The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: stem cells
Girl Meets German Stem Cell Donor Who Helped Her Beat Cancer

Girl Meets German Stem Cell Donor Who Helped Her Beat Cancer

By Sarah Freishtat, Chicago Tribune (TNS)

CHICAGO — Sabrina Chahir was waiting to meet the man who helped send her cancer into remission. The 8-year-old girl, who likes art and takes piano lessons, knew he had flown across an ocean to see her, nearly four years after he donated his stem cells to help rid her blood of cancer that could have taken her life.

Recently Sabrina and Maximilian Eule, 30, had their first face-to-face meeting at a celebration in suburban Schaumburg with Sabrina’s friends and family.

The two had emailed and video-chatted. But Sabrina’s mother, Natalia Wehr, said it was important to her to meet Eule in person.

“It’s your daughter, and this person we don’t know did something so wonderful,” Wehr said. “You need to know who that is.”

Sabrina was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, one of the most common types of cancer in children, when she was 2 1/2. The cancer cells were in more than 80 percent of her blood.

The girl’s cancer had gone into remission before, but she soon relapsed. After rounds of treatment and infections that caused Sabrina to go blind temporarily, doctors at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago told Sabrina’s family she would need a stem cell transplant.

“It was the most painful thing you can imagine,” Wehr said. “Not knowing if your child is going to live or not. It’s the worst feeling in the world.”

Ten to 15 percent of children diagnosed with this type of leukemia need a stem cell transplant, but the treatment is more common for other types of cancer, said Dr. Reggie Duerst, one of Sabrina’s doctors and director of the stem cell transplant program at Lurie.

And while doctors said the best donor matches are often people of similar racial and ethnic backgrounds — Sabrina is Hispanic and Arab — her match, located through a computer database, turned out to be a German man who lives in Austria.

Wehr spent about 10 days waiting, hoping and praying before she learned Eule had agreed to become her daughter’s donor.

Eule, who paid out of pocket for his trip to America for the meeting, said he almost cried when he was told he could donate stem cells to a little girl.

He had registered as a prospective donor when a man in his village became ill, he said. Though he wasn’t a match for that man, he said he was happy he was paired with Sabrina.

“Sabrina became a part of myself,” he said.

Eule had to wait at least a year to contact Sabrina and her family, under donation rules. Then, both sides must agree to meet.

On a recent evening, in a private room of Pilot Pete’s Restaurant & Bar at the Schaumburg Airport, Sabrina waited for Eule’s arrival, wearing a fancy red party dress.

When he walked in, she jumped up, ran to him and threw her arms around him. Eule, looking a bit overwhelmed at the row of TV cameras and lights, said he “can’t find the right words” to describe what he was feeling.

The two vowed to remain in touch and exchanged gifts. Eule gave Sabrina a necklace “so you always have something from me with you.” Sabrina’s family gave her donor a watch on which they had engraved: “Time passes, memories fade, but hearts never forget.”

Moved by the other gift Eule gave Sabrina — the chance to live into adulthood — Sabrina’s cousin also registered to become a donor at a drive her family organized to help find a match for a friend.

The cousin was soon paired with a patient and donated stem cells to her twice.

“That was pretty amazing,” Wehr said. “That we were able to live this from both sides.”

Though Sabrina is in remission, the hospital plans to follow her progress throughout her life, Duerst said. It is important to re-educate young patients about what they went through, and track any complications or illnesses in her future, he said.

Sabrina doesn’t like to talk about losing her hair during treatment or look at pictures of herself from that time, Wehr said.

But she talks about wanting to be a chef when she grows up. If that doesn’t work out, maybe she’ll become a ballerina, Wehr said.

“Now’s the time to celebrate that everything went well,” she said.

(c)2015 Chicago Tribune, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: A colony of embryonic stem cells, from the H9 cell line (NIH code: WA09). Viewed at 10X with Carl Zeiss Axiovert scope. (The cells in the background are mouse fibroblasts cells. Only the colony in the center are human embryonic stem cells). Via Wikicommons

Nature Journal Retracts STAP Stem Cell Studies After Finding More Errors

Nature Journal Retracts STAP Stem Cell Studies After Finding More Errors

By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times

After months of controversy, scientists have retracted two high-profile studies that purported to demonstrate a quick and simple way of making flexible stem cells without destroying embryos or tinkering with DNA.

