The immunosuppression was not for the stem cells, but for the existing white blood cells that were destroying the pancreatic cells of the patient (thus causing the diabetes).
Seems like we've been duped. There isn't anything in use of embryonic stem cells, but a lot already in the use of adult stem cells.
I just borrowed Ann Coulter's book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, from the library. She sure is a character. But what she says about stem-cells is quite revealing. (I also posted this in the "other" forum.)
Quote:
Although there has been research on both adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells since the fifties, only adult stem-cell research has produced any cures -- and lots of 'em. Adult stem cells have been used for decades to treat dozens of diseases, including Type 1 diabetes, liver disease, and spinal cord injuries. Currently, adult stem cells are used to treat more than eighty different diseases.
Harvard medical researcher Denise Faustman has used adult stem cells to cure diabetes in mice. Other cures from adult stem cells are being tested in hundreds of clinical trials. Adult stem-cell researchers in Switzerland take a few strands of hair from burn victims and use the follicular stem cells on the tips to create entire disks of new skin, a vast improvement on ugly skin grafts. Recently, patients with damaged livers have been helped by injections of bone marrow adult stem cells collected not directly from their marrow (an extremely painful procedure) but simply cultivated from their blood.
By contrast, the embryonic stem-cell researchers have produced nothing. They have treated nothing. They have not even begun one human clinical trial. They've successfully treated a few rodents, but they keep running into two problems: First, the cells tend to be rejected by the immune system. Second, they tend to cause malignancies called teratomas -- meaning "monster tumors."
The idea that embryonic stem cells are on the verge of curing anything is absurd...
The only advantage embryonic stem cells once had over adult stem cells was their ability to transform into any type of cell. But fast-advancing research on adult stem cells has stripped away even that theoretical advantage. As of 2002, adult stem cells were being converted into all three types of cells the body produces during early embryonic development. And adult stem cells were already curing people!
Embryonic stem-cell researchers were in trouble... No one is going to buy a drawing of a potential cure when somebody else is already selling the cure.
Embryonic stem-cell researchers had only one choice: Accuse anyone opposed to taxpayer funding of embryonic stem-cell research of being "anti-science." As Michael Fumento says, it was the very success of adult stem-cell research compared with the abject failure of embryonic stem-cell research that led to the all-out PR campaign: "Savvy venture capitalists have poured their money into ASCs, leaving ESC researchers desperate to feed at the federal (or state) trough."
While adult stem-cell researchers were in their labs quietly discovering cures, embryonic stem-cell researchers were mounting a massive public relations assault that not only promised cures for every known human malady but also viciously attacked adult stem-cell research as usless. This is perhaps not surprising, since -- in contrast to researchers on adult stem cells -- embryonic stem-cell researchers are virtually never doctors. They're biologists. They don't care about healing people, they just want to be paid to push petri dishes around the lab, cut up a living human embryo, and sell it for parts like a stolen Toyota at a chop chop.
It's always the same thing with liberals. Time and again doctors are just minding their own business trying to cure people and liberal special interest groups swoop in and take all their money...
Adult stem cells from human cord umbilical cord blood successfully engineered to make insulin
In a fundamental discovery that someday may help cure type 1 diabetes by allowing people to grow their own insulin-producing cells for a damaged or defective pancreas, medical researchers here have reported that they have engineered adult stem cells derived from human umbilical cord blood to produce insulin.
The researchers announced their laboratory finding, which caps nearly four years of research, in the June 2007 issue of the medical journal Cell Proliferation, posted online this week. Their paper calls it "the first demonstration that human umbilical cord blood-derived stem cells can be engineered" to synthesize insulin.
"This discovery tells us that we have the potential to produce insulin from adult stem cells to help people with diabetes," said Dr. Randall J. Urban, senior author of the paper, professor and chair of internal medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and director of UTMB�s Nelda C. and Lutcher H. J. Stark Diabetes Center.
Stressing that the reported discovery is extremely basic research, Urban cautioned: "It doesn�t prove that we�re going to be able to do this in people � it�s just the first step up the rung of the ladder."
The lead author of the paper, UTMB professor of internal medicine/endocrinology Larry Denner, said that by working with adult stem cells rather than embryonic stem cells, doctors practicing so-called regenerative medicine eventually might be able to extract stem cells from an individual�s blood, then grow them in the laboratory to large numbers and tweak them so that they are directed to create a needed organ. In this way, he said, physicians might avoid the usual pitfall involved in transplanting cells or organs from other people � organ rejection, which requires organ recipients to take immune-suppressing drugs for the rest of their lives.
Huge numbers of stem cells are thought to be required to create new organs. Researchers might remove thousands of donor cells from an individual and grow them in the laboratory into billions of cells, Denner explained. Then, for a person with type 1 diabetes, researchers might engineer these cells to become islets of Langerhans, the cellular masses that produce the hormone insulin, which allows the body to utilize sugar, synthesize proteins and store neutral fats, or lipids. "But we�re a long way from that," Denner warned.
