The Niche

The US patent office has upheld one of three patents on embryonic stem cells that had been challenged as overly broad. The patents are held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which has broad patent claims on the derivation, use and culture of human and primate embryonic stem cells. These have been challenged by researchers who say, among other things, that the patents unduly stall research and development. (See our an accounton these challenges by Jeanne Loring.)

Ken Taymor of the Centerfor Law, Business, and Economy at Berkeley told the The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog that even though the the first is still ongoing over two other patents, both WARF and its icensee Geron have plenty of other patents they can enforce. Taymor has prevsiously argued that the patent challenges could actually strengthen WARF's position. (See our blog on that topic here; it starts in the fourth paragraph) Patent challengers already say that they've seen success because WARF is narrowing its claims and being more generous with researchers who want to use its cell lines.

Here's the release from Geron.
Here's the challenger's release.

Posted by Monya Baker on February 29, 2008
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Alexey Bersenev has written in to warn for caution in extrapolating potential applications of a recent Nature paper that identified a mechanism linking circadian rhythms and the movement of blood stem cells into circulation.
You can read our summary here.

I don't think we can say "it may mean that more HSCs can be harvested from the bone marrow, by collecting at the right time of day" in terms of clinical application so far.
Because in bone marrow transplant clinic HSCs harvested after injection of drugs, mobilized of HSC (such as G-CSF). Authors didn't study how administration of this drug will affect circadian oscillations of HSCs. It's could be synergistic or could't.
It was pointed out in our blog:
http://hematopoiesis.info/2008/02/25/stem-cells-know-its-their-time-to-circulate

"The clinical implication of this study will be more convincing if it is shown that G-CSF or PTH treatment to increase HSC collection from the periphery will be enhanced if harvested at a certain time during the day"

Posted by Monya Baker on February 28, 2008
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Tuesday night and the night before, I went to events designed for scientists and non-scientists to mingle. It made me think about what stem-cell-research activists tell me frustrates them most about stem-cell scientists.

On Monday night, a complete stranger made dinner for me and others he’d identified in the stem-cell field. Peter Kuperman, a hedge fund manager who likes to cook, hosts modern-day salons on topics he finds interesting. And though I had misgivings (surely only psychopaths and pushy salespeople invite strangers into their homes), I went and found that it was exactly what he’d billed it to be.

It was nice to see scientists in their human contexts: sleepy from peer-reviewing a manuscript, worried about finding the best school for their children, excited for their spouses’ careers. It was instructive to see how what has become conventional wisdom to those inside the field is still news to those outside it.

On Tuesday night, I went to San Francisco’s Ask-A-Scientist: free monthly lectures by scientists to standing-room only crowds. As part of a discussion on ancient science, our speaker defined its modern counterpart: a consensus-driven community that cautiously advances hypotheses backed by evidence collected through rigorous methodologies.

I hadn’t considered the consensus-driven aspect, but it’s true. One current scientific controversy is whether certain tumours arise from stem-cell-like progenitors or from differentiated cells. Those in one camp don’t seek to split from those in the other camp; they want to convert them. They want that conversion to be honest, not forced; those in one camp should be drawn to the other not by bullies or charismatic personalities, but through logic and data. That’s why many reviewers want to be anonymous, and why some scientists want authors to be anonymous as well.

Consensus building through logical arguments built on empirical data is much of what makes the scientific community a community. It’s one reason why scientists volunteer to review grants and papers. Perhaps more than in other disciplines, scientists expect their arguments to be heard in full and carefully rebutted. Problems come when they interact beyond the community. Scientists don’t always anticipate that a reporter will sometimes listen to a long, cautious explanation and then use only the most enthusiastic sentence.

This leads to why stem cell researchers and stem-cell research advocates misunderstand each other.

The news that cultured human skin cells had been reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state came in late November of last year. Embryonic stem-cell researchers crowed over the accomplishment: how it advanced understanding of the rules governing cell potential; it promised more-accessible research tools and, maybe, cell therapies. Many embryonic stem-cell-research advocates despaired, fearing that the discovery would give ammunition to those who wish to ban all embryonic stem cell research. Scientists’ enthusiasm went off-message, many advocates chided. Advocates felt betrayed that scientists who reviewed the breakthrough papers hadn’t warned them before publication so they could prepare a media response.

But, for the most part, scientists act to ensure that consensus-building mechanisms are driven by logic; that means saying what they think and taking seriously the promises of confidentiality given during the review process. If advocates convince scientists they must act otherwise to ensure favorable policy, they risk weakening what gives the scientific community, and science, its strength.

