Spinal cord injury clinical trial hits another milestone (Kevin McCormack)
We began the week with good news about our CIRM-funded clinical trial with Asterias for spinal cord injury, and so it’s nice to end the week with more good news from that same trial. On Wednesday, Asterias announced it had completed enrolling and dosing patients in their AIS-B 10 million cell group.

People with AIS-B spinal cord injuries have some level of sensation and feeling but very little, if any, movement below the site of injury site. So for example, spinal cord injuries at the neck, would lead to very limited movement in their arms and hands. As a result, they face a challenging life and may be dependent on help in performing most daily functions, from getting out of bed to eating.

In another branch of the Asterias trial, people with even more serious AIS-A injuries – in which no feeling or movement remains below the site of spinal cord injury – experienced improvements after being treated with Asterias’ AST-OPC1 stem cell therapy. In some cases the improvements were quite dramatic. We blogged about those here.

In a news release Dr. Ed Wirth, Asterias’ Chief Medical Officer, said they hope that the five people treated in the AIS-B portion of the trial will experience similar improvements as the AIS-A group.

“Completing enrollment and dosing of the first cohort of AIS-B patients marks another important milestone for our AST-OPC1 program. We have already reported meaningful improvements in arm, hand and finger function for AIS-A patients dosed with 10 million AST-OPC1 cells and we are looking forward to reporting initial efficacy and safety data for this cohort early in 2018.”

Asterias is already treating some AIS-A patients with 20 million cells and hopes to start enrolling AIS-B patients for the 20 million cell therapy later this summer.

Earlier diagnosis of pancreatic cancer using induced pluripotent stem cells Reprogramming adult cells to an embryonic stem cell-like state is as common in research laboratories as hammers and nails are on a construction site. But a research article in this week’s edition of Science Translational Medicine used this induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) toolbox in a way I had never read about before. And the results of the study may lead to earlier detection of pancreatic cancer, the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the U.S.

A pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma
Credit: The lab of Ken Zaret, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

We’ve summarized countless iPSCs studies over the years. For example, skin or blood samples from people with Parkinson’s disease can be converted to iPSCs and then specialized into brain cells to provide a means to examine the disease in a lab dish. The starting material – the skin or blood sample – typically has no connection to the disease so for all intents and purposes, it’s a healthy cell. It’s only after specializing it into a nerve cell that the disease reveals itself.

But the current study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania used late stage pancreatic cancer cells as their iPSC cell source. One of the reasons pancreatic cancer is thought to be so deadly is because it’s usually diagnosed very late when standard treatments are less effective. So, this team aimed to reprogram the cancer cells back into an earlier stage of the cancer to hopefully find proteins or molecules that could act as early warning signals, or biomarkers, of pancreatic cancer.

Their “early-stage-cancer-in-a-dish” model strategy was a success. The team identified a protein called thrombospodin-2 (THBS2) as a new candidate biomarker. As team lead, Dr. Ken Zaret, described in a press release, measuring blood levels of THBS2 along with a late-stage cancer biomarker called CA19-9 beat out current detection tests:

“Positive results for THBS2 or CA19-9 concentrations in the blood consistently and correctly identified all stages of the cancer. Notably, THBS2 concentrations combined with CA19-9 identified early stages better than any other known method.”

DNA: the ultimate film archive device?
This last story for the week isn’t directly related to stem cells but is too cool to ignore. For the first time ever, researchers at Harvard report in Nature that they have converted a video into a DNA sequence which was then inserted into bacteria. As Gina Kolata states in her New York Times article about the research, the study represents the ultimate data archive system which can “be retrieved at will and multiplied indefinitely as the host [bacteria] divides and grows.”

A video file is nothing but a collection of “1s” and “0s” of binary code which describe the makeup of each pixel in each frame of a movie. The researchers used the genetic code within DNA to describe each pixel in a short clip of one of the world’s first motion pictures: a galloping horse captured by Eadward Muybridge in 1878.

The resulting DNA sequence was then inserted into the chromosome of E.Coli., a common bacteria that lives in your intestines, using the CRISPR gene editing method. The video code was still retrievable after the bacteria was allowed to multiply.

The Harvard team envisions applications well beyond a mere biological hard drive. Dr. Seth Shipman, an author of the study, told Paul Rincon of BBC news that he thinks this cell system could be placed in various parts of the body to analyze cell function and “encode information about what’s going on in the cell and what’s going on in the cell environment by writing that information into their own genome”.

Perhaps then it could be used to monitor the real-time activity of stem cell therapies inside the body. For now, I’ll wait to hear about that in some upcoming science fiction film.