Here are some stem cell stories that caught our eye this past week. Some are groundbreaking science, others are of personal interest to us, and still others are just fun.

Uncovering mystery of heart self-repair. We have often written about work that tries to get the body’s self-healing mechanisms to do a better job. This is particularly desirable but difficult in heart injury. A CIRM-funded team as Children’s Hospital Los Angeles found some clues to achieving this goal by investigating critters good at it. Neonatal mice have an amazing capacity to repair heart damage for about the first seven days of their life.

The team looked at what genetic and molecular systems were active during the period of repair and not active at other times. Senior author of the study, Ellen Lien, described the importance of what they are finding in a press release picked up by ScienceCodex:

“Using models such as zebrafish and neonatal mice that regenerate their hearts naturally, we can begin to identify important molecules that enhance heart repair.”

Good news on MS needed many caveats. Some good news on using stem cell transplants for Multiple Sclerosis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week sparked a flurry of news reports. But most of those stories lacked the caveats the study required and generated several calls to our office from desperate patients wanting to try the therapy. HealthDay did a good job of pointing out the hope and the limitations of the therapy and of the clinical trial itself.

Only half of the patients responded, which is still good for what can be such an intractable disease. But, only one subset of patients showed the benefit; ones earlier in the course of the disease with the form known as relapsing-remitting MS. None of the later stage patients responded, which makes some sense because if the transplant is altering the immune system, it would have the most impact when the patient’s immune cells are most actively attacking their nerves.

A personal tale of using genetic screening of embryos. Over the past couple years researchers’ need for new embryonic stem cell lines has declined. As a result, many of the new cell lines registered with the National Institutes of Health in the past year have been ones carrying specific genetic disease traits that have been screened out of consideration by couples using pre-implant genetic diagnosis (PGD) for family planning at in vitro fertilization clinics.

While we have written about this conceptually a feature story posted by the University of Michigan and picked up by ScienceDaily makes it very real through a family’s personal story. A devastating nerve disease called ALD runs in the prospective mother’s family so they decided to use PGD to avoid having a child with the disease, but they took it one step further. They donated the left over embryos that carried the genetic flaw to the university for research. Now they are about to celebrate the first birthday of a healthy son and the researchers have a valuable research tool as one stem cell scientist at the University, Gary Smith, explained:

“Disease-specific human embryonic stem cells are the gold standard for research —the purest pathway to understanding disease establishment and progression, and to discovering ways to prevent or alleviate pain and suffering caused by these diseases.”