The news comes on the same day as a $650-million donation to expand psychiatric research

Broad population studies are shedding light on the genetic causes of mental disorders. Credit: Thinkstock

Researchers seeking to unpick the complex genetic basis of mental disorders such as schizophrenia have taken a huge step towards their goal. A paperpublished inNaturethis week ties 108genetic locations to schizophrenia most for the first time. The encouraging results come on the same day as a US$650-million donation to expand research into psychiatric conditions.

Philanthropist Ted Stanley gave the money to the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The institute describes the gift as the largest-ever donation for psychiatric research.

The assurance of a very long life of the center allows us to take on ambitious long-term projects and intellectual risks, says its director, Steven Hyman.

The center will use the money to fund genetic studies as well as investigations into the biological pathways involved in conditions such as schizophrenia, autism and bipolar disorder. The research effort will also seek better animal and cell models for mental disorders, and will investigate chemicals that might be developed into drugs.

TheNaturepaperwas produced by the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) a collaboration of more than 80 institutions, including the Broad Institute. Hundreds of researchers from the PGC pooled samples from more than 150,000 people, of whom 36,989 had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. This enormous sample size enabled them to spot 108 genetic locations, or loci, where the DNA sequence in people with schizophrenia tends to differ from the sequence in people without the disease. This paper is in some ways proof that genomics can succeed, Hyman says.

This is a pretty exciting moment in the history of this field, agrees Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved in the study.

Many of the variations seem to be common, so most people will have some of them but people with schizophrenia have more, and each contributes a small amount to the overall risk of developing the condition. This has made the variants difficult to spot in smaller samples, which is why the PGC collaboration is so crucial, Insel says: If you want to look for common variants, you have to work with a lot of friends.

The large sample size also allowed the researchers to develop an algorithm that would calculate a risk score for each variants contribution to schizophrenia. This could eventually be used to predict who might develop the disorder or to add weight to an uncertain diagnosis of schizophrenia, Insel says. The NIMH is likely to dedicate more money soon towards doing intensive genetic surveys and following the genetic leads that come out of them, he adds.

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More than 100 Genetic Locations Found to Be Linked to Schizophrenia

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Overweight Because of Genetics Truth or Myth
(http://chairacise.com) Determine if you #39;re overweight/ obese from your genetic makeup. This video discusses both and will give you the final answer about your genetics. Once you know the answer...

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I Join The 3rd Reich Thor Does Genetics
Click to tweet: http://ctt.ec/78Tcp My experience of dealing with exams Twitter: @ItsHarrisonWebb Google+ : http://tinyurl.com/pjlc9fn Vidfest: http://tinyurl.com/ouw33c2 I AM THE BLOOD...

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Let #39;s Play The Sims 3 - Perfect Genetics Challenge: Cowgirl and Horse Edition Episode 23
Come join me on my latest journey into the complex world of sims 3 genetics, as I try to get perfect foals and perfect children. Will I succeed in getting pe...

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The Sims 3 | Perfect Genetics Challenge Part 14: All About Ashley
In this part, i explain a few things and visit Ashleys potential prom date? Sorry guys, im such a failure 🙁 Backstory: "Once upon a time, the Mighty Player ...

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Rebecca Hester. Panel 3: Manipulated Microbes: Genetics, Genomics and Global Health Security
Annual Conference 2014: #39;Genetics, Genomics and Global Health -- Inequalities, Identities and Insecurities #39; 19th July 2014 University of Sussex Conference Centre Scientific advances in our...

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Quantitative Genetics - How to find number of genes controlling the trait
QUANTITATIVE TRAITS Most phenotypic traits in plants and animals are affected by many genes (size, weight, shape, lifespan, physiological traits, fecundity). Often, it is not feasible to determine...

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Perfect Genetics/Midnight Sun Challenge (Part 5) The End Of Our Adventures in France
Melody explores France a little more before she has to go back home. We reach the end of our adventures and return home. Perfect Genetics Challenge: http://modthesims.info/t/454886 Midnight...

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Let #39;s Play The Sims 3 - Perfect Genetics Challenge: Cowgirl and Horse Edition Episode 26
Come join me on my latest journey into the complex world of sims 3 genetics, as I try to get perfect foals and perfect children. Will I succeed in getting perfect genetics in both? Can I keep...

