Gladstone Institutes

NIH-scientists are told to stop buying fetal tissue for research, highlighting importance of CIRM’s voter-created independence

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments
NIH_Clinical_Research_Center_aerial

National Institutes of Health

The news that President Trump’s administration has told scientists employed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that they can’t buy any new human fetal tissue for research has left many scientists frustrated and worried.

The news has also highlighted the reason why voters created CIRM in the first place and the importance of having an independent source of funding for potentially life-saving research such as this.

The Trump administration imposed the suspension of all new acquisitions saying it wants to review all fetal tissue research funded by the federal government. The impact was felt immediately.

In an article on ScienceMag.com, Warner Greene, director of the Center for HIV Cure Research at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, said the decision derailed collaboration between his lab and one at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana. The research focused on an antibody that previous studies showed might prevent HIV from establishing reservoirs in the human body.

“We were all poised to go and then the bombshell was dropped. The decision completely knocked our collaboration off the rails. We were devastated.”

Right now, it’s not clear if the “halt” is temporary or permanent, or if it will ultimately be expanded beyond scientists employed by the NIH to all scientists funded by the NIH who use fetal tissue.

In 2001, President George W. Bush’s decision to impose restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research helped generate support for Proposition 71, the voter-approved initiation that created CIRM. People felt that stem cell research had potential to develop treatments and cures for deadly diseases and that if the federal government wasn’t going to support it then California would.

CIRM Board member, and Patient Advocate for HIV/AIDS, Jeff Sheehy says the current actions could have wide-reaching impact.

“While the initial focus of the emerging ban on the use of fetal tissue has been on projects related to HIV, this action undermines a spectrum of vital research initiatives that seek to cure multiple life-threatening diseases and conditions.  Many regenerative medicine cell-based or gene therapies require pre-clinical safety studies in humanized mice created with fetal tissue.  These mice effectively have human immune systems, which allows researchers to examine the effects of products on the immune system. Work to prevent and treat infectious diseases, including vaccine efforts, require this animal model to do initial testing. Development of vaccines to respond to actual threats requires use of this animal model.  This action could have damaging effects on the health of Americans.”

 

Research Targeting Prostate Cancer Gets Almost $4 Million Support from CIRM

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Prostate cancer

A program hoping to supercharge a patient’s own immune system cells to attack and kill a treatment resistant form of prostate cancer was today awarded $3.99 million by the governing Board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM)

In the U.S., prostate cancer is the second most common cause of cancer deaths in men.  An estimated 170,000 new cases are diagnosed each year and over 29,000 deaths are estimated in 2018.  Early stage prostate cancer is usually managed by surgery, radiation and/or hormone therapy. However, for men diagnosed with castrate-resistant metastatic prostate cancer (CRPC) these treatments often fail to work and the disease eventually proves fatal.

Poseida Therapeutics will be funded by CIRM to develop genetically engineered chimeric antigen receptor T cells (CAR-T) to treat metastatic CRPC. In cancer, there is a breakdown in the natural ability of immune T-cells to survey the body and recognize, bind to and kill cancerous cells. Poseida is engineering T cells and T memory stem cells to express a chimeric antigen receptor that arms these cells to more efficiently target, bind to and destroy the cancer cell. Millions of these cells are then grown in the laboratory and then re-infused into the patient. The CAR-T memory stem cells have the potential to persist long-term and kill residual cancer calls.

“This is a promising approach to an incurable disease where patients have few options,” says Maria T. Millan, M.D., President and CEO of CIRM. “The use of chimeric antigen receptor engineered T cells has led to impressive results in blood malignancies and a natural extension of this promising approach is to tackle currently untreatable solid malignancies, such as castrate resistant metastatic prostate cancer. CIRM is pleased to partner on this program and to add it to its portfolio that involves CAR T memory stem cells.”

Poseida Therapeutics plans to use the funding to complete the late-stage testing needed to apply to the Food and Drug Administration for the go-ahead to start a clinical trial in people.

Quest Awards

The CIRM Board also voted to approve investing $10 million for eight projects under its Discovery Quest Program. The Quest program promotes the discovery of promising new stem cell-based technologies that will be ready to move to the next level, the translational category, within two years, with an ultimate goal of improving patient care.

Among those approved for funding are:

  • Eric Adler at UC San Diego is using genetically modified blood stem cells to treat Danon Disease, a rare and fatal condition that affects the heart
  • Li Gan at the Gladstone Institutes will use induced pluripotent stem cells to develop a therapy for a familial form of dementia
  • Saul Priceman at City of Hope will use CAR-T therapy to develop a treatment for recurrent ovarian cancer

Because the amount of funding for the recommended applications exceeded the money set aside, the Application Subcommittee voted to approve partial funding for two projects, DISC2-11192 and DISC2-11109 and to recommend, at the next full Board meeting in October, that the projects get the remainder of the funds needed to complete their research.

