Functional blood vessels from hESCs durable for at least 151 days

A really pushing-the-limits paper published by the Scadden lab as a Brief Communication in Nature Biotechnology Advance Online, just like the De Coppi, Atala et al. paper on human amniotic stem cells in January. This time human embryonic stem (hES) cells were differentiated into endothelial cells using a scalable step-by-step two-dimensional method, avoiding the formation of three-dimensional (3D) embryoid bodies from the cells and the inefficient spontaneous differentiation. The selected culture cells were labeled with enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) to track their in vivo life after transplantation into immunodeficient (SCID) mice (see the green visualization on the picture). The differentiated cells were able to form functional blood vessels in vivo and “contributed to arborized blood vessels that integrated into the host circulatory system and served as blood conduits for 150 d”. Zack Z Wang, Patrick Au, Tong Chen, Ying Shao, Laurence M Daheron, Hao Bai, Melanie Arzigian, Dai Fukumura, Rakesh K Jain & David T Scadden: Endothelial cells derived from human embryonic stem cells form durable blood vessels in vivo

Significance: Scalability in tissue engineering,

80 year old Lokey’s $33 million donation for Stanford Stem Cell Labs

Such a Californian story: Lorry I. Lokey, the founder of Business Wire will give a minimum of $33 million to help build a home for Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. Lokey says: “The important thing to me is that stem cells might not only extend life, but also improve the quality of life, as so many people suffer in their later years,” said Lokey, who will turn 80 in March. “But I think stem cells will have applications across the entire life span.” Lokey’s contribution to the School of Medicine—its largest single gift to date from an individual—will launch construction of new stem cell laboratories on campus where scientists will probe the power of these elusive cells in treating conditions as diverse as cancer, stroke and diabetes. Lokey launched Business Wire in San Francisco in 1961 with $2,000 of his own money. It quickly grew to become a news industry powerhouse, now distributing an average of 17,000 corporate and academic press releases a month. “The biotech revolution has become so important to the quality of life,” he said. “To me, the biotech field is going to be very, very hot for the next generation.” Link

JoVE 2.0 makes science social and pop: video sharing, comments, interviews

You must definitely check the completely redesigned, upgraded JoVE website to see the enhanced present of online science! Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) is an online journal publishing visualized (video-based) biological research studies. It was launched in November, 2006 and now due to the hard work and entrepreneurial spirit of editor Moshe Pritsker, web developer Nikita Bernstein and others it became a mature adventure, that is sporadic with its advanced features within the current online scientific community. What are the main novelties? Well, they are mostly technical and partly content related. First, on the right the videos have a cool textual chapter menu, so you can jump instantly to the part you are interested most. (See the picture below) Second, related to the protocol video Studying aggression in Drosophila (fruit flies) there is an interview with Edward Kravitz. I find the interview option a huge step forward, if it will be regular here besides the protocol videos, that has the chance to make JoVE and life sciences really popular on the web. Interviews can serve almost as videoblogs.

Third, if you are logged in, you can comment the videos and start a discussion and this is a big opportunity for life scientists to share video protocols and insider tricks and to learn techniques and repeat experiments properly.

Add stem cells and eat the lab-grown meat!

In 2001 it was just a weird NASA trial, but in 2007 (pig) stem cell-grown meat substitutes minus hormones, antibiotics, and the threat of mad cow disease, plus omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins are within range. Researchers and engineers are fine-tuning the in vitro generation process of designer meats, to make it scalable and cheap. Link

Unlimited Life Extension Petition to U.S. Congress and President: a good address?

The Coalition to Extend Life launched today an online petition to U.S. Congress and President in order to make the technological possibility of Indefinite Life Extension a national priority and public policy goal of the United States. They ask the power people to create the 4 main conditions that will make it possible.

1. a National Institute for Life Extension be created with sufficient revenues to fund research in this area.
2. the Food and Drug Administration classify aging as a disease.
3. a National Commission be organized to study the social and economic impacts of this new reality.
4. a “Manhattan Project” to cure the terminal disease of aging.

