By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Human egg cells can be tweaked to give rise to valued stem cells that match the tissue types of many different groups of people, U.S. and Russian researchers reported on Wednesday.
They said the stem cells they have created from unfertilized human eggs look and act like embryonic stem cells.
And they have been carefully tissue-matched in the same way as bone marrow donations to prevent the risk of rejection if they are transplanted into people.
The team at California-based International Stem Cell Corp. hopes to create a bank of tissue-matched stem cells that could be used as transplants that a patient's immune system would accept.
"The process is efficient, it is relatively safe and it is ethically sound," Jeffrey Janus, president and director of research at the company, said in a telephone interview.
The cells are created by a process known as parthenogenesis, a word that comes from Latin and Greek roots meaning virgin beginning.
It involves chemically tricking an egg into developing without being fertilized by sperm.
Several teams have now created parthenogenetic human stem cells from eggs. Other teams have created similar cells using human skin cells or human embryos.
Continune at Reuters
Study adds to evidence of adult stem cells' promising therapeutic role
BURLINGTON, VT (USA) - For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that adult human stem cell transplantation results in spontaneous cell regeneration in damaged lung tissue.
Published in the August 1 issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, the study further supports an existing body of research that suggests blood- and marrow-derived stem cells have the capacity to become many different human tissues.
'Many of the body's tissues once thought to be only locally regenerative may, in fact, be actively replaced by circulating stem cells after hematopoietic or blood-forming stem cell transplantation,' says lead author Benjamin Suratt, M.D., assistant professor of medicine and Vermont Lung Center researcher at the University of Vermont College of Medicine.
'This finding is of note not only for its novelty as a regenerative mechanism of the lung, but also for its vast therapeutic implications for any number of lung diseases.'
According to Suratt, the study's findings indicate that circulating stem cells are going into organ tissue and repairing damage, which could have a huge impact on the treatment of such devastating lung diseases as emphysema or cystic fibrosis.
Supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health and a National Center for Research Resources Centers for Biomedical Research Excellence grant, Suratt and his colleagues are currently looking further into what types of cells have the capacity to differentiate and generate a different type of cell, and whether these cells might be used to treat cystic fibrosis.
For more information on research taking place at the Vermont Lung Center at the University of Vermont, go to www.vermontlung.org
To link to the article abstract, go to:
ajrccm.atsjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/168/3/318