Advocates that support scientific research have worked hard and with some success to convince scientists that they must reach out to the general public so that society can value and support their work, but I think lecturing scientists about being “on message” could seed distrust. It would be far, far better and easier for scientists to learn to convey the essential skepticism of their discipline than to learn to convey one particular message.

To me the quintessential scientist is one who says, “I think I’ve found the most exciting thing ever. Now I have to work as hard as I can to see if I can prove it wrong.” Some apparently exciting things really are; some aren't. For most reading this blog, the exciting thing is that cells not derived from embryos can behave like embryonic stem cells; the hard work necessary to know if it’s really true means comparing these cells with embryonic stem cells, that means work with embryonic stem cells to know which cells can answer which questions. That’s not a message; that’s a thought process more people should understand.

I don’t pretend to have any answers for how researchers and research advocates can work together more productively, but I’ve spent the last two nights watching non-specialists and specialists spending their leisure time together, and I think the answer may lie somewhere in that.

Posted by Monya Baker on February 28, 2008
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Forbes has just reported a company’s announcement that it can reprogram adult human cells to an embryonic-stem-cell-like state without using viruses. All reported successes so far use viruses to introduce new genes into the cells, a technique that most believe make them unsuitable for clinical use. At a stem-cell conference in New York, PrimeGen, based in Irvine-Calif, said that it got the technique to work by attaching “carbon-based delivery vehicles” to the proteins that the genes encode and putting the proteins inside the cells. Unusually, it announced its results outside a peeri-reviewed journal without disclosing many of the details leading to its conclusions. That means that the results are likely to be met with high skepticism from the scientific community.

There are a lot of researchers trying to reprogram cells by introducing the proteins directly. Problems that they have encountered include the fact that some proteins enter and persist in cells better than others, and it’s hard to get enough proteins in for a long enough time and in the proper ratios, which are still not understood. Research in mouse cells indicate that the proteins from the viruses need to persist for a week or more in order for reprogramming to occur.

I haven’t read anything on this specifically but the Forbes article, but here are my thoughts based on my understanding of the researchers who have successfully reprogrammed human skin cells (Kyoto University’s Shinya Yamanaka, the University of Wisconsin’s James Thomson, Harvard’s George Daley, and the University of California, Los Angeles's Kathin Plath) and mouse skin cells (Yamanaka, Plath, Harvard’s Konrad Hochedlinger, MIT’s Rudy Jaenisch).

One problem is that it’s a lot easier to get the cells to just divide really fast than to reprogram, and these can initially resemble reprogrammed cells. The PrimeGen researchers don’t describe the techniques used to conclude that the cells as reaching the embryonic-like state. It implies that the cells have not been tested to see if they can make teratomas, weird tumors that make cells characteristic of the three main types of tissue and the most rigorous test available for human cells. PrimeGen does say that perhaps cells don’t need to be fully reprogrammed to be clinically useful.

According to the Forbes article, PrimeGen says it is collaborating with James Thomson, the scientists who first created human embryonic stem cells and leader of one of the teams that first reprogrammed differentiated cells. Thomson told Forbes he knows little about the company and denies he’s a collaborator.

The researchers say that they have reprogrammed testicular, skin, and retinal cells. There’s some evidence that testicular cells (depending on the actual type) are amenable over time in culture to becoming highly flexible cells, though less flexible than embryonic stem cells. There are several kinds of skin cells. Shinya Yamanaka recently showed that epithelial cells (cells that cover or line organs, and include some skin cells) can be reprogrammed using fewer copies of the viral genes than cultured skin cells (fibroblasts) need, which would make some cell types more amenable to being reprogrammed with proteins than others. Also, Daley found that one problem in reprogramming is that viral genes are silenced too quickly, thus inserting proteins directly might pose some advantages.

PrimeGen said that it made its announcement in order to attract investors. If a company has technology this hot, one would expect a company to approach investors with non-disclosure contracts in hand, not announce it so openly. Also, they say they need partners to expand the cells, but embryonic stem cells should be able to expand indefinitely. Also, the partners aren’t going to want to expand the cells until they know what they are. Embryonic stem cells are hard to grow, so possibly, researchers who could create the cells would have trouble growing them.

The Forbes article quotes several scientists saying they cannot evaluate the work until they see results in more detail. PrimeGen says it will soon be publishing its results in a peer-reviewed journal.

