StemLife's New Website and Good News For Women who have stored their Stem Cells

First and foremostly, I'd like to share with everyone that StemLife has recently launched a new website. Our web team has opted to refresh and update both pictures and information to enable company news and services to be accessed more easily. I'm sure that they'll be changing the photos and features from time to time, so please share it with all your friends and family.

StemLife- Malaysia's First Stem Cell Bank and Therapeutics Company for Babies and Adults


Access the site at www.StemLife.com




What about the WOMEN and their Stem Cells?

Well, I thought you might be interested in this article that I read in the Herald today. Apparently, scientists from the University of Pittsburgh have been studying the regenerative potential of stem cells obtained from females versus that from males. While they were investigating muscular dystrophy models in mice, the scientists noticed that the implantation of female stem cells led to significantly better recovery in the muscles than the male stem cells.

The scientist who made the finding, Dr. Bridget Deasy, postulates that the difference may be due to the different ways male and female cells respond to oxidative stress during the process of transplantation. Female cells may just survive the process better. This has a particular relevance to Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy because this genetic condition mainly affects boys and 1 in 3500 are born with the lifelong degenerative disease.

Further, this study might also provide some insights into the differences between men and women with regards to how either sex responds to ageing or disease. If female stem cells are more tolerant in transplant conditions, any stem cell company trying to grow them for mass use had better obtain female donors. And if a patient has a choice to obtain stem cells from a brother or a sister... well, it might be another good reason for Asian families to have girls too. Stronger stem cells :)

I'm wondering if anyone has done a study on all human transplants to date and found any correlation that might corroborate this finding in mice.

Adult Blood Stem Cells for Muscular Dystrophy

I've had some enquiries before about the use of stem cells to help patients with muscular dystrophy, but never as able to tell them very much. Now I've read that italian scientists from the Stem Cell Research Institute in Rome, have taken human adult stem cells from the bloodstream (much like what StemLife does presumably) and injected the stem cells into mice with muscular dystrophy.

What's interesting is that the scientists injected the cells intravenously into the dogs (young golden retreivers) and the cells circulated to regenerate the muscles of these dogs. Even more interesting was that the researchers proceeded further to obtain the blood cells of patients with muscular dystrophy, insert the correct gene (thereby sliencing the defective gene) and injected them into the mice. The result was that the cells made their way to the skeletal muscle and were able to partly regenerate the muscles.

This is really very interesting work and raises a few possibilities in my mind.

a) Can a muscular dystrophy patient use a younger patient's healthy stem cells and inject intravenously for the same effect?
b) How many cells might they need and would they need a really large stem cell dose to exhibit regeneration of the muscles?
c) Do the cells need to be autologous for effectivity in humans?
d) Any supplementary treatment to be administered?

The only way to really know -as in all research- is to give it a go because muscular dystrophy patients (depending on the severity) don't have time to wait.

I watched a movie entitled "Rory O'Shea was here" the other night (on satellite quite late) about two boys -one with cerebral palsy and the other with muscular dystrophy- about how they form a symbiotic relationship and eventually friendship. It was a moving and touching portrayal of people with the condition, their limitations, frustrations and will. I really enjoyed it and thought that it was well worth watching. Get your tissues ready.


If you'd like to know more about muscular dystrophy and how to recognize it, have a look at this site.

Sports and Stem Cells

My cousin and I used to love wakeboarding and we did it every weekend off the coast of Singapore for almost a year when I lived there. The thing about wakeboarding which makes it a real impact sport, is the pull of the speedboat cutting through seawater, sliding out away from the wake at a sharp angle and slicing back in to use the wake as a ramp for a jump.

Depending on how you've positioned yourself before and during the jump, your landing could be very elegant and soft, or very, very hard and bruising. The worst is probably what's called a "face-plant" where you slam face first onto the surface of the water, and you would be lucky if all you got was the wind knocked out of you without too much injury.

Many of the wakeboarders (well, not so many 11 years ago...) used to sport some injury or another, and I recall my boat driver and instructor whose knee injury was so bad that he had to wear a brace permanently and stop wakeboarding, which he loved so much.