The successful applications are:

 

APPLICATION

  

TITLE

  

INSTITUTION

 CIRM COMMITTED FUNDING
DISC2-11131 Genetically Modified Hematopoietic Stem Cells for the

Treatment of Danon Disease

 

  

U.C San Diego

  

$1,393,200

 
DISC2-11157 Preclinical Development of An HSC-Engineered Off-

The-Shelf iNKT Cell Therapy for Cancer

 

  

U.C. Los Angeles

  

$1,404,000
DISC2-11036 Non-viral reprogramming of the endogenous TCRα

locus to direct stem memory T cells against shared

neoantigens in malignant gliomas

 

  

U.C. San Francisco

  

$900,000
DISC2-11175 Therapeutic immune tolerant human islet-like

organoids (HILOs) for Type 1 Diabetes

 

  

Salk Institute

  

$1,637,209
DISC2-11107 Chimeric Antigen Receptor-Engineered Stem/Memory

T Cells for the Treatment of Recurrent Ovarian Cancer

 

  

City of Hope

  

$1,381,104
DISC2-11165 Develop iPSC-derived microglia to treat progranulin-

deficient Frontotemporal Dementia

 

  

Gladstone Institutes

  

$1,553,923
DISC2-11192 Mesenchymal stem cell extracellular vesicles as

therapy for pulmonary fibrosis

 

  

U.C. San Diego

  

$865,282
DISC2-11109 Regenerative Thymic Tissues as Curative Cell

Therapy for Patients with 22q11 Deletion Syndrome

 

  

Stanford University

  

$865,282

 

 

Gladstone scientists tackle heart failure by repairing the heart from within

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Modern medicine often involves the development of a drug or treatment outside the body, which is then given to a patient to fix, improve or even prevent their condition. But what if you could regenerate or heal the body using the cells and tissue already inside a patient?

Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes are pursuing such a strategy for heart disease. In a CIRM-funded study published today in the journal Cell, the team identified four genes that can stimulate adult heart muscle cells, called cardiomyocytes, to divide and proliferate within the hearts of living mice. This discovery could be further developed as a strategy to repair cardiac tissue damage caused by heart disease and heart attacks.

Regenerating the Heart

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US and affects over 24 million people around the world. When patients experience a heart attack, blood flow is restricted to the heart, and parts of the heart muscle are damaged or die due to the lack of oxygen. The heart is unable to regenerate new healthy heart muscle, and instead, cardiac fibroblasts generate fibrous scar tissue to heal the injury. This scar tissue impairs the heart’s ability to pump blood, causing it to work harder and putting patients at risk for future heart failure.

Deepak Srivastava, President of the Gladstone Institutes and a senior investigator there, has dedicated his life’s research to finding new ways to regenerate heart tissue. Previously, his team developed methods to reprogram mouse and human cardiac fibroblasts into beating cardiomyocytes in hopes of one day restoring heart function in patients. The team is advancing this research with the help of a CIRM Discovery Stage research grant, which will aid them in developing a gene therapy product that delivers reprogramming factors into scar tissue cells to regenerate new heart muscle.

In this new study, Srivastava took a slightly different approach and attempted to coax cardiomyocytes, rather than cardiac fibroblasts, to divide and regenerate the heart. During development, fetal cardiomyocytes rapidly divide to create heart tissue. This regenerative ability is lost in adult cardiomyocytes, which are unable to divide because they’ve already exited the cell cycle (a series of phases that a cell goes through that ultimately results in its division).

Deepak Srivastava (left) and first author Tamer Mohamed (right). Photo credits: Diana Rothery.

Unlocking proliferative potential

Srivastava had a hunch that genes specifically involved in the cell division could be used to jump-start an adult cardiomyocyte’s re-entry into the cell cycle. After some research, they identified four genes (referred to as 4F) involved in controlling cell division. When these genes were turned on in adult cardiomyocytes, the cells started to divide and create new heart tissue.

This 4F strategy worked in mouse and rat cardiomyocytes and also was successful in stimulating cell division in 15%-20% of human cardiomyocytes. When they injected 4F into the hearts of mice that had suffered heart attacks, they observed an improvement in their heart function after three months and a reduction in the size of the scar tissue compared to mice that did not receive the injection.

The team was able to further refine their method by replacing two of the four genes with chemical inhibitors that had similar functions. Throughout the process, the team did not observe the development of heart tumors caused by the 4F treatment. They attributed this fact to the short-term expression of 4F in the cardiomyocytes. However, Srivastava expressed caution towards using this method in a Gladstone news release:

“In human organs, the delivery of genes would have to be controlled carefully, since excessive or unwanted cell division could cause tumors.”