Posted by Monya Baker on February 27, 2008
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Here’s a round-up of recent publications that I thought were interesting. I’ve had some written up as research highlights which will go out in our newsletter. For others, I’ll point you to articles in the popular press.

(Update 2/22/08, on NPR's ScienceFriday, Geoerge Daley just gave a clear explanation of his Science paper along with an interesting backstory I hadn't appreciated when I read the paper. The audio should become available through NPR. )

Also, Cell just came out with a big collection of review and overview articles on stem cells. For those reading after Feb 28, it's the Feb 22, 2008 issue.

We’ll start with a list….
MicroRNA, embryonic stem cells, and Lin-28, oh my! -- in a Science paper, Daley and other Harvard folk show what Lin-28 might be doing in the reprogramming mix (Scroll down to 1)

Embryonic stem cells yield pancreatic progenitors that stall diabetes in mice--a Nature Biotechnology paper from Novocell (Scroll down to 2)

Different embryonic stem cell lines prefer different destinies--in a Nature Biotechnology paper, Harvard’s Melton watches his lines differentiate and finds some like the heart, others brain (Scroll down to 3)

Sorting the starting steps in self-renewal--in a couple Cell Stem Cell articles, Harvard’s Hochedlinger and MIT’s Jaenisch monitor how transgenes switch on cells’ own self-renewal machinery, information useful to get away from hard-to-control viruses (Scroll down to 4)

Reprogramming is not just for skin cells--in Science, Kyoto University’s Yamanaka shows that some cells seem easier to reprogram than fibroblasts, and the transformed cells were originally differentiated (Scroll down to 5)

Transplanted human embryonic stem cells help rats with strokes, no tumours either--in PLOS, Stanford’s Steinberg differentiates ES cells to neural stem cells, injects them in 10 rats, an finds they walk better
Read it in Scientific American
Or in the Guardian

Precancerous stem cells make blood vessels different than healthy cells do--in PLOS , Ohio State University’s Gao explains why some cancer treatments that try to starve tumours of their blood supply don’t work so well
Read about it in Medical News Today

Continue reading "Round-up of recent publications" »

Posted by Monya Baker on February 21, 2008
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The former head of President Bush’s council on bioethics, now says there shouldn’t be a ban against cloning human embryos for research. Instead, there should be a five-year moratorium against the process. Writing in the Weekly Standard, Leon Kass decries the fact that the US Congress did not pass a law blocking all forms of human cloning, and then says that this stricter form of the law is unnecessary now that researchers can turn to alternate ways of reprogramming.

Instead, he argues for a law that would ban “all attempts to conceive a child save by the union of egg and sperm (both taken from adults).” That’s because the new reprogramming techniques mean that a skin cell could generate egg and sperm cells, whether taken from a man or a woman (or a boy or a girl, for that matter).

Embryos created for the purposes of research would not be outlawed, but instead banned for four or five years as researchers are given more funds to perfect the reprogramming techniques. He does not rebut, because he does not raise, the argument that stopping work the creation of embryos for research through somatic cell nuclear transfer will delay efforts to prefect reprogramming techniques.

Kass writes “Cloning for the purpose of biomedical research has lost its chief scientific raison d'être” (i.e. making a pluripotent cell line genetically matched to a patient.) That’s because it will probably be much easier to reprogram whole cells from adult biopsies than it will be to pull out an adult cell’s nucleus, plop it into a donated egg, grow that “reconstituted embryo” to a blastocyst and make embryonic stem cells.

Kass is probably right, but he fails to mention two caveats.

First, while many scientists are hopeful that so-called induced pluripotent stem cells will really behave like embryonic stem cells, they still aren’t sure. Possibly, a reprogrammed skin cell could be coaxed into a pancreas cell or a heart cell, transplanted, and then “remember” that it started out as a skin cell. Also, no one wants to use the current technique (using viruses to insert genes at random places in the cells’ chromosomes) to make cells that would actually get put into people. Those are serious problems, but most scientists think they can be overcome.

Second, and more important, many scientists think that to understand how reprogramming works with viruses, they have to understand how reprogramming works in an egg. Most people think that requires transferring adult nuclei into eggs or early embryos, and trying to figure out what happens.

Just a little quibble: Kass says that recent success by Stemagen in cloning a human blastocyst depended on the technique that Shoukhrat Mitalipov’s team in Oregon used to clone monkey blastocysts to make embryonic stem cells . Actually, Stemagen did not use this technique but credits its success not with a new technique but with a supply of high quality eggs.