What’s new here? Indefinite life extension could be addressed as an independent political issue with a bunch of supporters. If you are pro, sign the petition, if you are not, never mind but do not oppose – says the background assumption. Well, I am definitely pro, so at first I felt tempted to sign the petition, because I liked point 2 and 4 from a technological point of view. But I don’t think that at this point the address is right and it should be a mail to the U.S. Congress and President with this subject. If I were the sender of a letter with a similar content like that I would write the names of tech savvy power people, Silicon Valley big guns and venture capitalists in the address field and try to motivate them in an economical fashion. On the other hand I agree with Reason in that the right for indefinite life extension falls into the category of positive rights so it is not the best move to put it into the government’s hands. Even if this positive right can be derived from our strongest, universal, concrete human and negative right, the right for life.

To sum up: If you feel yourself tempted to sign, I encourage you to do that, although I am reluctant in this respect. The idea of this online petition can become a very useful PR tool for our very niche Issue, if a critical mass of people is reached.

My favourite signature and comment from the list: Amos Avon Cooper: “I’m almost 86 years old. I’m thankful to hear your message.”

Maker into bioDIY via demistifying stem cells

Mac Googlers at Apple Headquarters: from Mountain View to Cupertino

Read this nice and brand conscious weekend off story on Official Google Mac Blog. Scott Knaster, Mac Team Technical Writer at Google organized a trip for a “gang of new Mac fans at Google“ from Mountain View to Apple headquarters, Cupertino. At the Caffe Macs they were eating a Google-like terrific food, but not for free, when suddenly “we noticed a slight disturbance in the room, as if all the air had rushed to a single place, over by the salad bar. As you have probably guessed, it was Apple CEO Steve Jobs, grabbing some lunch with Jonathan Ive, Apple’s industrial design guru. As the two moved across the room, there was no great commotion — after all, this probably happens just about every day at Apple — but our Google group and many other folks stopped eating long enough to follow the two rock stars around the room for awhile.” Sounds like a sitting ovation.
Anyway, it would be good to know the ratio of Mac-Windows-Linux users at Google. Guess what? I think Sergey Brin is using a Mac.

 

Volunteers needed for amniotic stem cell transplantation onto ocular surfaces!

Would you like to have some human amniotic stem cells transplanted into your eye? Well, regenerative medicine wants you to participate in a pioneer study! If you are 18 – 88 year old, female and you have corneal epithelial defects and ulcers that have persisted for 4 weeks or longer but otherwise you are healthy, you can participate voluntarily in the Texas study Transplantation of Tissue Cultured Human Amniotic Epithelial Cells Onto Damaged Ocular Surfaces.
See additional inclusion and exclusion criteria. Link

Bone marrow derived adult stem cells: which way to go?

Circulating bone marrow derived adult stem cells may serve as a backup rescue system if the pool of endogenous stem cells is exhausted (see cartoon). BM derived adult stem cells are the best characterized adult stem cells in humans (reviewed in Vieyra et al, 2005). The hematopoietic stem cell fraction of the bone marrow are capable of repopulating the entire blood system from the single-cell level. In addition, several studies demonstrated that multipotent bone marrow derived stem cells (BMDCs) differentiated into neural lineages and expressed specific markers for astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, neural precursors in the spinal cord, or migrated into the brain and expressed neuron-specific antigens (Mezey et al., 2000, Science, Koda et al., 2005, Neuroreport) One population of bone marrow derived cells, the mesenchymal stem cells or multipotent mesenchymal stromal cells are able to support hematopoiesis, and can also differentiate along mesenchymal and nonmesenchymal lineages in vitro (Keating, 2006, Curr Opin Hematol, Horwitz et al., 2007, Biol Blood Marrow Transplant). The multipotency in case of these primitive progenitor cells is the ability to generate cartilage, bone, muscle, tendon, ligament, and fat (reviewed in Oreffo et al., 2005, Stem Cell Rev). The suggested mechanism covers a series of asymmetrical divisions through which the originally undifferentiated progenitors start to express a new genetic pattern and eventually take the shape of a differentiated, functional cell in another tissue. The concept that lineage specific adult stem cells can change their fate, is called transdifferentiation. Recently, stem cell based regeneration in the heart (reviewed in Srivastava-Ivey, 2006, Nature) by transdifferentiation has been challenged and it was indicated that bone marrow derived mesenchymal stem cells do not transdifferentiate into hepatocytes (Murry et al, 2004, Nature). Instead it was suggested for the myocardium at least, that paracrine factors secreted by the bone marrow cells, like thymosin beta4 could be cardioprotective or angiogenic. (Gnecchi et al, 2006, Bock-Marquette et al 2004, Nature) The other basic and proposed regenerative mechanism is cell fusion between the transplanted cells and the damaged tissue cells (Nygren et al., 2004, Nat Med, Horvath et al., 2006, Neurosci Lett).