First stop heart, next stop …

This study suggests that it’s possible to regenerate our tissues and organs from within by triggering adult cells to re-enter the cell cycle. While more research is needed to ensure this method is safe and worthy of clinical development, it could lead to a regenerative treatment strategy for heart failure.

Srivastava will continue to unravel the secrets to the proliferative potential of cardiomyocytes but predicts that other labs will pursue similar methods to test the regenerative potential of adult cells in other tissues and organs.

“Heart cells were particularly challenging because when they exit the cell cycle after birth, their state is really locked down—which might explain why we don’t get heart tumors. Now that we know our method is successful with this difficult cell type, we think it could be used to unlock other cells’ potential to divide, including nerve cells, pancreatic cells, hair cells in the ear, and retinal cells.”

Related Links:

Stem Cell Stories that Caught Our Eye: New law to protect consumers; using skin to monitor blood sugar; and a win for the good guys

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment
Hernendez

State Senator Ed Hernandez

New law targets stem cell clinics that offer therapies not approved by the FDA

For some time now CIRM and others around California have been warning consumers about the risks involved in going to clinics that offer stem cell therapies that have not been tested in a clinical trial or approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in patients.

Now a new California law, authored by State Senator Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina) attempts to address that issue. It will require medical clinics whose stem cell treatments are not FDA approved, to post notices and provide handouts to patients warning them about the potential risk.

In a news release Sen. Hernandez said he hopes the new law, SB 512, will protect consumers from early-stage, unproven experimental therapies:

“There are currently over 100 medical offices in California providing non-FDA approved stem cell treatments. Patients spend thousands of dollars on these treatments, but are totally unaware of potential risks and dangerous side effects.”

Sen. Hernandez’s staffer Bao-Ngoc Nguyen crafted the bill, with help from CIRM Board Vice Chair Sen. Art Torres, Geoff Lomax and UC Davis researcher Paul Knoepfler, to ensure it targeted only clinics offering non-FDA approved therapies and not those offering FDA-sanctioned clinical trials.

For example the bill would not affect CIRM’s Alpha Stem Cell Clinic Network because all the therapies offered there have been given the green light by the FDA to work with patients.

Blood_Glucose_Testing 

Using your own skin as a blood glucose monitor

One of the many things that people with diabetes hate is the constant need to monitor their blood sugar level. Usually that involves a finger prick to get a drop of blood. It’s simple but not much fun. Attempts to develop non-invasive monitors have been tried but with limited success.

Now researchers at the University of Chicago have come up with another alternative, using the person’s own skin to measure their blood glucose level.

Xiaoyang Wu and his team accomplished this feat in mice by first creating new skin from stem cells. Then, using the gene-editing tool CRISPR, they added in a protein that sticks to sugar molecules and another protein that acts as a fluorescent marker. The hope was that the when the protein sticks to sugar in the blood it would change shape and emit fluorescence which could indicate if blood glucose levels were too high, too low, or just right.

The team then grafted the skin cells back onto the mouse. When those mice were left hungry for a while then given a big dose of sugar, the skin “sensors” reacted within 30 seconds.

The researchers say they are now exploring ways that their findings, published on the website bioRxiv, could be duplicated in people.

While they are doing that, we are supporting ViaCytes attempt to develop a device that doesn’t just monitor blood sugar levels but also delivers insulin when needed. You can read about our recent award to ViaCyte here.

Deepak

Dr. Deepak Srivastava

Stem Cell Champion, CIRM grantee, and all-round-nice guy named President of Gladstone Institutes

I don’t think it would shock anyone to know that there are a few prima donnas in the world of stem cell research. Happily, Dr. Deepak Srivastava is not one of them, which makes it such a delight to hear that he has been appointed as the next President of the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco.

Deepak is a gifted scientist – which is why we have funded his work – a terrific communicator and a really lovely fella; straight forward and down to earth.

In a news release announcing his appointment – his term starts January 1 next year – Deepak said he is honored to succeed the current President, Sandy Williams:

“I joined Gladstone in 2005 because of its unique ability to leverage diverse basic science approaches through teams of scientists focused on achieving scientific breakthroughs for mankind’s most devastating diseases. I look forward to continue shaping this innovative approach to overcome human disease.”

We wish him great success in his new role.

 

 

 

Hearts and brains are center stage at CIRM Patient Advocate event

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments

Describing the work of a government agency is not the most exciting of topics. Books on the subject would probably be found in the “Self-help for Insomniacs” section of a good bookstore (there are still some around). But at CIRM we are fortunate. When we talk about what we do, we don’t talk about the mechanics of our work, we talk about our mission: accelerating stem cell therapies to people with unmet medical needs.