Posted by Monya Baker on February 21, 2008
Categories: Cloning, Ethics, Policy, Reprogramming/Pluripotency | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A California woman has asked a Korean company to clone her dead pet, according to an article in the Guardian .

The scientist leading the cloning team, Lee Byeong-chun, formerly worked with disgraced Korean scientist Woo-suk Hwang to clone the first dog. While Hwang’s work cloning human embryonic stem cells was found to be fraudulent, independent analysis found that the dog was indeed a clone.

Snuppy, the first cloned dog, was born in 2005 after over 1,000 cloned embryos were placed in 123 carrier females to produce two live pups, one of which died soon after birth.

In 2006, the team announced that 167 cloned embryos transferred to 12 carriers produced 3 live pups, all of which were delivered by Caesarian section. The nuclear DNA came from the same female Afghan hound. The accomplishment used eggs collected from 23 female dogs.

Earlier this year, the same team reported that it had cloned a 14-year-old toy poodle from an aged toy poodle, but using egg donors and surrogate mothers from larger dogs. Three-hundred fifty eight “activated couplets” were implanted into 20 recipient dogs; 2 got pregnant, and one pup was born via Caesarean section. (Activated couplets are apparently enucleated eggs fused with donor cells and then stimulated to divide.) Previously, the team had cloned wolves.

The woman who ordered the clone apparently preserved the tissue herself after her pet had died. A company spokeswoman estimated the likelihood of success as around 25%.

Simply getting to a live birth may not mean a happy animal. Mouse clones often have respiratory problems when born alive. The first cloned guar died shortly after its birth because of respiratory problems.

Company executives told Reuters that the company could clone 30 pets a year, and the Korean Customs Service is looking into cloning drug-sniffing dogs.

A California company set up to clone cats shut down in 2006. The company had previously financed the work that led to the first cloned cat, which was published in 2002.

Posted by Monya Baker on February 19, 2008
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The possibility of reprogramming adult cells to behave like embryonic stem cells without overexpressing cancer genes or relying on hard-to-control viruses has gotten a bit closer. Publishing in Science, Shinya Yamanaka and colleagues from Kyoto University, in Japan (see From skin cells to stem cells), show that the reprogramming techniques he previously demonstrated on cultured mouse skin cells also work on two other mouse cell types: those that line the stomach and those from the liver1.

Because far fewer than 1 in 100 treated cells are successfully reprogrammed, several stem cell scientists had raised concerns that reprogramming does not work on fully differentiated cells but rather on rare stem cells residing undetected within the culture. That would make the reprogrammed cells less interesting scientifically and, potentially, therapeutically. To address this concern, Yamanaka used a genetic marking system that permanently labeled liver cells once they differentiated enough to express albumin, and he found that these cells could be reprogrammed to so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells that can contribute to all cell types in an adult mouse.

“The old question in cloning was exactly the same: was Dolly derived from a fully differentiated cell?” said Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who showed that mice can be cloned from terminally differentiated cells such as neurons. Yamanaka provides “good evidence” that reprogramming works in differentiated cells, said Jaenisch, but that conclusion assumes both a reliable labeling system and that only mature cells express the albumin gene. Yamanaka himself stopped short of calling the initial cells fully differentiated: “Our data showed that lineage-committed albumin-producing cells can be reprogrammed.”

Perhaps more interesting, Yamanaka also shows that the epithelial cells lining the stomach can generate iPS cells using a less rigorous screening system than that used with cultured skin cells or fibroblasts. Reprogramming currently uses viruses to insert several copies of three or more pluripotency genes into cells, one of which is particularly implicated in cancer. Tumours develop in about a third of mice created using iPS cells derived from fibroblasts; no tumours were found in mice created from iPS cells derived from stomach and liver cells. Though viruses were less efficient at infecting the stomach-lining cells with the necessary genes, the cells that were transformed contained fewer copies of the transgenes compared with fibroblasts, perhaps because epithelial cells are more similar to embryonic stem cells than fibroblasts are. (These mice were more likely to die in utero, but live-born mice appeared healthy.)

Yamanaka found that the transgenes do not need to be inserted into specific sites within the genome for liver and stomach cells to be reprogrammed. “This is encouraging to those of us who are seeking a nonviral means of generating iPS cells,” said George Daley of Children’s Hospital Boston, who recently compared the efficiencies of reprogramming human fibroblasts from different sources.