If I had his number now, I'd certainly convince him to store his own stem cells to treat his injured knee.

I believe that applications of stem cells in sports injuries will take centerstage in the near future, simply because there isn't that much out there which assures patients that they'll really be able to get back their full range of motion after serious damage. Apart from the excruciating pain and lengthy recovery period (my cousin hurt her knee once on the board and was out of action for months), injuries are often severe enough that full form is never quite regained and the sport loses its lustre.


ENOUGH ABOUT WAKEBOARDING WHAT ABOUT THE STEM CELLS?

I read this interesting article in the International Herald Tribune about how doctors and researchers are now promoting the storage of stem cells from the umbilical cord to use in tendon, ligament, muscle and ligament repair in the few years.

Estimated timeline?

"It's not a pie in the sky notion," said Dr. Scott Rodeo, an orthopedist and research scientist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan. "Maybe it's not going to happen next year, but a three-to-five year horizon is not unreasonable."

Dr. Rodeo, who is the doctor for the New York Giants football team and former US Olympic team doctor, has apparently been conducting common injury trials which do not mend easily on rats, reconstructing knees, ligament and shoulder cuffs with stem cells.


Another strong endorsement for stem cell banking:

"If you have a child who has exceptional athletic talent at the age of 5 or 6, you might want to get a muscle or fat biopsy to draw and freeze some young stem cells," said Dr. Johnny Huard, director of the Stem Cell Research Center of the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh and a leading gene therapy researcher. "To have a pool of stem cells already removed would be enormously valuable. The practical use might be years away, but that's the future of sports medicine."


Of course there are detractors to using stem cells as a treatment option, but frankly, if you've every played futsal or even fallen down the stairs and sprained your ankle in a life-limiting way, to me having an option is better then no option at all.

If you're a weekend athlete with an injury and would like to consider stem cell banking and therapy, please give us a call (603-2163 8800) and we'll be happy to make the arrangements for you*.


*No, you do not have to be pregnant to store your stem cells, StemLife offers Adult Stem Cell Banking for individuals who wish to use their own stem cells for their own treatment.

A new application for stem cells: FOOD FOR HUMANS

When I was at school in the UK (alas, many many years ago), I used to love writing short stories. Unfortunately, I no longer have the luxury of time to pursue this hobby.

Strange as it might sound, I won a school writing award for a story I submitted about harnessing biotechnology for food and the creation of transgenic animals for human health.

Admittedly at the time, I had read only very little about xenotransplantation or about food production, but my active teenage imagination took care of a lot of the details in the script. Without going into too many details about my short story, it somewhat resembles this article that I found on line, except that it includes my current favorite topic: stem cells.

I really thought the article was marvellous and have posted it here in its entirety. However, you could click on link just to check out the illustration that comes along with it.



Who needs animals? It's only a matter of time before lab-grown meat turns into the oink-less BLT

BY Ian Christe

It sounds like a sci-fi nightmare: giant sheets of grayish meat grown on factory racks for human consumption. But it's for real. Using pig stem cells, scientists have been growing lab meat for years, and it could be hitting deli counters sooner than you think.

Early attempts produced less-than-enticing results. Then, in 2001, scientists at New York's Touro College won funding from NASA to improve in vitro farming. Hoping to serve something, well, beefier than kelp on moon bases and Mars colonies, the scientists successfully grew goldfish muscle in a nutrient broth. And, in 2003, a group of hungry artists from the University of Western Australia grew kidney bean-size steaks from biopsied frogs and prenatal sheep cells. Cooked in herbs and flambéed for eight brave dinner guests, the slimy frog steaks came attached to small strips of fabric — the growth scaffolding. Half the tasters spit out their historic dinner. (Perhaps more significant, half didn't.)