Yesterday at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco we did just that, talking about the progress being made in stem cell research to an audience of friends, supporters and patient advocates. We had a lot to talk about, including the 35 clinical trials we have funded so far, and our goals and hopes for the future.

We were lucky to have Dr. Deepak Srivastava and Dr. Steve Finkbeiner from Gladstone join us to talk about their work. Some people are good scientists, some are good communicators. Deepak and Steve are great scientists and equally great communicators.

Deepak Srivastava highlighted ongoing stem cell research at the Gladstone
(Photo: Todd Dubnicoff/CIRM)

Deepak is the Director of the Roddenberry Stem Cell Center at Gladstone (and yes, it’s named after Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame) and an expert on heart disease. He talked about how advances in research have enabled us to turn heart scar tissue cells into new heart muscle cells, creating the potential to use a person’s own cells to help them recover from a heart attack.

“If you have a heart attack, your heart turns that muscle into scar tissue which affects the heart’s ability to pump blood around the body. We identified a combination of factors that support cells that are already in your heart and we have found a way of converting those scar cells into muscle. This could help repair the heart enough so you may not need a transplant, but you can lead a much more normal life.”

He said this research is now advancing to the point where they hope it could be ready for testing in people in the not too distant future and joked that his father, who has had a heart attack, volunteered to be the second person to try it. “Not the first but definitely the second.”

Steve, who is the Director of the Taube/Koret Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, specializes in problems in the brain; everything from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s to schizophrenia and ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

He talked about his uncle, who has end stage Parkinson’s disease, and how he sees first-hand how devastating this neurodegenerative disease is, and how that personal connection helps motivate him to work ever harder.

He talked about how so many therapies that look promising in mice fail when they are tested in people:

“A huge motivation for me has been to try and figure out a more reliable way to test these potential therapies and to move discoveries from the lab and into clinical trials in patients.”

Steve is using ordinary skin cells or tissue samples, taken from people with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and other neurological conditions, and using the iPSC technique developed by Shinya Yamanaka (who is a researcher at Gladstone and also Director of CIRA in Japan) turns them into the kinds of cells found in the brain. These cells then enable him to study how these different diseases affect the brain, and come up with ways that might stop their progress.

Steve Finkbeiner is using human stem cells to model brain diseases
(Photo: Todd Dubnicoff/CIRM)

He uses a robotic microscope – developed at Gladstone – that allows his team to study these cells and test different potential therapies 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This round-the-clock approach will hopefully help speed up his ability to find something that help patients.

The CIRM speakers – Dr. Maria Millan, our interim President and CEO – and Sen. Art Torres (ret.) the Vice Chair of our Board and a patient advocate for colorectal cancer – talked about the progress we are making in helping push stem cell research forward.

Dr. Millan focused on our clinical trial work and how our goal is to create a pipeline of promising projects from the work being done by researchers like Deepak and Steve, and move those out of the lab and into clinical trials in people as quickly as possible.

Sen. Art Torres (Ret.)
(Photo: Todd Dubnicoff/CIRM)

Sen. Torres focused on the role of the patient advocate at CIRM and how they help shape and influence everything we do, from the Board’s deciding what projects to support and fund, to our creating Clinical Advisory Panels which involve a patient advocate helping guide clinical trial teams.

The event is one of a series that we hold around the state every year, reporting back to our friends and supporters on the progress being made. We feel, as a state agency, that we owe it to the people of California to let them know how their money is being spent.

We are holding two more of these events in the near future, one at UC Davis in Sacramento on October 10th, and one at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on October 30th.

Treatments, cures and clinical trials: an in-person update on CIRM’s progress

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments

Patients and Patient Advocates are at the heart of everything we do at CIRM. That’s why we are holding three free public events in the next few months focused on updating you on the stem cell research we are funding, and our plans for the future.

Right now we have 33 projects that we have funded in clinical trials. Those range from heart disease and stroke, to cancer, diabetes, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), two different forms of vision loss, spinal cord injury and HIV/AIDS. We have also helped cure dozens of children battling deadly immune disorders. But as far as we are concerned we are only just getting started.

Over the course of the next few years, we have a goal of adding dozens more clinical trials to that list, and creating a pipeline of promising therapies for a wide range of diseases and disorders.

That’s why we are holding these free public events – something we try and do every year. We want to let you know what we are doing, what we are funding, how that research is progressing, and to get your thoughts on how we can improve, what else we can do to help meet the needs of the Patient Advocate community. Your voice is important in helping shape everything we do.

