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.

3D nerve model for Parkinson’s. The wave of successes in making more complex tissues in three dimensional lab cultures continues this week with a team in Luxembourg creating nerves from stem cells derived from Parkinson’s patients that assembled into complex connections in the lab.

Nerve cells made from skin cells. Credit: Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB), 2015

The name of the journal where the group published their results, Lab on a Chip, says a lot about where the field is going. While many have grown the dopamine-producing nerves lost in Parkinson’s disease in two dimensional cultures, the new technique better replicates the disease state and does it about 10-fold cheaper because the 3D bioreactors used can be automated and use less of the reagents needed to grow the cells and to tell them to become the right nerves.

They started with skin samples from patients and reprogrammed them into iPS-type stem cells. After those cells are placed in the vessel, they are matured into 90 percent pure dopamine-nerves. At that point they are ideal for testing potential drugs for any impact on the disease. The senior researcher, Ronan Fleming, explained the benefit in a press release from the University of Luxembourg, picked up by ScienceDaily:

“In drug development, dozens of chemical substances can therefore be tested for possible therapeutic effects in a single step. Because we use far smaller amounts of substances than in conventional cell culture systems, the costs drop to about one tenth the usual.”

Synthetic blood from stem cells. Making synthetic blood, particularly for people with rare blood types for which there are few donors, has long been a goal of science. Now, the British National Health Service (NHS) says it expects to begin giving patients at least one component of lab-made blood—red cells—by 2017.

Starting with adult stem cells grown in just the right solution they hope to produce large quantities of red blood cells. Initially they plan to give only small quantities to healthy individuals with rare blood types to compare them to donor blood.

“These trials will compare manufactured cells with donated blood,” said Nick Warkins of the NHS. “The intention is not to replace blood donation but provide specialist treatment for specific patient groups.”

The story got wide pick up in the British press including in the Daily Mail and in several web portals including Rocket News.

Tracking Huntington’s spread in the brain. A CIRM-funded team at the University of California, Irvine, has developed a way to track the spread of the mutant protein responsible for progression of Huntington’s disease. They were able to accurately detect the mutant protein in cerebrospinal fluid and distinguish between people who carried the mutation but were pre-symptomatic from those that had advanced disease.

The protein appears to be released by diseased cells and migrates to other cells, seeding additional damage there. Measuring levels of the protein should allow physicians to monitor progression of the disease ahead of symptoms.

“Determining if a treatment modifies the course of a neurodegenerative disease like Huntington’s or Alzheimer’s may take years of clinical observation,” said study leader Dr. Steven Potkin. “This assay that reflects a pathological process can play a key role in more rapidly developing an effective treatment. Blocking the cell-to-cell seeding process itself may turn out to be an effective treatment strategy.”

Medical News Today wrote up the research that the team published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Good overview of cloning. Writing for Medical Daily, Dana Dovey has produced a good overview of the history of cloning, and more important, the reasons why reproductive cloning of human is not likely to happen any time soon.

She describes the important role a number of variations on cloning play in scientific research, and the potential to create personalized cells for patients through a process known as therapeutic cloning. But she also describes the many problems with reproductive cloning as it is practiced in animals. It is very inefficient with dozens of eggs failing to mature and often results in animals that have flaws. She quotes Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technologies (now Ocata Therapeutics):

“It’s like sending your baby up in a rocket knowing there’s a 50-50 chance it’s going to blow up. It’s grossly unethical.”