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.

Designer bags from human skin? I had to share a bizarre story I read this week about a UK fashion designer who is making a collection of luxury handbags from lab-grown human skin called Pure Human. What’s even weirder is that the human skin used was engineered to contain the genetic material or DNA of the famous fashion designer Alexander McQueen who passed away in 2010.

I had to admit I cringed when I first read about it in CCRM’s Signals Blog, but now I am fascinated that someone is actually doing this and intrigued about the ethical conversations that this story will undoubtedly stir up.

While it isn’t possible to patent a person’s DNA, it is possible to patent a technology that uses human DNA and products made from that technology. According to Signals, “the aim of the collection is to highlight existing legal loopholes around ownership of a person’s DNA and to open the doors for tissue bioengineering into the world of fashion.”

The collection’s designer, Tina Gorjanc, explained her motivation behind Pure Human:

Tina Gorjanc

“My main goal was to show that it is possible to patent a process using human genetic information in a domain other than medicine. Biotechnology is happening at a really rapid pace and legislation has not kept up with it.”

 

She also sees her bags as an untapped resource in the global luxury goods market which is now apparently worth $1 trillion dollars.

“When it comes to bioengineering, people tend to skip the luxury goods market because they think it’s too shallow and not important, but if you look at it, it’s one of the biggest markets that we have – and one that is open to new technology.”

Imagine having the option to bypass animal leather products for engineered human skin-based products? But on the flip side, the author of the Signals blog, Jovana Drinjakovic, makes a great point at the end of her piece by saying: just because we can do this, does it mean we should?

Drinjakovic finishes her piece with a reality-check quote from Dr. Marc Jeschke, the leader of a burn research and skin regeneration lab in Toronto:

“We are trying to find a way to make skin that is functional and won’t be rejected after a transplant. But just to grow skin for fashion – I don’t think that’s very useful.”

 

Large-Scale Stem Cell Production in Texas. A nonprofit company in San Antonio, Texas, called BioBridge, has big plans to produce large amounts of clinical-grade stem cells for regenerative medicine purposes. The company recently received $7.8 million in funding from the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium to pursue this effort.

BioBridge will work with GenCure, a subsidiary company, to develop the technology to manufacture different types of stem cells at a large scale. These stem cells will be clinical-grade, meaning that they can be used for cell therapy applications in patients. BioBridge’s goal is to provide enough stem cells for both academic researchers and companies who need more than their current lab resources can generate.

The CEO of GenCure, Becky Cap, explained the need for this type of large-scale stem cell manufacturing technology in an interview with Xconomy:

“The capabilities in this sector right now are at a scale that’s appropriate for bench research and some clinical research, depending on the indication and volume of cells we need. We’re talking about moving from hundreds of millions of cells to billions of cells. You need billions of cells to do tissue regeneration and scaffold reengineering.”

Two other companies with expertise in cell manufacturing, StemBioSys from San Antonio and RoosterBio in Maryland, will be working with BioBridge and GenCure over the next three years on specific projects. StemBioSys plans to develop materials that will be used to promote stem cell growth. RoosterBio will take stem cell culturing from small-scale petri dishes to large-scale bioreactors that can produce billions of cells.

It will be interesting to see how the BioBridge collaboration works out. Xconomy concluded:

“This sort of large-scale manufacturing is still years out. The results that come from the work will be incorporated into a contract manufacturing operation that BioBridge is opening within GenCure.”

 

A new way to look at fat stem cells. (By Todd Dubnicoff)

Human fat stem cells, scientifically known as human adipose stem cells (hASC), are an attractive cell source for regenerative medicine. Their low tendency to cause tissue rejection and their ability to transform into bone cells make them particularly well-suited for developing cell-based treatments for osteoporosis, a disease that weakens bones and makes them susceptible to fractures. And thanks to the numerous liposuction procedures performed in the U.S. each year, hASCs are readily available to researchers.

But a lingering problem with hASCs as a reliable cell source for future therapies is their extreme patient-to-patient variability. Studies have shown that all sorts of factors like gender, body mass index (BMI) and age can have profound effects on the ability of hASCs to multiply and to specialize into bone cells.

Now, University of Missouri researchers describe the novel use of a measuring device to make more quantitative comparisons of different sets of donor hASCs. The instrument, called an electrical cell-substrate impedance spectroscopy (ECIS) – try saying that three times fast! – sends a very weak, noninvasive current through the cells and can measure changes in the cells’ shape in real-time. Other studies had shown that ECIS can quantitatively detect differences between hASCs and human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells as they mature into their respective cell types.

In the current Stem Cells Translational Medicine study, picked up this week by Health Canal, hASCs were obtained from young (24–36 years old), middle-aged (48–55 years old), and elderly (60–81 years old) donors. The ECIS results showed that stem cells from older donors matured into bone cells much quicker (~ 1day) than the younger cell of cells (~10 day). You might have intuitively thought the youngest stem cells would mature the fastest. But the end result of the difference is that the young set of stem cells multiplied much more than the cells from older donor and they accumulated more calcium over time.

This noninvasive, quantitative tool for predicting a fat stem cell’s potential to specialize into bone has the promise to improve quality control for manufacturing cell therapies, and it also provides researchers a means to better observe the underlying biological basis for this patient-to-patient variability in human fat cells.