The first event is at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco on Wednesday, September 6th from noon till 1pm. The doors open at 11am for registration and a light lunch.

Gladstone Institutes

Here’s a link to an Eventbrite page that has all the information about the event, including how you can RSVP to let us know you are coming.

We are fortunate to be joined by two great scientists, and speakers – as well as being CIRM grantees-  from the Gladstone Institutes, Dr. Deepak Srivastava and Dr. Steve Finkbeiner.

Dr. Srivastava is working on regenerating heart muscle after it has been damaged. This research could not only help people recover from a heart attack, but the same principles might also enable us to regenerate other organs damaged by disease. Dr. Finkbeiner is a pioneer in diseases of the brain and has done ground breaking work in both Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease.

We have two other free public events coming up in October. The first is at UC Davis in Sacramento on October 10th (noon till 1pm) and the second at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles on October 30th (noon till 1pm). We will have more details on these events in the coming weeks.

We look forward to seeing you at one of these events and please feel free to share this information with anyone you think might be interested in attending.

Stem cell stories that caught our eye: skin grafts fight diabetes, reprogramming the immune system, and Asterias expands spinal cord injury trial sites

/ Karen Ring / Leave a comment

Here are the stem cell stories that caught our eye this week.

Skin grafts fight diabetes and obesity.

An interesting new gene therapy strategy for fighting type 1 diabetes and obesity surfaced this week. Scientists from the University of Chicago made genetically engineered skin grafts that secrete a peptide hormone called glucagon-liked peptide-1 (GLP-1). This peptide is released by cells in the intestine and can lower blood sugar levels by stimulating pancreatic islet cells to secrete insulin (a hormone that promotes the absorption of glucose from the blood).

The study, which was published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, used CRISPR gene editing technology to introduce a mutation to the GLP-1 gene in mouse and human skin stem cells. This mutation stabilized the GLP-1 peptide, allowing it to hang around in the blood for longer. The team matured these stem cells into skin grafts that secreted the GLP-1 into the bloodstream of mice when treated with a drug called doxycycline.

When fed a high-fat diet, mice with a skin graft (left), genetically altered to secrete GLP-1 in response to the antibiotic doxycycline, gained less weight than normal mice (right). (Image source: Wu Laboratory, the University of Chicago)

On a normal diet, mice that received the skin graft saw a rise in their insulin levels and a decrease in their blood glucose levels, proving that the gene therapy was working. On a high fat diet, mice with the skin graft became obese, but when they were treated with doxycycline, GLP-1 secreted from their grafts reduced the amount of weight gain. So not only does their engineered skin graft technology look like a promising new strategy to treat type 1 diabetes patients, it also could be used to control obesity. The beauty of the technology is in its simplicity.

An article in Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News that covered this research explained that Xiaoyang Wu, the senior author on the study, and his team “worked with skin because it is a large organ and easily accessible. The cells multiply quickly and are easily transplanted. And, transplanted cells can be removed, if needed. “Skin is such a beautiful system,” Wu says, noting that its features make it a perfect medium for testing gene therapies.”

Wu concluded that, “This kind of therapy could be potentially effective for many metabolic disorders.” According to GenBio, Wu’s team “is now testing the gene-therapy technique in combination with other medications.” They also hope that a similar strategy could be used to treat patients that can’t make certain proteins like in the blood clotting disorder hemophilia.

How to reprogram your immune system (Kevin McCormack)

When your immune system goes wrong it can cause all manner of problems, from type 1 diabetes to multiple sclerosis and cancer. That’s because an overactive immune system causes the body to attack its own tissues, while an underactive one leaves the body vulnerable to outside threats such as viruses. That’s why scientists have long sought ways to correct those immune dysfunctions.

Now researchers at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco think they have found a way to reprogram specific cells in the immune system and restore a sense of health and balance to the body. Their findings are published in the journal Nature.

The researchers identified a drug that targets effector T cells, which get our immune system to defend us against outside threats, and turns them into regulatory T cells, which control our immune system and stops it from attacking our own body.

Why would turning one kind of T cell into another be helpful? Well, in some autoimmune diseases, the effector T cells become overly active and attack healthy tissues and organs, damaging and even destroying them. By converting them to regulatory T cells you can prevent that happening.

In addition, some cancers can hijack regulatory T cells and suppress the immune system, allowing the disease to spread. By turning those cells into effector T cells, you can boost the immune system and give it the strength to fight back and, hopefully, kill the cancer.

In a news release, Gladstone Senior Investigator Sheng Ding, the lead scientists on the study, said their findings could have several applications:

“Our findings could have a significant impact on the treatment of autoimmune diseases, as well as on stem cell and immuno-oncology therapies.” 