“Several critical errors have been found in our Article and Letter,” the scientists wrote in a retraction statement issued Wednesday. “We apologize for the mistakes.”

The two reports described a new way of reprogramming blood cells so that they would revert to a developmentally primitive state and be capable of growing into any type of cell. Researchers from Japan and the United States said they accomplished this feat by soaking the cells in an acid bath for 30 minutes and then spinning them in a centrifuge for 5 minutes.

The resulting stem cells — dubbed stimulus triggered acquisition of pluripotency, or STAP — had the hallmarks of embryonic stem cells. When the researchers injected them into developing mice, the STAP stem cells grew into heart, bone, and brain cells, among others, the research team reported in January.

Scientists in the field of regenerative medicine were giddy at the prospect of using the cells to grow new insulin-producing cells for people with Type 1 diabetes or central nervous system cells for people with spinal cord injuries, to name a few examples. Since these replacement tissues would be generated from a patient’s own cells, researchers believed they would not prompt the immune system to attack, eliminating the need for patients to take immune-suppressing drugs.

But it didn’t take long for some researchers to suspect that STAP stem cells were too good to be true. Critiques posted online gained more currency when labs began reporting that they weren’t able to replicate the experiments. Then one of the senior researchers who worked on both of the studies called for the papers to be withdrawn until the results could be independently verified.
In April, the Japanese research institute where most of the work was conducted accused study leader Haruko Obokata of intentional misconduct.

Investigators at RIKEN said Obokata had manipulated two images of DNA fragments to make the results of her experiments look better than they really were. They also found that data were handled inappropriately and that two of the images in the study were duplicates.

Investigators at the journal Nature cited five additional errors that were not included in the RIKEN investigation. Figures and images in the studies were improperly labeled, and one of the images was digitally enhanced, according to the retraction statement. They also identified “inexplicable discrepancies” in the cells of mice that were injected with STAP stem cells.

“These multiple errors impair the credibility of the study as a whole and we are unable to say without doubt whether the STAP-SC phenomenon is real,” the scientists wrote in the retraction. “Ongoing studies are investigating this phenomenon afresh, but given the extensive nature of the errors currently found, we consider it appropriate to retract both papers.”

All of the researchers who contributed to both papers have agreed with the decision to retract them, according to an editorial published by the journal.

Photo: UC Irvine via Flickr

Interested in national news? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!

Hungry For A Helping Of Test Tube Meat? Maybe You Should Be

Hungry For A Helping Of Test Tube Meat? Maybe You Should Be

By Monte Morin, Los Angeles Times

If the notion of biting into a hamburger made from lab-cultured stem cells doesn’t make your mouth water, perhaps your brain can find it appetizing.

That’s the view of two Dutch professors who argue that meat grown in enormous test tubes, or bioreactors, can provide an ever more prosperous world with a plentiful, environmentally friendly and humane source of protein.

Cultured meat, they say, is the food of the future.

“Rising global demand for meat will result in increased environmental pollution, energy consumption and animal suffering,” the Wageningen University professors wrote Tuesday in the journal Trends in Biotechnology.

“As large parts of the world become more prosperous, the global consumption of meat is expected to rise enormously in the coming decades,” they wrote.

This growing demand for meat necessitates a “protein transition,” according to bioethicist Cor van der Weele and bioprocessing engineer Johannes Tramper. This transition will probably involve substituting some vegetable products for meat, keeping fewer animals on factory farms and possibly eating insects.

The authors envision a day when “every village” maintains a cultured meat facility in which muscle stem cells from pigs, cows, chicken, fish or any other animal are allowed to grow and reproduce in 5,200-gallon processing tanks.

The reproducing cells are suspended in a growth medium that provides them with nutrition, while mechanical paddles agitate the solution.

When the cell population reaches the desired density — perhaps in a month, the authors say — an enzyme and binding protein are added to the solution. At that point, the agitation stops and the tissue cells form small clumps and settle to the bottom of the tank.

Finally, the authors say, the tank is drained of the growing medium and the remaining “meat slurry” is pressed into a mincemeat-type cake and sold.

If the idea sounds far-fetched, consider the 2003 art project in which cultured frog meat was served as the cell-donor frog looked on, van der Weele says.

