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.

Monkey trial provides some hope for spinal cord injury. Stem cell treatments have made many mice and rats walk again after spinal cord injury, but moving from those rodents to human has been a slow process. Their immune systems and nervous systems are very different from ours. So, it was good to read this week that a team at Japan’s Keio University reported success in monkeys with systems much more like ours.

The experiment was “controlled.” They compared treated and non-treated animals and saw a significant difference in mobility between the two groups. Bloomberg picked up the release from the journal that published the work Stem Cells Translational Medicine, which quoted the study author Hideyuki Okano:

“An animal in the control group, for example, could not raise her hands up to head height at 12 weeks after injury when motor function almost plateaus. On the other hand, at the same point in time a transplanted animal was able to jump successfully and run so fast it was difficult for us to catch her. She could also grip a pen at 3 cm. above head-height.”

But the work requires some caveats. They treated all animals at exactly 14-days post injury, a window considered optimal for having initial inflammation subside and scar tissue not yet formed. Also, the researchers inflicted bruises not more severe damage to the spinal cord. Most patients with spinal cord injury are chronic, long past the 14-day window, and have damage to their spinal cords more severe than these animals.

The researchers started with embryonic stem cells and matured them into nerve progenitor cells, which they injected into the monkeys. While this process can yield plentiful cells for therapy the researchers acknowledged that much more research is needed before they can help the vast majority of spinal cord injuries with more severe and older injuries. CIRM funds a clinical trial using cells derived from embryonic stem cells to treat more complex spinal injuries, but it is just getting underway.

Clues to creating complex tissues. These days getting stem cells to form a single type of tissue, nerve or skin for example, is almost routine, with the remaining hurdle being purity. But getting stem cells to form complex tissues with multiple types of cells, while done a few times, still gets folks attention. For the most part, this is because we don’t know the cell-to-cell interactions required to form complex tissues. A CIRM-funded team at the University of California, San Diego, thinks they have part of the answer.

They studied something called the neurovascular unit, made up of blood vessels, smooth muscle and nerves that regulate heart rate, blood flow and breathing, among other basic functions. Using a lab model they showed how the different cell types come together to form the vital regulatory tissue. San Diego Newscape posted a piece on the work, quoting the study’s senor author David Cheresh:

“This new model allows us to follow the fate of distinct cell types during development, as they work cooperatively, in a way that we can’t in intact embryos, individual cell lines or mouse models. And if we’re ever going to use stem cells to develop new organ systems, we need to know how different cell types come together to form complex and functional structures such as the neurovascular unit.”

And a brainy example.   Prior research has created small brain “organoids” that started with stem cells and self assembled in a lab dish to create layers of nerves and support cells, but the cells did not interact much like normal brain tissue. Now, a team at Stanford has developed “cortex-like spheroids” with different types of cells that talk to each other.

Nerves and supporting cells form layers and organize like in the developing brain

In the new cortex spheres the nerves are healthier with a better network of the natural supporting cells called glial cells. The cells form layers that interact with each other like in our brains as we are developing.

A program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) focusing on using stem cells to create models of disease in the lab funded the work. Thomas Insel, Director of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health described the importance of the current work in a press release from the institute picked up by HealthCanal:

“There’s been amazing progress in this field over the past few years. The cortex spheroids grow to a state in which they express functional connectivity, allowing for modeling and understanding of mental illnesses. They do not even begin to approach the complexity of a whole human brain. But that is not exactly what we need to study disorders of brain circuitry.“

The release starts with a fun lede imagining the day when a patient tormented by mental illness could have a model of their disease grown in a dish and researchers could genetically engineer better brain circuits for the patient. Certainly not just around the corner, but not far fetched.

States economic gain from funding research. The very niched web cite Governing posted a piece that appears to be largely from a conference in Washington D.C. hosted by the Greater Phoenix Economic Council. It quotes several experts speaking about the opportunity for states to gain economic advantage by funding research.

The piece notes some well documented examples of federal government spending on research spawning industries—think Silicon Valley. Then it talks about some more recent state examples including the California initiative that created CIRM.

One speaker, Mark Muro of the Brookings Institute said that we are in a new era now and states may not be able to fund research through their general tax revenue. He said:

“It may be the state becoming part of a consortium or working with Fortune 500 companies, or going to voters with a general obligation bond vote. I think we’re heading for a new complexity.”

Since CIRM was created through a vote for bonds, guess we have to agree.