A team of UCSF researchers has for the first time used tiny molecules called microRNAs to help turn adult mouse cells back to their embryonic state. These reprogrammed cells are pluripotent, meaning that, like embryonic stem cells, they have the capacity to become any cell type in the body. The findings suggest that scientists will soon be able to replace retroviruses and even genes currently used...

Dalhousie Medical School cancer researcher Dr. Patrick Lee has proven that a common virus can infect and kill breast cancer stem cells. This breakthrough finding is published in the current issue of Molecular Therapy, the journal of the American Society of Gene Therapy. It is only within the past few years that the scientific community has understood the full significance of cancer stem cells and ...

Stem cells collected from human corneas restore transparency and don`t trigger a rejection response when injected into eyes that are scarred and hazy, according to experiments conducted in mice by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Their study will be published in the journal Stem Cells and appears online April 9. The findings suggest that cell-based therapies might be...

Research led by David Hess of the Robarts Research Institute at The University of Western Ontario has identified how to use selected stem cells from bone marrow to grow new blood vessels to treat diseases such as peripheral artery disease. It`s one of the severe complications often faced by people who`ve had diabetes for a long time. Reduced blood flow (ischemia) in their limbs can lead to restin...

Cells isolated from the eye that many scientists believed were retinal stem cells are, in fact, normal adult cells, investigators at St. Jude Children`s Research Hospital have found. If retinal stem cells could be obtained, they might provide the basis for treatments to restore sight to millions of people with blindness caused by retinal degeneration. Stem cells are immature cells capable of produ...

Scientists have discovered that growing mouse skin cells in spheres can lead to generation of cells with properties of cancer stem cells, even without genetic manipulation of stem cell genes. This unexpected finding, published in the April 3rd issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell, provides a potential pathway for generation of cancer stem cells from differentiated cells and may even eventually lead...

 Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found a way to endow human skin cells with embryonic stem cell-like properties without inserting potentially problematic new genes into their DNA. The team of researchers reports that it has created induced human pluripotent stem (iPS) cells completely free of viral vectors and exotic genes. By reprogramming skin cells to an embryonic st...

A newly identified molecular pathway that directs stem cells to produce glial cells yields insights into the neurobiology of Down`s syndrome and a number of central nervous system disorders characterized by too many glial cells, according to a recent study by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Their findings, to be published in the March 13 online edition of Cell Death and D...

More than five years ago, Dr. Lawrence C.B. Chan and colleagues in his Baylor College of Medicine laboratory cured mice with type 1 diabetes by using a gene to induce liver cells to make insulin. "Now we know how it works," said Chan, director of the federally designed Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center at BCM and chief of the division of endocrinology in BCM`s department of medi...

While interferon gamma sounds like an outer space weapon, it`s actually a hormone produced by our own bodies, and it holds great promise to repair bones affected by osteoporosis. In a new study published in the journal Stem Cells, researchers from the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre explain that tweaking a certain group of multipotent stem cells (called mesenchymal stem c...