Abstract Corneal wound healing is a complex process that occurs in response to various injuries and commonly used refractive surgery. It is a significant clinical problem, which may lead to serious complications due to either incomplete (epithelial) or excessive (stromal) healing. Epithelial stem cells clearly play a role in this process, whereas the contribution of...
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Expansion and Purification Are Critical for the Therapeutic Application of Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Myogenic Progenitors
Highlights Tested CDM muscle differentiation protocol generates a heterogeneous population The population does not contribute to myofiber formation in vivo Regulated PAX7 expression allows expansion of homogeneous myogenic progenitors CDM iPAX7 myogenic progenitors are endowed with in vivo regenerative potential Summary Recent reports have documented the differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells toward the skeletal myogenic lineage...
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Assessing the Safety of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells and Their Derivatives for Clinical Applications
Pluripotent stem cells may acquire genetic and epigenetic variants during culture following their derivation. At a conference organized by the International Stem Cell Initiative, and held at The Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine, October 2016, participants discussed how the appearance of such variants can be monitored and minimized and, crucially, how their significance for the...
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Using your own stem cells to help your body heal osteoarthritis
The truth came crashing home last year—a perfect storm of faulty genetics, the unrelenting march of age, and every athletic mishap I’ve ever stumbled through. After watching two kinds of arthritis stiffen my mother’s joints—leaving her with fingers pinched into what she called her “flippers” and staggering knee pain—I suppose it shouldn’t have been a...
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Mechanoresponsive stem cells to target cancer metastases through biophysical cues
A stiff punishment for tumors In patients, tumor cells do not grow in isolation, and their behavior is regulated not only by their own biology but also by interactions with their microenvironment. A key part of the microenvironment is the extracellular matrix, which typically has a greater stiffness in tumors than in surrounding normal tissues....
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Diffusion dynamics play an essential role in regulating stem cells and tissue development
Gradients of molecular signaling factors play an essential role in numerous events in embryonic development, from patterning limb and organ formation to the intricate shaping of the brain and neuroanatomical architecture. These gradients are a consequence of diffusion dynamics in tissues, and newly published work describes two vital aspects of these diffusion processes in tissue...
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Magic helps unmask how the brain works
Tricks and illusions, once the domain of magicians, are helping scientists unveil how the brain works. Here’s one you can try using a tabletop mirror. Place your left hand on the table in front of the mirror’s reflective surface and your right hand behind the mirror, about six inches away, where you can’t see it....
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Dementia: New substance improves brain function
The protein amyloid beta is believed to be the major cause of Alzheimer’s disease. Substances that reduce the production of amyloid beta, such as BACE inhibitors, are therefore promising candidates for new drug treatments. A team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has recently demonstrated that one such BACE inhibitor reduces the amount of...
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Trigeminal nerve stimulation shows promise for management of traumatic brain injury
Researchers at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research and the department of neurosurgery at the Hofstra Northwell School of Medicine, announced today that they have published a paper with research findings that could have implications for the treatment of many neurological conditions, including severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) traumatic brain injury (TBI) traumatic brain injury...
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A new insight into Parkinson’s disease protein
Abnormal clumps of certain proteins in the brain are a prominent feature of Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases, but the role those same proteins might play in the normal brain has been unknown. Now, new research by UC San Francisco neuroscientist Robert Edwards, MD, has uncovered the role of one such protein, known as alpha-synuclein, which has...