Gladstone scientists Sheng Ding (right) and Tao Xu (left) discovered how to reprogram cells in our immune system. (Gladstone Institutes)

CIRM-funded spinal cord injury trial expands clinical sites

We have another update from CIRM’s clinical trial front. Asterias Biotherapeutics, which is testing a stem cell treatment for complete cervical (neck) spinal cord injury, is expanding its clinical sites for its CIRM-funded SCiStar Phase 1/2a trial. The company is currently treating patients at six sites in the US, and will be expanding to include two additional sites at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and the UC San Diego Medical Center, which is part of the UCSD Health CIRM Alpha Stem Cell Clinic.

In a company news release, Ed Wirth, Chief Medical Officer of Asterias said,

Ed Wirth

“We are excited about the clinical site openings at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and UC San Diego Health. These sites provide additional geographical reach and previous experience with spinal cord injury trials to our SCiStar study. We have recently reported completion of enrollment in four out of five cohorts in our SCiStar study so we hope these institutions will also participate in a future, larger study of AST-OPC1.”

The news release also gave a recap of the trial’s positive (but still preliminary) results this year and their plans for completing trial enrollment.

“In June 2017, Asterias reported 9 month data from the AIS-A 10 million cell cohort that showed improvements in arm, hand and finger function observed at 3-months and 6-months following administration of AST-OPC1 were confirmed and in some patients further increased at 9-months. The company intends to complete enrollment of the entire SCiStar study later this year, with multiple safety and efficacy readouts anticipated during the remainder of 2017 and 2018.”

Stem Cell Roundup: Battle of the Biotech Bands, “Cells I See” Art Contest and Teaching Baseball Fans the Power of Stem Cells

/ Karen Ring / Leave a comment

This Friday’s stem cell roundup is dedicated to the playful side of stem cell science. Scientists are often stereotyped as lab recluses who honorably forgo social lives in the quest to make game-changing discoveries and advance cutting-edge research. But as a former bench scientist, I can attest that scientists are normal people too. They might have a nerdy, slightly neurotic side around their field of research, but they know how to enjoy life and have fun. So here are a few stories that caught our eye this week about scientists having a good time with science.

Rockin’ researchers battle for glory (Kevin McCormack)

Did you know that Bruce Springsteen got his big break after winning the Biotech Battle of the Bands (BBOB)? Probably not, I just made that up. But just because Bruce didn’t hit it big because of BBOB doesn’t mean you can’t.

BBOB is a fun chance for you and your labmates, or research partners, to cast off your lab coats, pick up a guitar, form a band, show off your musical chops, play before a live audience and raise money for charity.  This is the fourth year the event is being held. It’s part of Biotech Week Boston, on Wednesday, September 27th at the Royale Nightclub, Boston.

Biotech Week is a celebration of science and, duh, biotech; bringing together what the event organizers call “the most inventive scientific minds and business leaders in Boston and around the world.” And they wouldn’t lie would they, after all, they’re scientists.

If you want to check out the competition here’s some video from a previous year – see if you can spot the man with the cowbell!

“Cells I See” Stem Cell Art Contest

It’s that time again! The “Cells I See” art contest hosted by Canada’s Centre for Commercialization for Regenerative Medicine (CCRM) and The Stem Cell Network is now open for business. This is a super fun event that celebrates the beauty of stem cells and biomaterials that support regenerative medicine.

Not only is “Cells I See” a great way for scientists to share their research with the public, it’s also a way for them to tap into their artistic, creative side. Last year’s ­contestants submitted breathtaking microscope images, paintings and graphic designs of stem cells in action. The titles for these art submissions were playful. “Nucleic Shower” “The Quest for Innervation” and “Flat, Fluorescent & Fabulous” were some of my favorite title entries.

There are two prizes for this contest. The grand prize of $750 will be awarded to the submission with the highest number of votes from scientists attending the Till and McCulloch Stem Cell Meeting in November. There is also a “People’s Choice” prize of $500 given to the contestant who has the most numbers of likes on the CCRM Facebook page.

The deadline for “Cell I See” submissions is September 8th so you have plenty of time to get your creative juices flowing!

Iris

The 2016 Grand Prize and People’s Choice Winner, Sabiha Hacibekiroglu, won for her photo titled “Iris”.

Scientists Teach Baseball Fans the Power of Stem Cells

San Francisco Giants fans who attended Tuesday’s ball game were in for a special treat – a science treat that is. Researchers from the Gladstone Institutes partnered with the SF Giants to raise awareness about the power of stem cells for advancing research and developing cures for various diseases.

Gladstone PhD student Jessica Butts explains the Stem Cell Plinko game to a Giants fan.