Denner said this research, which reflects a fruitful collaboration with co-authors Drs. Colin McGuckin and Nico Forraz at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in the United Kingdom, used human umbilical cord blood because it is an especially rich source of fresh adult stem cells and is easily available from donors undergoing Caesarian section deliveries in UTMB hospitals. "However," he added, "embryonic stem cell research was absolutely necessary to teach us how to do this."
Embryonic stem cells have been engineered to produce cardiac, neural, blood, lung and liver progenitor cells that perform many of the functions needed to help replace cells and tissues injured by many diseases, the paper notes. Among the insights into cell and tissue engineering gained from work with embryonic stem cells, it adds, are those "relevant to the engineering of functional equivalents of pancreatic, islet-like, glucose-responsive, insulin-producing cells to treat diabetes."
The researchers said they tested adult stem cells in the laboratory to ensure that they were predisposed to divide. Then they used a previously successful method in which complex signals produced by the embryonic mouse pancreas were used to direct adult stem cells to begin developing, or "differentiating," into islet-like cells.
As they grew these adult stem cells in the laboratory, the researchers conducted other tests in which the cells to be engineered showed evidence of a characteristic, or marker, known as SSEA-4 that was previously thought to exist only in embryonic cells. They also found that, just as embryonic cells have been shown to do, these adult stem cells produced both C-peptide, a part of the insulin precursor protein, and insulin itself. Confirming the presence of the C-peptide was especially crucial, the researchers suggested, because although insulin is often found in the growth media with which the cells are nurtured and is often taken up by such cells, the presence of the C-peptide proves that at least some of the insulin was produced, or synthesized, by the engineered cells.
Muscle Stem Cells Effectively Treat
Urinary Incontinence Long Term
Science Daily � Women with stress urinary incontinence (SUI) treated using muscle-derived stem cell injections to strengthen their sphincter muscles experience long-term improvements in their condition, according to a study led by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. The study, which followed patients for more than one year, suggests that the approach is safe, improves patients' quality of life and may be an effective treatment for SUI.
"This clinical trial is extremely encouraging, given that 13 million people in the United States, most of them women, cope with stress urinary incontinence," said Michael B. Chancellor, M.D., the study's senior author and professor of urology and gynecology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. "We're demonstrating for the first time that we may be able to offer people with SUI a long-term and minimally invasive treatment option."
"The technique to achieve optimal efficacy is evolving, but we are pleased with what this study has shown," added principal investigator Lesley Carr, M.D., urologist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and assistant professor at the University of Toronto. "We now have preliminary evidence that stem cells are safe to use and appear to improve female stress urinary incontinence."
Previous studies in animal models of SUI completed at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine demonstrated that injecting stem cells into the urethral muscles increases leak point pressure, leading to the restoration of the deficient muscles. The results of these studies formed the basis for the clinical trial.
In the study, Dr. Carr and colleagues took biopsies of skeletal muscle tissue from eight female patients and isolated and expanded the stem cells from the tissue in culture. In an outpatient setting, the patients then received injections of the muscle-derived stem cells into the area surrounding the urethra. Each patient received an equal dose of stem cell injections using three different injection techniques -- a transurethral injection with either an 8-mm or 10-mm needle or a periurethral injection.
Five of the eight women who participated in the study reported improvement in bladder control and quality of life with no serious short- or long-term adverse effects one year after the initial treatment. These improvements were associated with both the 10-mm needle injections and the periurethral injections, which allowed the investigators to deliver the stem cells close to the damaged sphincter muscle. The 8-mm needle was not able to deliver the muscle stem cells deep enough into the tissue to reach the sphincter.
A multi-center study in Canada and a study in the United States are currently underway and will allow researchers to determine the optimal dose of muscle stem cells needed to effectively treat SUI.
Women with SUI involuntarily leak urine during activities that put pressure on the bladder, such as running, coughing, sneezing or laughing. Stress incontinence is caused by childbirth, menopause or pelvic surgery and is most often diagnosed in women during middle-age.
The findings were presented at the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine in Urology briefing at the annual meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) in San Diego, and will be published in Abstract 1331 in the AUA proceedings.
In addition to Drs. Carr and Chancellor, other contributors to the study included Deborah Steele and Shannon Steele, with Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre; Janet Erickson and Wendy Leng, M.D., with the University of Pittsburgh; and David Wagner, Ryan Pruchnic and Ron Jankowski with Cook MyoSite Inc. The study was funded by Cook MyoSite Inc. of Pittsburgh. Dr. Chancellor serves as a paid consultant to CookMyoSite and maintains a financial interest in the company. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0521124524.htm
Another news item. I don't know how long Physorg.com web pages are kept on the site. I plan on saving and printing the web pages in the links available so far.
Gerry, if you like, we could make a new forum/category here, to store that information. Let me know if you think it would be useful. Would we call is something like "Archives from links" ?
Suggestions welcomed.
Embryonic Stem Cells NOT Needed!
We've been taught way back in the '70s that stem cells in one's body can change into any needed tissue. 
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