References
1. Aoi, T. et al. Generation of pluripotent stem cells from adult mouse liver and stomach cell. Science published online 14 February 2008; doi:10.1126/science.1154884

Posted by Monya Baker on February 14, 2008
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A million fixes can add up to one big mess. If everyone holds tight to his own tools, few work well. These were the grand problems identified in an all-day workshop on barriers to stem-cell research and collaborative efforts to remove them. The workshop was held by the Berkeley Stem Cell Center on the University of San Francisco campus on February 6.

Here's a preliminary draft of my write-up from the conference.

Tools refer to the data, materials, and intellectual property researchers need for discovery. The million fixes refers to human embryonic stem cell research. Societies generally agree that destroying, creating, or manipulating embryos requires ethical oversight, even to pursue the ethical good of potential therapies. Various societies created various regulations. Experts, materials, and scientific progress stall when they cross regional barriers.

At a meeting so close to Silicon Valley, its not surprising that one proposed solution to everything was a giant, collaborative database. Ethical oversight committees could flag and track discrepancies; researchers and lawyers could find fragmented intellectual property to bring together; scientists would stop duplicating each others’ efforts because they could find the data and collaborators they needed.

Kumbaya.

That’s what Ed Pinhoet, vice-chair of the governing board of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine said in sarcasm toward the end of the day as he urged participants to have realistic expectations and to remember that worthwhile collaboration required worthwhile projects. Still, he called the meeting of lawyers, scientists, academics, and activists a “historic event”, because so many sectors were engaged in how biomedical science can and should move forward.

What follows is my highly selective and condensed version of the meeting, for a fuller account, contact conference co-organizer David Winickoff, co-director of the Berkeley Science Technology and Society Center.

Continue reading "Thickets and gaps blocking stem cell science" »

Posted by Monya Baker on February 14, 2008
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An independent laboratory has been able to reprogram differentiated human skin cells to an embryonic-like state using the method originally reported by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University.1,2 Also late last year, two other laboratories announced reprogramming differentiated human cells via slightly different methods.3,4 The latest work, by Kathrin Plath of the University of California, Los Angeles, indicates that the technique is broadly feasible and introduces a potentially easier method to pluck reprogrammed cells from culture.5

Notably, all the groups that have reported success with this method have experience working with embryonic stem cells. At least two have derived human embryonic stem cells, and the genes that must be introduced to reprogram cells were identified through embryonic stem cells.

Meanwhile, the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine announced that it has received 50 applications for up to 16 grants totaling $25 million for creating new human pluripotent cell lines either from embryos from fertility clinics or from other sources of cells. In an executive order and his state of the union address, President Bush has directed the NIH to direct more funds to methods to create pluripotent stem cell lines without destroying embryos, but no dedicated funding programs have yet been announced.

The scientist leading the work just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has received a $1.5 million NIH grant set aside for “exceptionally innovative investigators.” Only 41 such grants were awarded, less than one of 50 applicants including biomedical researchers across the nation. She also received a $2.2 million grant from CIRM to study how reprogramming works in mice. Two other scientists who have successfully reprogrammed human cells (Yamanaka and James Thomson) have part-time appointments in California that will allow them to access some funds from the CIRM Medicine, but Plath is the first full-time faculty California to lead such an effort.

Plath’s team infected cultured skin cells originally collected from circumcisions and infected them with retroviruses carrying the four genes originally identified in reprogramming work. After about two weeks they began to see colonies proliferating. They looked clearly different from the cultured skin cells, but they did not go on to become induced pluripotent cells, and analysis showed that they had not taken in copies of all four genes. Colonies of cells destined to become reprogrammed lines showed up about 21 days after infection; they clustered together as human embryonic stem cells do, and they also displayed a variety of cell-surface markers characteristic of ES cells. A week later, Plath and researchers hand-selected colonies staining positive for one particular cell-surface marker. All cells analyzed from these colonies contained copies of all four genes.

Of the 30 colonies isolated, cells from seven were closely analyzed. As expected, all of these cells were expressing endogenous genes associated with pluripotency, and the viral genes were silenced. Though the cells express markers of the three main types of tissues forming the body, the team has not yet tested the functionality of the cells by differentiating them into teratomas or other cell types.