The Gladstone team had a snazzy stem cell booth at the Giant’s Community Clubhouse with fun science swag and educational stem cell activities for fans of all ages. One of the activities was a game called “Stem Cell Plinko” where you drop a ball representing a pluripotent stem cell down a plinko board. The path the ball travels represents how that stem cell differentiates or matures into adult cells like those in the heart.

Gladstone also debuted their new animated stem cell video, which explains how “stem cell research has opened up promising avenues for personalized and regenerative medicine.”

Finally, Gladstone scientists challenged fans to participate in a social media contest about their newfound stem cell knowledge cells on Twitter. The winner of the contest, a woman named Nicole, will get an exclusive, behind-the-scenes lab tour at the Gladstone and “see firsthand how Gladstone is using stem cells to overcome disease.”

The Gladstone “Power of Stem Cells” event is a great example of how scientists are trying to make research and science more accessible to the public. It not only benefits people by educating them about the current state of stem cell research, but also is a fun way for scientists to engage with the local community.

“Participating in the SF Giants game was very fun,” said Megan McDevitt, vice president of communications at the Gladstone Institutes. “Our booth experienced heavy traffic all evening, giving us a wonderful opportunity to engage with the San Francisco community about science and, more specifically, stem cell research. We were delighted to see how interested fans were to learn more on the topic.”

And as if all that wasn’t enough, the Giants won, something that hasn’t been happening very much this season.

Go Giants. Go Gladstone.

Gladstone scientist dropping stem cell knowledge to Giants fans.

Scientists make stem cell-derived nerve cells damaged in spinal cord injury

/ Karen Ring / Leave a comment

The human spinal cord is an information highway that relays movement-related instructions from the brain to the rest of the body and sensory information from the body back to the brain. What keeps this highway flowing is a long tube of nerve cells and support cells bundled together within the spine.

When the spinal cord is injured, the nerve cells are damaged and can die – cutting off the flow of information to and from the brain. As a result, patients experience partial or complete paralysis and loss of sensation depending on the extent of their injury.

Unlike lizards which can grow back lost tails, the spinal cord cannot robustly regenerate damaged nerve cells and recreate lost connections. Because of this, scientists are looking to stem cells for potential solutions that can rebuild injured spines.

Making spinal nerve cells from stem cells

Yesterday, scientists from the Gladstone Institutes reported that they used human pluripotent stem cells to create a type of nerve cell that’s damaged in spinal cord injury. Their findings offer a new potential stem cell-based strategy for restoring movement in patients with spinal cord injury. The study was led by Gladstone Senior Investigator Dr. Todd McDevitt, a CIRM Research Leadership awardee, and was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The type of nerve cell they generated is called a spinal interneuron. These are specialized nerve cells in the spinal cord that act as middlemen – transporting signals between sensory neurons that connect to the brain to the movement-related, or motor, neurons that connect to muscles. Different types of interneurons exist in the brain and spinal cord, but the Gladstone team specifically created V2a interneurons, which are important for controlling movement.

V2a interneurons extend long distances in the spinal cord. Injuries to the spine can damage these important cells, severing the connection between the brain and the body. In a Gladstone news release, Todd McDevitt explained why his lab is particularly interested in making these cells to treat spinal cord injury.

Todd McDevitt, Gladstone Institutes

“Interneurons can reroute after spinal cord injuries, which makes them a promising therapeutic target. Our goal is to rewire the impaired circuitry by replacing damaged interneurons to create new pathways for signal transmission around the site of the injury.”

 

Transplanting nerve cells into the spines of mice

After creating V2a interneurons from human stem cells using a cocktail of chemicals in the lab, the team tested whether these interneurons could be successfully transplanted into the spinal cords of normal mice. Not only did the interneurons survive, they also set up shop by making connections with other nerve cells in the spinal cord. The mice that received the transplanted cells didn’t show differences in their movement suggesting that the transplanted cells don’t cause abnormalities in motor function.

Co-author on the paper, Dylan McCreedy, described how the transplanted stem cell-derived cells behaved like developing V2a interneurons in the spine.

“We were very encouraged to see that the transplanted cells sprouted long distances in both directions—a key characteristic of V2a interneurons—and that they started to connect with the relevant host neurons.”

Todd McDevitt (right), Jessica Butts (center) and Dylan McCreedy (left) created a special type of neuron from human stem cells that could potentially repair spinal cord injuries. (Photo: Chris Goodfellow, Gladstone)

A new clinical strategy?

Looking forward, the Gladstone team plans to test whether these V2a interneurons can improve movement in mice with spinal cord injury. If results look promising in mice, this strategy of transplanting V2a interneurons could be translated into human clinic trials although much more time and research are needed to get there.