Cord blood stem cell therapy without immune suppression?

The first scientific review of the rationale for the practical use of umbilical cord stem cells without the use of immune suppression was published in the Journal of Translational Medicine and it is freely available: “the authors propose that expanding the use of cord blood to non-preconditioned adult recipients for regenerative purposes would be a great step for the practical advancement of stem cell therapeutics. By overcoming allogeneic barriers in regenerative medicine, the fundamental limitations of autologous cell therapy may result in effective standardized “off-the-shelf” cellular products for regenerative therapeutics.” Source

The philosophical problems of life extension in post partitions

With this paragraph on blogging Merlin Mann of 43 Folders hit the nail on my head: “Remember that your blog is only incidentally a publishing system or a public website. At its heart, your blog represents the evolving expression of your most passionately held ideas. It’s a conversation you’re holding up with the world and with yourself — a place where you can watch your own thoughts take different shapes and occasionally surprise you with where they end up…”
Well, I started Pimm at May, 2006, mainly with excerpts from my philosophy MA thesis, called The philosophical problems of human biotechnology and regenerative medicine. This is in no way a system (I don’t believe in the utility of any philosophical system), or intended to be, but a series of problem centered arguments via thought experiments. Additionally, I don’t think and seriously doubt, that there is a One & Only philosophical viewpoint, position or ideology, which best fits the problems & prospects of indefinite life extension.
In the meantime as I got more and more immersed into stem cell research through my PhD years (what a Bildungsroman blog!), the profile of Pimm has changed in consonance with the applied strategy, which suggests the following: in order to make the idea of radical life extension acceptable, the scientific-technological basis of it must be disclosed, which is regenerative medicine in my opinion. It’s good to change the approaches here, one is a top-down, from philosophy (why?) to science (how?) and the other is the bottom-up from science to philosophy and ethics. And there is the constant problem and reality level of life extension in the middle with paths to the middle, bottom and top, i.e. the realities of the uprising biotechnology industry (when?). Here I collected the philosophical posts in one place:
What is (and is not) partial immortalization?
Why is partial immortalization theoretically and technologically possible?
The parameters of a partially immortalized individual
Why do we have the right to partially immortalize ourselves, if it is possible?
3 hypothetic cost stages of continuous regeneration treatment
Why it is not a Grenzsituation to participate in a continuous regeneration treatment?
Why is the moral problem of extending human lifespan is inevitable?
Are you immortalized? Never mind, you are still a moral person!
Moral, instrumental, human rights: framework for pimm philosophy
How to protect the right for pimm when the costs are extremely high?
Can partial immortalization be permissible to those who can buy it?

Google’s Larry Page at the AAAS meeting: entrepreneurship and unlocking in science

Larry Page, Google co-founder, gave a talk at the Annual Meeting of American Association of the Advancement of Science, on 16 February. You can also watch the lecture on video if you download it in ram format. Page has not quite finished his PhD on Computer Science in Stanford yet, so he is a rookie scientist in a way besides being a mature entrepreneur. Larry’s core claim was, that “Science has a really serious marketing problem and nobody pays attention to that since none of the marketers work for science. If all the growth in world is due to science and technology and no one pays attention to you, then you have a serious marketing problem.” That’s why, he highlighted, entrepreneurship is necessary for science, and “You need to have the right attitude about it, and you need to think that business and entrepreneurship are important parts of science.” When, at the age of 6, he read the autobiography of Tesla, he cried at the end because it basically is a failure, he couldn’t fund his research, and was struggling hard to commercialize that stuff. He decided, he doesn’t want to be like Tesla, he wants a real impact, and for that the scientist needs integration with business, engineering and other areas. So Larry doesn’t really separate science and engineering, and he is absolutely right. If we, scientists really want our scientific work out there, and would like people to understand it there should be some mix between the activities. In Larry’s case it was obvious, since according to him “there is no computer science, it is just computer engineering and computer engineering is something else.”
He highlighted the early history of Silicon Valley, when in 1939, David Packard and William Hewlett established their firm in Packard’s garage with an initial capital investment of $538.

On the other hand scientific thinking hugely benefits most jobs. So at Google they try to hire a lot of scientific and tech oriented people even in positions they wouldn’t normally be on.