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* Rutherford company making global push

Cancer Genetics Inc., a Rutherford-based DNA diagnostics company that focuses on developing genomic-based oncology tests and services, said Monday it officially agreed to buy Gentris Corp., a private medical services company with locations in the United States and China.

Last month, CGI released the details of the acquisition, which was not yet made official. CGI bought Gentris for about $4.75 million: $3.25 million in cash and $1.5 million in CGI stock, plus additional performance-based earnouts of up to $1.5 million. The transaction was treated as an asset purchase.

Gentris' headquarters are in Raleigh, N.C., and it has a facility in Shanghai.

According to a statement in the release made by Cancer Genetics CEO Panna Sharma on Monday, this deal "will serve as a strong foundation for the expansion of our programs into the clinical and hospital setting globally." He added, "The fact that large biopharma companies are continuing to invest heavily in China and that cancer is now the single largest cause of death in China, makes it important that CGI expand its operations and capabilities in this market."

Gentris was founded in 2001 and provides pharmacogenomic testing, which studies an individual's genetics in drug response, among other services.

CGI expects the deal to add about $5 million to $6 million to its annual sales, according to a news release detailing the acquisition. The company will also increase its contract backlog to over $18 million.

This deal will help CGI continue expanding its global reach. In May, the company purchased BioServe Biotechnologies Pvt. Ltd., a medical services company based in Hyderabad, India, for about $1.9 million, primarily in CGI stock and other deferred consideration. BioServe provides its clients with genomic services, including next-generation genotyping and DNA synthesis.

With the acquisitions of Gentris and BioServe, CGI will have about 60,000 square feet of lab space. CGI went public in April 2013.

Email: anzidei@northjersey.com

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Genetics plays more of a role in the development of autism than environmental causes, according to new research published Sunday in Nature Genetics.

The study found that 52% of autism risk comes from common genes, while only 2.6% are attributed to spontaneous mutations caused by, among other things, environmental factors.

These genetic variations are common enough that most people are likely to have some, said Joseph Buxbaum, a researcher at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and one of the lead authors on the study. Each one has a tiny effect on autism risk, and many hundreds or thousands together make a significant risk.

Using Swedens health registry, the researchers compared 3,000 people with autism to 3,000 people without autism to determine the degrees that common and rare genes, as well as spontaneous mutations, contribute to autism risk. The study authors also compared the studys results with a parallel study of 1.6 million Swedish families that identified specific genetic risk factors.

Buxbaum says the presence of these common genes can only determine the risk of autism, not whether or not the condition will develop. And even though spontaneous mutations only account for a small percentage of autism risk, their effect is significant.

Chris Gunter, an autism researcher at the Marcus Autism Center and professor at the Emory University School of Medicine, says the findings of this study are similar to those reported in other studies.

There is no one gene for autism, Gunter said. Instead there are many different genetic variations which each contribute a little bit to the risk of developing the group of symptoms we diagnose as autism.

He added that we still dont know exactly how much these different factors contribute to the development of autism.

Once scientists accumulate more data on the autism population, Buxbaum says this new research could help develop a risk score such as the one that exists for heart attacks that would help patients determine the likelihood of family members developing autism.

The autism field has changed dramatically, Buxbaum said. We now have immense power to find both common and rare and spontaneous mutations in autism. Thats really the exciting part.

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Genetics play a bigger role than environmental causes for autism

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The First Minister has given his support to the Teles campaign for bone marrow donors.

Alex Salmond urged people to consider joining the national bone marrow registers after he heard about Menzieshill baby Faith Cushnies cancer battle.

Mr Salmond said: Faiths story highlights the need for more bone marrow donors, and I commend the Evening Telegraph for their excellent campaign.

It is vital that those willing to donate their blood stem cells or bone marrow sign up to the Anthony Nolan Trust and British Bone Marrow Registers, to help people who desperately need lifesaving transplants.

I would encourage everyone eligible to consider saving lives by joining the register.

More than 180 people from Tayside have registered to be donors with the bone marrow and stem cell charity Anthony Nolan since the Tele published Faiths story on Tuesday.

The nine-month-old, needed a bone marrow donation to beat leukaemia, but after her donor backed out she relapsed before a replacement could be found.

Doctors have told Faiths devastated parents there is now nothing they can do for her.

Every year around 1,800 people in the UK need a bone marrow or stem cell transplant to treat cancers such as leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma and blood disorders like sickle cell disease.

Bone marrow, the spongy tissue found inside some bones, contains stem cells that produce blood cells to carry oxygen around the body, fight infection and stop bleeding.

