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.

Two ways to clean up mitochondrial defects. Every student gets it drilled into them that we get half our genes from mom and half from dad, but that is not quite right. Mom’s egg contains a few genes outside the nucleus in the so-called powerhouse of the cell, the mitochondria that we inherit only from mom. The 13 little genes in that tiny organelle that are responsible for energy use can wreak havoc when they are mutated. Now, a multi-center team working in Oregon and California has developed two different ways to create stem cells that match the DNA of specific patients in everyway except those defective mitochondrial genes.

The various mitochondrial mutations tend to impact one body system more than others. The end goal for the current research is to turn those stem cells into healthy tissue that can be transplanted into the area most impacted by the disease in a specific patient. That remains some years away, but this is a huge step in providing therapies for this group of diseases.

Currently, we have two ways of making stem cells that match the DNA of a patient, which hopefully result in transplantable cells that can avoid immune rejection. One is to reprogram adult tissue into induced pluripotent (iPS type) stem cells and the other uses the techniques called Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT), often called therapeutic cloning. The current research did both.

The team converted the SCNT stem cells into various needed tissues such as these nerve precursor cells.

The iPS work relied on the fact that our tissues are mosaics because of the way mitochondria get passed on when cells divide. So not all cells show mitochondrial mutations in people with “mito disease” —how impacted families tend to refer to it, as I found out through a distant cousin with a child valiantly struggling with one form of the disease. Because each iPS stem cell line arises from one cell, the researchers could do DNA analysis on each cell line and sort for ones with few or no mutations, resulting in healthy stem cells, which could become healthy transplant tissue.

But for some patients, there are just too many mutations. For those the researchers inserted the DNA from the patient into a healthy donor egg containing healthy mitochondria using SCNT. The result: again healthy stem cells.

“To families with a loved one born with a mitochondrial disease waiting for a cure, today we can say that a cure is on the horizon,” explained co-senior author Shoukhrat Mitalipov at the Oregon Stem Cell Center in a story in Genetic Engineering News. “This critical first step toward treating these diseases using gene therapy will put us on the path to curing them and unlike unmatched tissue or organ donations, combined gene and cell therapy will allow us to create the patients’ own healthy tissue that will not be rejected by their bodies.”

ScienceDaily ran the Oregon press release, HealthCanal ran the press release from the Salk Institute in La Jolla home of the other co-senior author Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, whose lab CIRM funds for other projects. And Reuters predictably did a piece with a bit more focus on the controversy around cloning. Nature published the research paper on Wednesday.

Stem cells to heal damaged lungs. Lung doctors dealing with emphysema, cystic fibrosis and other lung damage may soon take a page from the playbook of cancer doctors who transplant bone marrow stem cells. A team at Israel’s Weizmann Institute has tested a similar procedure in mice with damaged lungs and saw improved lung function

Transplanted lung cells continued to grow at six weeks (left) and 16 weeks (right).

Stem cells are homebodies. They tend to hang out in their own special compartments we call the stem cell niche, and if infused elsewhere in the body will return home to the niche. Bone marrow transplants make use of that tendency in two ways. Doctors wipe out the stem cells in the niche so that there is room there when stem cells previously harvested from the patient or donor cells are infused after therapy.

The Weizmann team did this in the lungs by developing a method to clear out the lung stem cell niche and isolating a source of stem cells capable of generating new lung tissue that could be infused. They now need to perfect both parts of the procedure. ScienceDaily ran the institute’s press release.

Stem cells for chronic pain due to nerve damage. Neuropathy, damaged nerves caused by diabetes, chemotherapy or injury tends to cause pain that resists treatment. A team at Duke University in North Carolina has shown that while a routine pain pill might provide relief for a few hours, a single injection of stem cells provided relief for four to five weeks—in mice.

They used a type of stem cell found in bone marrow known to have anti-inflammatory properties called Bone Marrow Stromal Cells (BMSCs). They infused the cells directly into the spinal cavity in mice that had induced nerve damage. They found that one chemical released by the stem cells, TGF Beta1, was present in the spinal fluid of the treated animals at higher than normal levels. This finding becomes a target for further research to engineer the BMSCs so that they might be even better at relieving pain. ScienceNewsline picked up the Duke press release about the research published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.