Additionally, scientists are really great citizens in Larry’s opinion, and he wants to have people in power, who understands things. His example was Abdul Kalam, the president of India, a rocket scientist by profession, who also apparently knows much about how Indian languages are encoded for web-display. This idea reminds me a little bit of Platon’s argument on the philosopher kings of city-states in Book VII of The Republic. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee, that an excellent scientist, who is a very smart man by definition, will naturally become a good politician.

Public list of researchers behind the first approved embryonic stem cell grants in California

Little history: SAN FRANCISCO, February 16, 2007 – The governing board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) approved 72 grants totaling approximately $45 million over two years, to researchers at 20 academic and non-profit research centers throughout the state focused solely on human embryonic stem cell research.
So here is what the future of embryonic stem cells looks like: Stanford scholars were preferred the most by CIRM, in the first run 12 grants worth a combined $8 million were distributed to them. Well, I wouldn’t be surprised too much if the founders of the coming Google Incorporation of Regenerative Medicine in the biotechnology industry were from Stanford University also.
38 projects have been already listed and linked that were recommended for funding. But now from the press release pdf at the CIRM website we are finally informed about the names of the researchers who will carry on the projects. It is also an excellent career guide for young stem cell researchers, undergraduates, graduates, postdocs who are eager to work in California. Surprisingly there are scholars, who are completely new in stem cell research, but would like to put it in a multidisciplinary context. A good example is Gregory T. A. Kovacs electrical engineering professor from Stanford, who will develop cell-monitoring technologies that would provide a better understanding of cardiomyocyte differentiation from human embryonic stem cells (hESC), identify optimal stages of differentiation for cell-transplantation therapy, and perhaps facilitate directed in vitro differentiation strategies.
The list is public:

pplication#		Principal Investigator		Institution		Title		Amount
RS1-00161-1		Blelloch, Dr. Robert Hector		University of California, San Francisco		MicroRNA Regulation of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Self-Renewal and Differentiation		$631,831
RS1-00163-1		Bredesen, Dr. Dale Eric		Buck Institute for Age Research		Programmed Cell Death Pathways Activated in Embryonic Stem Cells		$734,202
RS1-00169-1		Cashman, Dr. John R.		Human BioMolecular Research Institute		Discovering Potent Molecules with Human ESCs to Treat Heart Disease		$714,654
RS1-00170-1		Chen, Dr. Bin		University of California, Santa Cruz		In vitro differentiation of hESCs into corticospinal motor neurons		$500,000
RS1-00171-1		Chen, Dr. Huei-Sheng Vincent		Burnham Institute for Medical Research		Development of Neuro-Coupled Human Embryonic Stem Cell-Derived Cardiac Pacemaker Cells.		$744,639
RS1-00172-1		Chen, Dr. Irvin S.Y.		University of California, Los Angeles		Genetic modification of the human genome to resist HIV-1 infection and/or disease progression		$642,652
RS1-00173-1		Chien, Professor Shu		University of California, San Diego		Combinatorial Platform for Optimizing Microenvironments to Control hESC Fate		$638,140

Where are the good stem cell labs in New York City?

I have the opportunity to travel to the United States in early March. As I’ll be in New York City for some days I’d like to visit several good stem cell labs, but I do not know where these labs are in the Big Apple and whom to contact? Unfortunately a short Google period did not help me a lot in this respect, I don’t know why. Would you be kind enough to help me and offer some? Human filters are the best, when you need strongly selected contextual information.

An argument supporting systemic regenerative medicine as a life extension tool

The incentive of this argument is a comment on a post over at fellow life extension blog Fight Aging! titled You Can’t Row the Whole Distance With Oars Made of Stem Cells.

1. Currently the biggest grants in life sciences are in regenerative medicine and stem cell biology.
2. The rate of progress is very fast (if not the fastest) in stem cell biology, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine comparing to the other branches of life sciences due to the growing number of researchers and grants in the field.
3. Early disruptor candidate stem cell therapies will make regenerative medicine economically and generally acceptable in society.
4. Systemic regenerative medicine is a coherent and inclusive engineering approach to eliminate all aging related problems indefinitely.
Definiton: Systemic regenerative medicine theoretically means the continuous, gradual and consecutive regeneration of every tissue and organ of the human body n times by combined regenerative medicine approaches, i.e. tissue engineering (in vitro grown organs and tissues implants or parts of them), systemic (via circulation) and locally targeted stem and progenitor cell transplantation, and endogenous stem cell niche activation with proper growth factor delivery aiming to maintain the physiological turnover and condition of the human body.