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Alex Salmond says Yes to the Teles bone marrow campaign

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Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) July 22, 2014

MetroMD, one of the leading names in regenerative medicines in all of California and one of the greatest proponents of holistic health services, now brings a reason to rejoice for individuals long suffering from debilitating arthritis. As per a report published on March 6 2013, by The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery on The US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health (Ref: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3748969/), on an average, around 500,000 revision of knee replacement surgeries were recorded in the US - with the prime reason being osteoarthritis in majority of these cases. And If Mr. Devin Stone, MetroMDs Operations Director is to be believed, the cumulative cost of the treatment is estimated to be around $50 billion every year.

The cost covers hospitals bills, doctors visits, medicine, etc and makes arthritic treatment, which often requires a repeat procedure, a hugely burdensome endeavor. But the fact is, even after spending so much of money, one is not sure about getting fully relieved from the agony that arthritis brings to ones life. Arthritis appears in many forms and the expresses itself as joint pain, stiffness and limited body movement in a patient, says Dr Alex Martin, MD, MetroMDs Director of Medicines. MetroMD, ensures that patients can put aside all these concerns and enjoy complete healing that only an advanced Stem cell therapy for arthritis can promise, says Dr. Martin highlighting the fact regarding how pocket-friendly the treatment is. One can regain a healthy knee, while retaining the health of his/her money bag now with MetroMDs stem cell therapy.

How does MetroMDs Stem cell therapy Work?

MetroMDs stem cell treatment process includes extraction of healthy bone marrow out of the patients body by experts and placing it in a centrifuge. After segregating various elements of blood, the stem cell is isolated and placed with cellular growth promoters (found in platelets). All of these are then inserted into the part of the body, ensuring a quicker tissue-based healing.

Mr. Devin Stone exuded confidence in mentioning that MetroMDs stem cell therapies come as a great alternative to invasive surgeries - making way for easier and quicker knee replacements and arthritic treatment.

Is the stem cell therapy safe?

Dr. Alex Martin says, If you are suffering from chronic joint paint due to arthritis, surgery is not anymore the only answer. Stem Cell Therapy can provide an amazing alternative, where your own cells are used to promote healing inside your body. Medicine has advanced significantly in the last 15 years and persistence with the techniques that were pioneered over two decades ago is illogical- and newer and less invasive procedures are the future of medicine.

Backed by the fact that stem cell treatment is a minimally invasive procedure requiring little or no hospitalization, Dr Martins and MetroMDs stance towards propagating stem cell therapy looks only logical. The procedure is legal and the therapy rendered by MetroMD is in compliance with CFR 21 part 1271 standards. Being a non surgical process, evidently, its the safest and totally side-effect free process.

Dr. Martin welcomes the residents of LA suffering from debilitating arthritic condition to consult an expert at its branches spread across in several parts of Los Angeles - and enjoy an improved quality of life.

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This 2013 file photo provided by Cardiff University shows Dr. Michael O'Donovan, deputy director of the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics at Cardiff University School of Medicine in Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom. (AP Photo/Cardiff University School of Medicine)

Scientists have linked more than 100 spots in our DNA to the risk of developing schizophrenia, casting light on the mystery of what makes the disease tick.

Such work could eventually point to new treatments, although they are many years away. Already, the new results provide the first hard genetic evidence to bolster a theory connecting the immune system to the disease.

More than 100 researchers from around the world collaborated in the biggest-ever genomic mapping of schizophrenia, for which scientists had previously uncovered only about a couple of dozen risk-related genes.

The study included the genetic codes of more than 150,000 people - nearly 37,000 of them diagnosed with the disease. Researchers found 108 genetic markers for risk of getting the disease, 83 of them not previously reported. And scientists say there are still likely more to be found.

"It's a genetic revelation; schizophrenia has been a mystery," said study co-author Steve McCarroll, director of genetics for the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. "Results like this give you things to work on. It takes it out of the zone of guesses about which genes are relevant."

The results were released Monday by the journal Nature. It takes large studies to ferret out genes related to schizophrenia risk because each gene generally has only a very weak effect.

Schizophrenia is a debilitating mental disorder that makes it hard to tell the difference between what is real and not real, and affects about one out of every 100 people. Studies estimate that it costs $60 billion in the U.S. each year. Scientists have long known that genes play a part, and this work further confirms that.

