Every time three-year-old Bethanie Thomson looks at her little brother, she will be staring at the boy who saved her life. The young leukemia sufferer is recovering after receiving a life-saving stem cell transplant from her baby brother – without which she would have faced certain death. Bethanie was diagnosed with leukemia when she was just six months old. After fighting off the disease long enough to learn to walk and to start enjoying a normal childhood, she relapsed at age two – just before her little brother Joshua was born. Using blood rich in stem cells from Joshua’s umbilical cord, doctors were able to perform the life saving stem cell transplant. Now Bethanie is on the road to recovery.
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8/9/2008
Stem cell therapy with stored umbilical cord blood could have saved the life of a once desperately sick Australian teenager. After failing to find a bone marrow match, a one in 70 million shot, doctors decided there was no option but to use stem cells from the cord blood of a baby recently listed on an international register. This ended months of uncertainty for the Woodvale teen, who has had a rare blood disorder, which recently turned into a time-bomb with a risk of becoming deadly leukemia.
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8/8/2008
Stem cells have helped to accelerate the healing of severe leg fractures in Australian trials. The research involved five men and four women who had suffered the worst type of compound bone fractures in serious road accidents, some of whom still could not walk up to 41 months after their accidents. In the procedure, bone marrow stem cells are harvested from the patient's pelvis in a non-invasive day procedure using a needle. The stem cells are cultivated in a laboratory until they have divided to create 15 billion stem cells over six weeks. Surgeons then applied the stem cells directly to the fractures. One patient in the trial, 36 year-old Anthony Giancola, was walking the following day.
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8/3/2008
In a breakthrough discovery, Dr. Kevin Eggan, Chief Scientific Officer of The New York Stem Cell Foundation and Principal Faculty Member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, has produced human stem cell lines from the cells of patients afflicted with a version of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The work, published in the on-line edition of the journal Science, is a major step toward scientists' belief that stem cell research will eventually make it possible to treat patients suffering from chronic diseases with stem cell-based treatments created from their own cells.
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8/3/2008
Scientists at Harvard University and Columbia University found a new technique for reprogramming stem cells which permitted them to grow neurons from cell samples that had been donated by individuals suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease, also called ALS. The finding, which is definitely an important step forward in stem cell research, may trigger to an understanding of how the Lou Gehrig’s disease develops.
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8/2/2008
A new technique for reprogramming cells has allowed scientists to grow neurons from cell samples donated by people suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS) that genetically match the bad cells in the spinal cords of ALS patients. This breakthrough may lead to an understanding of how the disease develops and further advancement in stem cell therapy. Stem cells have the capability of developing into various cell types in the body and can act as a repair system within the body. The stem cells can continue to divide and replace other cells in the body as long as the body lives. Stem cells divide and each new cell can remain a stem cell or become another type of cell with a specialized function.
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7/31/2008
Umbilical cords are usually discarded after birth, but stem cells can be extracted from their blood and kept in cold storage to later be used to help regenerate tissue such as bone marrow, making the stem cells important for treating illnesses. Because the stem cells are from the recipient, there is no wait for a donor and theoretically no rejection risk.
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7/31/2008
Cedric Hopkins, a nineteen-year old from Fredericksburg, Virginia, recently received word from his doctors that he can have a transplant using the umbilical cord blood stem cells of a newborn baby instead of bone marrow stem cells. Hopkins, diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkins lymphoma in August 2007, was slated to receive a bone marrow transplant twice earlier this year, but doctors were unable to find a match. However, Hopkins recently received word from his doctors that he can have a transplant using the umbilical cord blood stem cells of a newborn baby instead.
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7/28/2008
Two months after the Pinetop, Arizona toddler, Chloe Levine, was infused with stem cells from her own umbilical-cord blood, Levine has made a 50 percent recovery and is walking, running and able to use her right hand. Umbilical-cord blood was used to treat 2-year-old Chloe Levine, who was born with cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder that prevented her from using the right side of her body.
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7/26/2008
Monique and Sean O’Neill, parents of five year old Liam O’Neill, who was diagnosed at birth with cystic fibrosis, made the decision to bank Liam’s younger brother Lenny’s umbilical cord blood in hopes the recent developments in the stem cell therapy could help in treating Liam’s disease. Now the New Zealand youngster will take part in a stem cell research project aimed at finding a therapy to treat his disease.
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7/18/2008
Research is paving the way for stem cell therapy as a way to repair blood-deprived regions of organs that have been damaged by heart attacks and other conditions. Researchers withdrew stem cells from the blood or bone marrow of adults or the umbilical cord blood of newborns. The cells were combined with two different types of progenitor cells in a culture dish of nutrients and growth factors. The cells were then implanted into mice with weakened immune systems.
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7/17/2008
Umbilical cord blood is increasingly being used by transplant centers as an alternative source of stem cells for the treatment of blood cancers, including myeloma. Topcancernews.com recently reported research being conducted on a CD26 Inhibitor that enhanced the directional homing of stem cells to the bone marrow by increasing the responsiveness of donor stem cells to a natural homing signal. With the relatively limited number of stem cells available in umbilical cord blood, the objective in this research is to increase the transplant efficiency of umbilical cord blood and make stem cell transplants safer.
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7/11/2008
Research performed by scientists in Grenada and Leon suggests that stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood have the potential to cure various hepatic diseases such as hepatitis. These studies introduce critical treatment methods for such illnesses other than liver transplants, which have become increasingly difficult to perform due to a lack of donors. According to a scientific paper to be published in the journal “Cell Transplantation,” human umbilical cord blood cells are useful for hepatic regenerative medicine, as they are capable of nesting in the liver after carrying out a xenotransplant from human to rat.
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7/10/2008
C’elle Virtual Broadcast Center Launches on July 10th at 12 noon EDT; Ground-Breaking Stem Cell Research and Introduction of C’elle, the Innovative New Service to Preserve Stem Cells Found in Menstrual Blood to be Showcased
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7/7/2008
Once chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant had failed, stem cell therapy was the last hope for young Jordan Harden. Leukemia was attacking Jordan's blood cells and killing him. After receiving a stem cell transplant which involved stem cells from the umbilical cord blood of a baby in Spain, Jordan, now 3, is recovering with his family in Scotland and growing healthier by the day.
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7/3/2008
Researchers at the B.C. Cancer Agency have begun to investigate the benefits of examining genes found in some stem cells that act as cancer “factories”, speeding up the spread of tumors throughout the body. Studies of these genes located in normal stem cells may allow scientists to inhibit and eventually eliminate the development of cancerous stem cells, which are the cause of one of the most destructive diseases affecting women today.
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6/30/2008
Researchers at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, CA have for the first time converted stem cells to nerve cells, and implanted them into mice. The scientists involved report this being a major stem in moving forward with stem cell based research and stem cell therapies.
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6/29/2008
A unique study developed by researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver has revealed safe methods for utilizing bone-marrow stem cells to slow the development of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). The disease currently has no cure, but recent scientific developments suggest that stem cell stimulators can potentially improve the body’s repair system without creating adverse effects for ALS patients.
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