5. Taking the above premises into consideration it is very rational to assume that systemic regenerative medicine has a real chance to reach its goal in itself within the next decades.
/If the current rate of progress will remain stable and will be focused throughout these decades/

Disruptor candidate stem cell therapies

Stem cell therapies are likely to be disruptive treatments for the following medical sectors according to the Stem Cell Market Analysis Fact Sheet:

What is interesting in the following list: all the target tissues are of mesodermal origin.

• Total knee implants: Stem cell therapies that repair worn articular or meniscus cartilage will delay and potentially reduce the need for total knee replacement surgery

• Sports medicine: Stem cell therapies will extend the continuum of care for “weekend warriors.” It is highly likely that stem cell therapies will become the standard of care for torn meniscus or damaged articular cartilage

• Heart muscle repair following heart attacks

• Vascularization: To improve flow of blood by stimulating growth of new capillaries and vessels to the heart muscle

• Use of bone marrow transplants: stem cell therapies significantly reduce the effects of graft vs. host disease in patients with transplants.

• Treating the broad range of inflammation in the human body.

Early progenitor cell number as organ size determinant: pancreas

Developmental biology is the gold mine of stem cell biology. A pioneer, but elegant quantitative cell biology paper was published in Nature advance online publication on 28, January 2007 by U.S. researchers Stanger, Tanaka, Melton along developmental lines.
Based on the strict regulation of vertebrate development it was thought that extrinsic or systemic signals, growth factors and apoptotic factors have a decisive role in determining and restoring the final size and shape of an organ even after big cellular loss during embryogenesis and regeneration. Extrinsic signals regulate size in many vertebrate tissues, including blood, liver, muscle and the central nervous system by controlling cell proliferation or by modulating cell death. Not in mice’s pancreas! Two different methods—cell ablation and tissue complementation—were used to perturb precursor cell number during the earliest stages of pancreatic and liver development. Liver was chosen because of its close developmental relationship to the pancreas. Transgenic mice strains were used, in which pancreatic and hepatic progenitor cell number can be regulated, ablated, restored. To assess the capacity for compensatory growth, embryos were generated in which many, but not all, progenitor cells were ablated.

Setting aside the complicated (really) technological details it was showed, that “compensatory growth during pancreas development is either quite limited or does not occur at all. Thus, embryonic progenitor cells represent a critical and limiting determinant of pancreas size.

All American Stem Cell Companies = 1 YouTube = $1.65 billion

Did you ever think that the market value of all public stem cell companies is $1.655 billion, which is exactly (+5 million) the amount of money Google Acquired YouTube in a stock-for-stock transaction in October, 2006? This fact sheds new light on the maturity of the information technology and biotechnology markets. Let’s make hypes into proportion!

Stem Cell Therapy Market, US, 2005-2016: do you believe this?

This extrapolation is from the inforich and insider Stem Cell Market Analysis Fact Sheet of the 2nd Annual Stem Cell Summit, February 12-13 at San Diego, happening now.

Other important facts concerning the Stem Cell Therapy Market in the U.S.:

23andMe: the early bird of web based biotech startups

23andMe is a biotech focused web startup based in Mountain View, California (yes, the Googleplex neighbourhood) self-defined as “an early stage startup developing tools and producing content to help people make sense of their genetic information. Our goal is to take advantage of new genotyping technologies and help consumers explore their genetics, informed by cutting edge science. Genome deciphering technologies have reached affordable levels, allowing consumer access. For the individual, such information will provide personal insight into ancestry, genealogy and health. For society, the collection of genotypic and phenotypic information on a large scale will provide scientists with novel avenues for research.”
Briefly, they are concentrating on the enormous genomics data we already have to analyze them for customers. They are probably right, because in biotech, genomics could be the first field that has enough results, easy measurement methods (a little blood or biopsies), infotech background and enough commercial demand to make the business profitable within 1-2 years. Unfortunately, regenerative medicine and the stem cells frontier are not in this position yet. The next business step could be monetizing data from proteomics, transcriptomics. With the promising combination of computer science, biology and informatics 23andMe is an early bird of a biotech-based web domain, because there will be times when all your genes, RNAs, peptides (and in my opinion: cells and tissues) will be taken into account by your initiative to know your future prospects, and a web-based service is a proper choice for managing all of your biodata. Security problems will emerge, of course.

