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.

Reprogramming skin to fight cancer. Earlier CIRM-funded research showed that adult nerve stem cells can home to the residual brain cancer left behind after surgery and deliver a cancer killing agent directly to where it is most needed. Now a team at the University of North Carolina has shown it can use reprogramming techniques similar to the Nobel-prize winning iPS cell reprogramming method to turn a patient’s own skin cells directly into adult nerve stem cells. They then used those stem cells to deliver a cancer-fighting protein to mice with brain cancer and extended their lives.

“We wanted to find out if these induced neural stem cells would home in on cancer cells and whether they could be used to deliver a therapeutic agent. This is the first time this direct reprogramming technology has been used to treat cancer,” said the leader of the study, Shawn Hingtgen, in a UNC press release.

Cancer cells. (iStockPhoto)

Many outlets picked up the release, including FoxNews, which overstated the lack of progress in the field.  Their piece suggests there had been no improvements “in more than 30 years,” which ignores several advances, but you can not argue with the quote they use from Hingtgen: “Patients desperately need a better standard of care.”

More evidence the neighborhood matters. Cells excrete substances that become the structure, known as the extracellular matrix (ECM), that holds them in place. Many regenerative medicine strategies count on using donor ECM to attract and hold stem cells, or use a synthetic material that mimics ECM. A team at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona has documented a strong feedback loop in which the ECM also directs which cells populate an area.

The work builds on a growing body of research we have written about that shows the neighborhood a stem cell finds itself in helps dictate what it will become. The study, published in eLife, focused on the tracheal tube in fruit flies.

“The biological context of these cells modifies not only their behavior but also their internal structure,” said the head of the project Jordi Casanova in a press release picked up by NewsMedical.net. “When we modify only the extracellular matrix, the cytoskeleton is also altered.”

The research team suggested that this form of intracellular communication has been preserved in evolution and has an important role in humans, including in inflammatory diseases and cancer.

Cancer therapy’s major step toward patients. We frequently point out that our mission is not to do research; it is to deliver therapies to patients. And that requires commercial partners that can do all the late stage work needed to bring a therapy to market. So, we are thrilled when the developers of a therapy we have fostered from the very earliest days in the lab announces they have complete the first half of a $75 million round of venture financing, and with major names from Silicon Valley, Lightspeed, Sutter Hill and Google Ventures.

The therapy, from the Stanford Lab of Irv Weissman, now being taken forward by the company he and colleagues founded, Forty Seven, has been shown to be effective against several types of cancer in animals and is now in an early phase human clinical trial funded by CIRM. We also funded the pre-clinical work for a total investment of more than $30 million in the therapy, which has promise to work synergistically with other therapies to wipe out notoriously difficult cancers. The company name comes from the therapy’s target on cancer stem cells, CD47.

Irv Weissman

“Targeting CD47 integrates the adaptive and innate immune systems, creating synergy with existing cancer-specific antibodies like rituximab, cetuximab and trastuzumab through ADCP, and potentially with T-cell checkpoint inhibitors through cross-presentation,” said Weissman in a company press release.

The online publication Xconomy wrote a longer piece providing more perspective on how the therapy could fit into the market and on CIRM’s role in its development.

The next generation in the lab.  The Guardsman, the student newspaper of City College, San Francisco, did a nice write up on our recent renewal of the colleges grant for one of our 17 current Bridges programs that train undergraduate and masters level students the ins-and-outs of working in a stem cell laboratory.

Rosa Canchari works with cell cultures in City College’s biotech laboratory. (Photo by Amanda Aceves/Special to The Guardsman)

The current renewal has redirected the programs to have the students better understand the end user, the patient, and to get a firmer grasp on the regulatory and process development pathways needed to bring a new therapy to market. As program officer for this initiative, I will be meeting with all the program directors next week to discuss how best to implement these changes.

But, as the CCSF director Dr. Carin Zimmerman told the Guardsman, the program continues to generate highly valued skilled workers. Like many of our programs, CCSF offers its basic courses to students at the school beyond those enrolled in the CIRM internships, and even that more limited exposure to stem cell science often lands jobs.

“One of the reasons we have a hard time filling all these classes is because people take one or two classes and get hired,” said Carin Zimmerman.