1. Takahashi K. et al. Induction of pluripotent stem cells from adult human fibroblasts by defined factors. Cell advance online publication 20 November 2007. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2007.11.019 | Article |
2. Takahashi K. & Yamanaka S. Induction of pluripotent stem cells from mouse embryonic and adult fibroblast cultures by defined factors. Cell 126, 663–76 (2006) | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |
3. Yu, J. et al. Induced pluripotent stem cell lines derived from human somatic cells. Science advance online publication 20 November 2007. doi: 10.1126/science.1151526 | Article |
4. Park, I. H. et al. Reprogramming of human somatic cells to pluripotency with defined factors. Nature advance online publication, doi:doi: 10.1038/nature06534 (23 December 2007).
5. Lowry, W.E. et al. Generation of human-induced pluripotent cells from dermal fibroblasts. Advance online publication www.pnas.org_cgi_doi_10.1073_pnas.0711983105 11 February 2008

Posted by Monya Baker on February 10, 2008
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Here's a summary by Jen Middleton of an article just out in Nature. We'll have it as an archived research highlight soon.
Blood stem cells move between circulating blood and bone marrow, but little is known about what controls the traffic between the two. Reporting in Nature, Paul Frenette and colleagues from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York show that levels of circulating HSCs fluctuate with natural circadian rhythms.
The team originally set out to study how a common treatment administered to patients before bone marrow transplants stimulates haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). Working in mice, they noted by chance that HSC traffic increased under continuous exposure to light.
Under standard conditions of 12 hours light – 12 hours dark, the number of circulating HSCs in mice fluctuated predictably. Yet keeping mice in continuous light, disrupted this fluctuation pattern. Similar irregularities were observed in ‘jet-lagged’ mice. The team then looked at expression of a blood-signalling molecule called CXCL12 known to regulate HSC migration in the bone marrow. Levels of this chemokine fluctuated with exactly opposite timing such that when levels dropped, HSCs were released. This rhythmic pattern of CXCL12 expression was also disrupted in animals kept in constant light.
The “flight or fight” response releases HSCs from bone marrow, and the researchers wondered whether the neurons controlling this might also influence the patterns. A series of experiments found that these neurons (the adrenergic neurons of the sympathetic nervous system) delivered signals to the bone marrow in a pattern correlated with circadian rhythms. These signals triggered HSCs to enter circulation. Disrupting a particular kind of receptor known as the 3-adrenergic receptor was sufficient to disrupt the HSC cycle. Intriguingly, the bone-secreting cells or osteoblasts generally considered an important source of CXCL12 lack these receptors, so the neurons must directly target a different cell type.
These findings provide further clues to understanding the bone marrow stem cell niche. In practical terms, it may mean that more HSCs can be harvested from the bone marrow, by collecting at the right time of day.
Mendez-Ferrer S et al. (2008) Haematopoietic stem cell release is regulated by circadian oscillations. Nature doi:10.1038/nature06685 Advance online publication 6 February 2008

Posted by Monya Baker on February 07, 2008
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Fifty non-profits and nine companies have applied for the up to 20 disease-specific planning awards offered by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine. These are small potatoes, intended to support six months of proposal development for the CIRM disease team research awards, multi-year grants for multidisciplinary teams, but the grants will take just as long to award. Recommendations will be made by the Grants Working Group in April, with decisions by the Independent Citizen’s Oversight Committee making the final decision in June. In January, ten companies and 56 teams from university sent letters saying that they intended to apply for these smaller $55,000 grants, according to a story by Terri Somers. Receiving one of these planning grants is not a prerequisite for submitting an application for the bigger grants, though the applications for these should be issued shortly after the planning cycle.

The notion of creating disease-specific teams was first put forth by former chief scientific officer Arlene Chiu, who was brought in by the now-departed president Zach Hall. Though I did not see any amounts listed for the bigger awards, current president Alan Trounson shows support for this idea and the bigger grants. The press release quotes him as saying, “A key objective of the subsequent Disease Team Research Award will be for teams to produce an approvable regulatory filing enabling human clinical testing within four years after the award.” CIRM’s scientific strategic plan written in 2006 projects spending $122 million on disease teams and $60 million on interdisciplinary teams over ten years, though presumably work by researchers funded under these plans would also be eligible for other funding categories.

These programs are also interesting because they are the first time CIRM will give money to businesses, though they do have some strings attached. In addition to grants, CIRM is also offering loans.

CIRM says that funding companies necessary because companies traditionally move science into medicine. Companies that receive CIRM funding to make high-revenue products will be required to give some of this revenue back to the state, and CIRM argues that this investment will yield high returns. In one of our commentaries, Stanford’s Michael Longaker provides a case study of how that might work and how return on investment can be assessed.

Posted by Monya Baker on February 05, 2008
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