Grailsearch.org: aging information from a systems biology perspective

Check out Grailsearch.org, which was started at the end of January and is hosted by software engineer Jim Craig with a deep interest in aging and bioinformatics. Grailsearch is a “community web portal intended for use by biogerontologists, students of biogerontology, software engineers, biochemists or anyone else interested in working towards the search for systems solutions to the diseases of aging.” Jim was interviewed at Pimm in November, 2006, and said that: “I have adopted life extension as a hobby. I now study microbiology, proteomics and molecular design about 20 hours per week and plan to guide the next 20-40 years of my career through bioinformatics and eventually into de novo drug design with an emphasis on aging solutions.”
The initial set of blog posts on the site seems really exciting for the multi-disciplined systems biologists of the future. As my point of view on indefinite life extension technology is systemic regenerative medicine, I am strongly committed to all the computational based large scale model approaches and quantitative aspects of the human body on which I had an interesting correspondence with Jim last year.

With Grailsearch the geeky IT side of aging research and life extension has at last got a quality representative on the web!

Elements of the stem cell niche: 2 figures by Scadden

According to Austin Smith’s definiton of the stem cell niche in a glossary for stem cell biology in Nature Insights: Stem Cells, a niche is a “cellular microenvironment providing support and stimuli necessary to sustain self-renewal.” That the niche is much more than just a cellular microenvironment is clear from the following 2 figures from David Scadden’s elegant review on The stem-cell niche as an entity of action I’ve discussed in The birth of the stem cell niche concept: Schofield, 1978.

Figure 3: Inputs feeding back on stem-cell function in the niche. Elements of the local environment that participate in regulating the system of a stem cell in its tissue state are depicted. These include the constraints of the architectural space, physical engagement of the cell membrane with tethering molecules on neighbouring cells or surfaces, signalling interactions at the interface of stem cells and niche or descendent cells, paracrine and endocrine signals from local or distant sources, neural input and metabolic products of tissue activity.

Satellite cells, the primary stem cells of adult skeletal muscle

Engineered muscle regeneration has the potential to be one out of the first successful applications of regenerative medicine: muscle is not a too complicated issue with a few type of cells, and the human demand for regeneration is big concerning the muscle centered sports. I am working on an article concerning our lab’s experiments on skeletal muscle regeneration, so the next text is a little intro from an early draft on satellite cells.
Skeletal muscle has a specific multinucleated, syncytial structure in vertebrates. Satellite cells were identified through electron microscopic studies by their specific anatomical position situated between the basal lamina and cell membranes of mature myofibers, and their periferial position earned it the name ’satellite’ cell. Satellite cells are primarily in a quiscent state, dividing very infrequently under normal conditions in the adult. These cells are thought to be the primary stem cells of postnatal skeletal muscle {reviewed in Wagers and Conboy, and Dhawan and Rando} as the source of myogenic cells for growth and repair. Cells in the satellite cell compartment are heterogeneous by origin and function, no single marker exists, and intrinsic differences have been found in differentiation, proliferation and fusogenic capacity.
The classic model of satellite cell self-renewal and the importance of satellite cells in muscle maintenance and repair have been challenged during the past few years as bone marrow-derived cells, and various intramuscular populations were shown to be able to contribute myonuclei and occupy the satellite cell niche. Welcome to the muscle regeneration battlefield! I’ll talk about the bone-marrow challenge later…

Studies recommended for funding by California Stem Cell Rush dollars

The working future of embryonic stem cell biology and regenerative medicine is in the 38 projects listed and linked below. Or at least in some of them. These are the research projects that were recommended for funding available by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine after a thorough evaluation and all applications can be found in the Public List of CIRM. 47 more were recommended for funding if money is available. If you choose to scan through the public abstracts of the proposal (linked with the numbers) I also strongly recommend to read the WEAKNESSES part of the review. The order of the projects is descending from the highest scientific score (out of 100) to the lowest.