Today, scientists funded by companies such as Stegeman, a Dutch sausage giant, are fine-tuning the process. It takes just two weeks to turn pig stem cells, or myoblasts, into muscle fibers. "It's a scalable process," says Jason Matheny of New Harvest, a meat substitute research group. "It would take the same amount of time to make a kilogram or a ton of meat." One technical challenge: Muscle tissue that has never been flexed is a gooey mass, unlike the grained texture of meat from an animal that once lived. The solution is to stretch the tissue mechanically, growing cells on a scaffold that expands and contracts. This would allow factories to tone the flaccid flesh with a controlled workout.

Lab-grown meat isn't an easy sell, but there could be benefits. Designer meat would theoretically be free of hormones, antibiotics, and the threat of mad cow disease or bird flu. Omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins could be blasted into the mixture or dispersed through veins. Revolting? You bet, but have you ever visited a sausage factory? Currently costing around $100,000 per kilogram, a choice cut of lab meat makes Kobe beef seem like a bargain. But meat-processing companies hope to start selling affordable factory-grown pork in under a decade. Bon appétit.


If I can find that story I childishly wrote so long ago, maybe I'll post it and we can do a two decade double-take... strangely it doesn't take a whole generation for technology to catch up and make what you read in a book or saw on TV a reality.

Stem Cell technological application may be a lot wider than we currently know.

Heart Surgery with Stem Cells from Patient's Own Thigh Muscles

Its been a busy week for me but a slow week on stem cell news. One piece of news that I thought interesting to mention was about the use of muscle stem cells obtained from a patient's thigh and implanted into his failing heart in the US. A company called Bioheart has been promoting the use of patient's own cultured muscle cells for re-implantation via angioplasty since its inception in 1999. They have been conducting clinical trials for their process- results expected in 2008- and have also developed related instruments for delivery (much like Cordis, which I blogged about in another entry).

The news piece related the story of a patient, Richard Howell, who had heart failure and underwent experimental heart surgery at The Cleveland Clinic (listed as one of Bioheart's clinical trial centers). The treating doctor, Dr. Stephen Ellis did not describe the procedure in any great detail but revealed that the patient received 18 separate injections of a total of 200 million cells. The article mentions a "surgery" that was performed and it is unclear to me as to whether the cells were delivered by angioplasty or by direct cardiac injection.

It does however, say that he underwent the surgery 6 weeks ago and is feeling much better than he has in six years, enough to be out on the beach when he could not leave his living room before.

Previous trials with stem cells obtained from thigh muscles had poor outcomes, enough to stall these trials in a number of countries including Singapore. The stem cells were cultured to form "myoblasts" which are muscle cells and injected into the heart. But little known to the scientists and doctors at the time, although the cells looked genuinely like cardiac muscle cells, they lacked one important and necessary factor- the timing of the heartbeat known as "twitch". Skeletal muscle (normal muscle) fibers exhibit "slow twitch" but cardiac muscle fibers have to have "fast twitch" in order to maintain the contractile action of the heart to pump blood around the body.

There were a few publications that came out strongly against this technique of using cultured thigh muscle cells- although the cells in culture did show the twitch rhythm of the heart- the results upon injection showed that the thigh muscle cells never really engrafted or express cardiac markers, and in fact the cells died after some time. The consequence of this poor clinical outcome was serious enough to warrant patients requiring a pacemaker and to take other measures for their worsening condition.

Ever since those publications in 2002-2003, support for this area of work has waned clinically but I'm sure scientifically, it has spurred the need for greater understanding of the expression markers necessary to show that at the minimum, these cells do no harm to the patient.

As for StemLife's work on the heart, we have taken a more conservative approach of using a mixed population of cells obtained from mobilized peripheral blood. Cell culture is neither cheap nor easy to prove that it works better than a mixed population of cells. For now, we'll be preparing the cells with our own in-house developed protocol, which has helped patients feel better and certainly done them no harm.

If you know anyone with heart failure who would like to seek advice or participate in StemLife's cardiac cell therapy program, feel free to drop by or give us a call.

StemLife Malaysia: +603 2163 8800 (ask for me)
StemLife Thailand: +662 613 1515-8 (ask for Kostas)

We'd be delighted to set up a no obligations appointment for an honest and friendly consultation.