“A tentative life-cycle analysis estimated that if cultured meat can be grown on a medium of algae, energy use will not be reduced dramatically, but greenhouse-gas emissions, land use and water use will: by more than 90 percent compared to European beef,” the authors wrote.

The system envisioned by the authors would be capable of producing roughly 28 tons of meat a year, assuming there was no waste, and could feed more than 2,500 people in that time, they said.

Of course, there are some very real economic and technological hurdles facing in vitro meat. The cost of the growth medium would directly affect the cost of the meat product, and producers would have to establish robust, continuous stem cell lines.

And then, of course, there’s the issue of whether people want to eat it.

“The cells have to be concentrated to minced-meat density and structured into a texture that is appetizing and with good mouth feel,” the authors wrote.

“Although the potential advantages of cultured meat are clear, they do not guarantee that people will want to eat it,” they wrote.

Photo by roboppy via Flickr.com

Heart Muscle Successfully Regenerated In Monkeys From Stem Cells

Heart Muscle Successfully Regenerated In Monkeys From Stem Cells

By Carol M. Ostrom, The Seattle Times

SEATTLE — Since 1996, Dr. Chuck Murry, a University of Washington cardiovascular biology researcher, has been intent on transforming powerful human stem cells into heart-muscle cells that can repair damaged hearts.

Over the years, he and his colleagues have worked through myriad setbacks and complications in studies on mice, rats and guinea pigs, piling up successes as their animal models got larger and physiologically closer to humans.

Now, they have successfully regenerated heart muscle in monkeys, Murry and Dr. Michael Laflamme and other colleagues at the UW Institute for Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

As before, the researchers transformed the human stem cells into heart-muscle cells, this time injecting them into damaged monkey hearts. There, the cells assembled themselves into muscle fibers, began beating in the heart’s rhythm, and ultimately were nurtured by the monkey’s arteries and veins, which grew into the new heart tissue.

“This is 10 times more heart muscle than anybody else in the world has been able to generate,” said Murry, who predicted his lab would be ready for clinical trials in humans within four years.

Dr. Michael Simons, director of the Yale Cardiovascular Research Center, said the research is the first to show that human embryonic stem cells can fully integrate into normal heart tissue. The lab’s impressive “scale up” for production of sufficient newly programmed stem cells for a large-animal heart, which was done by Laflamme’s team, was likely unprecedented, as well.

The Murry team’s latest success, like the others, did not answer every question and had its own complications, but even so, cardiovascular research leaders not connected with the work hailed it as a significant step forward.

“It’s a very big deal,” said Dr. Richard Lee of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. It’s very challenging to do such experiments, and being able to show benefit is a “real achievement,” he said.

Murry is “an extraordinarily careful and thoughtful investigator,” Lee added. “When work comes out of his lab it makes us all feel better because we know we can trust it.”

The most serious problem encountered in the research was a period of irregular heartbeats, known as arrhythmias. Although the monkeys’ arrhythmias disappeared after a few weeks, Murry and others said it was concerning.” That’s a very big deal, because that’s what kills,” Simons said. On the other hand, he said, the arrhythmias were not unexpected because of technical issues with larger hearts.

“The question is: How serious are they? How long do they last? Do they go away after several weeks after the tissue matures and the heart matures, or is it a lifelong problem?”

Murry said if his lab hadn’t been monitoring the monkeys 24-7, researchers might have missed the arrhythmias, which didn’t appear to have disturbed the monkeys.

“The monkey is in the cage eating a banana,” Murry said. Meanwhile, “the investigators are freaking out. We’re having the heart attack. But the monkey was OK.”

The six monkeys involved in the study were pigtail macaques, a type commonly used in research.

Heart muscle is inextricably linked to heart failure, which for Murry is Public Enemy No. 1, with worse average survival time than breast cancer, he said.

When a heart attack damages heart muscle, it forms scar tissue rather than growing back. If there is enough damage, the heart may not have enough muscle to pump out blood, leading to heart failure, which Murry calls “a burgeoning public-health problem.”

“It’s really bad now, and it’s going to get worse” as the baby boomer generation ages, he said.

For Murry, his lab’s latest success is bittersweet. His mother, Donna Murry — the inspiration and motivation for his focus on fixing damaged hearts, he said — died last week of multiple infarctions. Heart disease ran in her family, Murry said.” She is the kind of person we would like to have helped,” he said. “My mom would have been so proud.”

UC Irvine via Flickr