96 Generation of forebrain neurons from human embryonic stem cells RS1-00205-1

95 The APOBEC3 Gene Family as Guardians of Genome Stability in Human Embryonic Stem Cells RS1-00210-1

95 Generation of hESC lines, under defined conditions, modeling normal & diseased states from material stored at the Burnham shared embryo bank. RS1-00305-1

94 Gene regulatory mechanisms that control spinal neuron differentiation from hES cells. RS1-00288-1

93 Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Embryonic Stem Cells RS1-00432-1

Dying of old age: an unfounded myth? Rando paper, Box 2

I think you would be in a serious trouble if I ask you to explain the concrete death of an old, but otherwise healthy man in terms of the suspected biological processes of human ageing, like slowly accumulating mitochondrial and chromosomal mutations, oxidative stress, overall cell loss, intra- or extracelular junk molecules or whatever. In almost every definition of aging there is the actuarial, probabilistic and mechanism-blind term: “increased vulnerability to death” or “increased probability of dying” or something like that. But isn’t it useless and empty when we would like to explain the hows of ageing and dying? Now it is Thomas Rando’s turn for the second time in Pimm, author of a marvellous paper on stem cells and ageing. In the slightly philosophical, but definitely scientific Box 2, called “Dying of old age”, he explains (emphasis by me): “There is no compelling explanation for the cause of death in old but otherwise healthy humans, mice, worms or flies, or any other organism for that matter. The colloquial expression ‘dying of old age’ belies our knowledge of the biological basis of this event. Surely, the cessation of respiratory and circulatory functions results quickly in irreversible damage to vital organs; however, to insist that ageing of the heart or lungs is the cause of death only sidesteps the question. Examination of tissues of an old member of a species at the time of death will reveal stereotypical biological changes and perhaps even pathological changes that were only mildly symptomatic or even asymptomatic. Why, then, did this individual die? We can measure average and maximal lifespan in species, we can evaluate the effects of genetic, nutritional or pharmacological interventions that alter those indices, and we can correlate them with changes in tissue ageing. Yet no hypothesis has emerged that yields a useful definition of dying of old age in terms of cell and tissue biology.

Human mitochondrial DNA vs. nuclear DNA

In order to introduce you the circular human mitochondrial DNA, I compare it shortly to its more famous neighbour, the chromosomal nuclear DNA. (Thx for Google Spreadsheets.)

Accidental influentials meet life extension: a breakthrough idea for 2007

Most of us believe that the massive spreading of an idea through the channels of society, say, ‘big-scale life extension technology is possible and worth realizing’, depends on highly influential people’s production and characteristics. So hardcore life extension supporters tend to think if Aubrey de Grey or Ray Kurzweil will hold another 120-120 presentations in front of highly influential people this year and the next and so on and so forth… then this fact will guarantee that one day we wake up, and see that the majority of people support our former niche topic, eager to do something for it. Make no mistake, these guys are doing their best for life extension, but according to Duncan J. Watts and Peter Dodds network researchers, it is not enough for this idea to become mainstream. What we need is a critical mass of easily influenced people to make some real great progression in life extension support. And in that respect, the Web is a par excellence medium for all of us, when everyone with a bandwidth and a computer can do their best. In the light of the above I hope soon there will be a critical mass of easily influenced life extension bloggers, wikipedians, other content generators, and so “global cascades”(see below) for LE. The responsibility is ours.

Watts and Peter Dodds are publishing their work on Influentials, Networks and Public Opinion Formation in Journal of Consumer Research, but it will be in press only in December, 2007. Nevertheless you can read the text in html or download in pdf now. Their theory on the role of the so called Accidential influentials was listed as the No. 1 in the Harvard Business Review list of Breakthrough Ideas for 2007 and here are some enlightening excerpts out of it to make the above application clear /warning: the theory was originally applied and invented in a marketing context/:

Virgin’s Branson and stem cell banking

BBC News: “Virgin founder Richard Branson is set to launch a company which will let families bank and store stem cells from their child’s umbilical cord.” Question: Why just umbilical cord blood cells, why not amniotic fluid derived stem cells, or amniotic placental stem cells which have a far more wider regenerative potential than cord blood cells according to recent studies?

Update: Nature News info: “There is, however, an issue regarding how long the cells can be stored — so far, the record for a successful transplant is eleven years after initial freezing in liquid nitrogen. Colin McGuckin, Professor of Regenerative Medicine at Newcastle University in the UK, notes that this may be a barrier to long-term use. “This is completely uncharted territory — we can’t say whether samples will or will not be useful.”“