Trials testing stem cell-based treatments for spinal cord injury are already ongoing. Many of them involve transplanting progenitor cells that develop into the different types of cells in the spine, including nerve and support cells. These progenitor cells are also thought to secrete important growth factors that help regenerate damaged tissue in the spine.

CIRM is funding one such clinical trial sponsored by Asterias Biotherapeutics. The company is transplanting oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (which make nerve support cells called oligodendrocytes) into patients with severe spinal cord injuries in their neck. The trial has reported encouraging preliminary results in all six patients that received a dose of 10 million cells. You can read more about this trial here.

What the Gladstone study offers is a different stem cell-based strategy for treating spinal cord injury – one that produces a specific type of spinal nerve cell that can reestablish important connections in the spinal cord essential for movement.

For more on this study, watch the Gladstone’s video abstract “Discovery Offers New Hope to Repair Spinal Cord.”

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Telomere length matters: scientists find shorter telomeres may cause aging-related disease

/ Karen Ring / Leave a comment

Aging is inevitable no matter how much you exercise, sleep or eat healthy. There is no magic pill or supplement that can thwart growing older. However, preventing certain age-related diseases is a different story. Genetic mutations can raise the risk of acquiring age-related diseases like heart disease, diabetes, cancer and dementia. And scientists are on the hunt for treatments that target these mutations in hopes of preventing these diseases from happening.

Telomeres shown in white act as protective caps at the ends of chromosomes.

Another genetic component that can accelerate diseases of aging are telomeres. These are caps made up of repeat sequences of DNA that sit at the ends of chromosomes and prevent the loss of important genetic material housed within chromosomes. Healthy cells have long telomeres, and ascells divide these telomeres begin to shorten. If telomere shortening is left unchecked, cells become unhealthy and either stop growing or self-destruct.

Cells have machinery to regrow their telomeres, but in most cases, the machinery isn’t activated and over time, the resulting shortened telomeres can lead to problems like an impaired immune system and organ degeneration. Shortened telomeres are associated with age-related diseases, but the reasons why have remained elusive until recently.

Scientists from the Gladstone Institutes have found a clue to this telomere puzzle that they shared in a study published yesterday in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. This research was funded in part by a CIRM Discovery stage award.

In their study, the team found that mice with a mutation that causes a heart condition known as calcific aortic valve disease (CAVD) were more likely to get the disease if they had short telomeres. CAVD causes the heart valves and vessels to turn hard as rock due to a buildup of calcium. It’s the third leading cause of heart disease and the only effective treatment requires surgery to replace the calcified parts of the heart.

Old age and mutations in one of the copies of the NOTCH1 gene can cause CAVD in humans. However, attempts to model CAVD in mice using the same NOTCH1 mutation have failed to produce symptoms of the disease. The team at Gladstone knew that mice inherently have longer telomeres than humans and hypothesized that these longer telomeres could protect mice with the NOTCH1 mutation from getting CAVD.

They decided to study NOTCH1 mutant mice that had short telomeres and found that these mice had symptoms of CAVD including hardened arteries. Furthermore, mice that had the shortest telomeres had the most severe heart-related symptoms.

First author on the study Christina Theodoris, explained in a Gladstone news release how telomere length matters in animal models of age-related diseases:

“Our findings reveal a critical role for telomere length in a mouse model of age-dependent human disease. This model provides a unique opportunity to dissect the mechanisms by which telomeres affect age-dependent disease and also a system to test novel therapeutics for aortic valve disease.”

Deepak Srivastava and Christina Theodoris created mouse models of CAVD that may be used to test drug therapies for the disease. (Photo: Chris Goodfellow, Gladstone Institutes)

The team believes that there is a direct relationship between short telomeres and CAVD, likely through alterations in the activity of gene networks related to CAVD. They also propose that telomere length could influence how severe the symptoms of this disease manifest in humans.

This study is important to the field because it offers a new strategy to study age-related diseases in animal models. Senior author on the study, Dr. Deepak Srivastava, elaborated on this concept:

Deepak Srivastava, Gladstone Institutes

“Historically, we have had trouble modeling human diseases caused by mutation of just one copy of a gene in mice, which impedes research on complex conditions and limits our discovery of therapeutics. Progressive shortening of longer telomeres that are protective in mice not only reproduced the clinical disease caused by NOTCH1 mutation, it also recapitulated the spectrum of disease severity we see in humans.”

Going forward, the Gladstone team will use their new mouse model of CAVD to test drug candidates that have the potential to treat CAVD in humans. If you want to learn more about this study, watch this Gladstone video featuring an interview of Dr. Srivastava about this publication.