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.

An ALS clinical trial with a twist. It is well known that the disease we call ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, behaves differently in different people, so it makes sense that a potential medication might help some people more than others. Now a collaborative group in the North East wants to use iPS-type stem cells to predict who will respond to a medication at the outset of a clinical trial.

The drug to be tested is already used to calm hyper excitable nerves in people with epilepsy. Hyper excitable nerves also seem to play a role in ALS, at least in some patients. So the team, lead by a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital with others from Harvard, the Northeast ALS Consortium and GlaxoSmithKline, will reprogram the patients’ blood cells to be iPS type stem cells and grow them into nerve cells in the lab and test their response to the drug, Retigabine.

The ALS Association is providing part of the funding for the effort, and the association’s chief scientist, Lucie Bruijn noted the unique nature of this effort in the association’s press release picked up by Bloomberg.

“This powerful collaboration of leaders in the fields of stem cells, clinical neurology, ALS research and GSK will be the first time that lab data from patient derived stem cells with disease-specific properties that respond to drugs have formed the basis for a clinical trial.”

Do stem cells prefer wearing a coat? One of our grantees and the editor of the journal Stem Cells, Jan Nolta, likes to refer to mesenchymal stem cells as little ambulances that run around the body delivering first aid supplies. These cells found in bone marrow and fat are being tested in many different disease, but in most cases they are not expected to actually make repairs themselves. Instead researchers use them to deliver a variety of protein factors that trigger various components of the body’s natural healing machinery.

One problem is the cells often do not stick around very long delivering their needed medical supplies. A team at Cornell University in New York thinks they may have found a way to improve the performance of these stem cells, by giving them a coat. By enclosing the stem cells in a capsule the cells stay in place better and more effectively help wounds heal, at least in the lab model the team used.

The university’s press release was picked up by Medical Design Technology.

Noise plus bad genes bad for hearing. Some people can spend years of Saturday nights attending loud rock concerts and have no issue with their hearing. Others end up constantly adjusting the battery on their hearing aids. A CIRM-funded team at the University of Southern California thinks they have fingered a genetic explanation for the difference.

Hearing is a complex process involving many components, which has resulted in no clear answers from previous attempts to find genetic links to hearing loss. The USC team performed a more complex analysis known as a GWAS, genome-wide association study. The result provided strong evidence that variations in the gene Nox3, which is normally turned on only in the inner ear, account for the differences in susceptibility.

Researchers now have a clear target to look for opportunities for prevention and therapy. Futurity picked up the University’s press release.

Accident creates new type of stem cell. Much of the work with embryonic stem cells centers on figuring out what proteins and other factors to expose them to in order to get them to mature into a desired type of cell. One such attempt at the University of Missouri resulted in creating a new type of stem cell that may be easier to work with than embryonic stem cells (ESCs).

They call their new cells BMP-primed stem cells because one of the various factors they were adding to their ESCs in a lab dish was Bone Morphogenetic Protein. Michael Roberts, the leader of the team, described the potential value of the new stem cells in an article in Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News:

“These new cells, which we call BMP-primed stem cells, are much more robust and easily manipulated than standard embryonic stem cells. BMP-primed cells represent a transitional stage of development between embryonic stem cells and their ultimate developmental fate, whether that is placenta cells, or skin cells or brain cells.”

For hardcore biologyphiles, the new cells offer a chance to better understand the early stages of embryo development. ESCs can form any part of the body but they cannot form the placenta and other early tissues needed to support the embryo. The BMP-primed stem cells can. So they may yield some long-sought answers about what determines cell fate in the early days after fertilization and perhaps some practical information on diseases related to the placenta like pre-eclampsia.