The results are a "big step" toward finding drug therapies, said study lead author Dr. Michael O'Donovan, deputy director of the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics at Cardiff University School of Medicine in Wales. While 108 genetic markers are a lot, the study authors say they tend to implicate a narrower group of biological functions, giving some but not too many hints for scientists to pursue.

"It's a map or maze. It's telling you were to start, it's not telling you where to end," O'Donovan said.

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Scientists find genetic ties to schizophrenia

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Hello Doctor Nandani Gokulchandran On Stem Cell Therapy Treatment 20th July 2014

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The appeal process
Paul explains what you can do if you have been denied access to the CSIL program.

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Brian Wrapping Up #RegMedClass Week 2014 - Mayo Clinic
Brian Rodysill, medical student at Mayo Clinic Medical School provides us with a summary of the week of "The Regenerative Medicine and Surgery Selective" (#R...

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Melbourne: In a discovery that raises hope for a cure for AIDS, two Australian men have been found to be HIV-free after receiving stem cells to treat cancer. The two patients' virus levels became undetectable after bone-marrow therapy with stem cells.

They are still on antiretroviral therapy (ART) "as a precaution", but those drugs alone could not be responsible for bringing the virus to such low levels, said David Cooper, director of the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, who led the discovery.

Cooper began searching for patients who had been purged of the HIV virus after attending a presentation by a United States team last year at a conference of the International AIDS Society in Kuala Lumpur.

At that meeting, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, reported that two patients who had received stem-cell transplants were virus-free.

Cooper and his collaborators scanned the archives of St Vincent's hospital in Sydney, one of the largest bone-marrow centres in Australia.

"We went back and looked whether we had transplanted [on] any HIV-positive patients, and found these two," said Cooper. The first patient had received a bone-marrow transplant for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2011.

His replacement stem cells came from a donor who carried one copy of a gene thought to afford protection against the virus. The other had been treated for leukaemia in 2012.

Because of the risk of relapse, Cooper's team will not claim that their patients are cured, 'nature.com' reported. However, Cooper said the results show that "there is something about bone-marrow transplantation in people with HIV that has an anti-HIV reservoir effect, such that the reservoirs go down to very low levels. And if we can understand what that is and how that happens, it will really accelerate the field of cure search."

Stem-cell transplant in itself cannot be used as a routine HIV treatment, because of the high mortality (10 per cent) associated with the procedure, researchers said.

Earlier this month, the search for AIDS cure suffered a major setback when a child in the US, who was thought to have been cured of HIV after intensive drug therapy, was found with detectable levels of the virus.

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Cancer Treatment Clears Two Australian Men of HIV

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Leukemia patient Mai Duong is in desperate need of a bone marrow transplant -- something doctors say the Montreal resident requires within a matter of weeks.

While finding a well-matched stem cell donor is already a difficult task, the 34-year-old mother of one faces an added challenge: shes Vietnamese.

Duong was first diagnosed with acute leukemia in 2013, when she was 15 weeks pregnant with her second child. She was forced to terminate the pregnancy as she underwent seven months of chemotherapy, putting her cancer into remission for seven months.

But it returned in May, and doctors gave her two months to find a stem cell match.

"The only option for me to get cured is with the generosity of people," she says.

Duongs case is raising the alarm about a need for stem cell donors among Canada's minority groups, as those in need of transplants are more likely to find a donor from the same ethnic background.

Canadian Blood Services says less than 25 per cent of individuals in need of a stem cell transplant will be able to find a match within their own families and will have to turn to the public inthe hopes of finding a suitable donor.

But ethnic minorities are under-represented on donor lists in North America.

Less than one per cent of registered stem cell donors in Quebec are of South Asian descent, according to Hema-Quebec, the provinces blood services agency. The statistics are similar across Canada and in the international donor database.

"There is a cultural effect and religious effect," spokesperson Susie Joron told CTV News. "The other issue is that the biggest registries are in America and Germany, which has a big Caucasian population."

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Montreal woman with leukemia desperately seeks Vietnamese stem cell donors

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VANCOUVER Mai Duong, 34, only has six weeksleft to get a life-saving stem cell or bone marrow transplant and shes pleading with the Lower Mainlands Asian population tosave her.

The mother of one was born and raised in Montreal. Shes had good health for most of her life, until she was diagnosed with leukemia in January 2013, while pregnant with her second child. Doctors told her she had to terminate the pregnancy she was at 15 weeks and start chemotherapy immediately.

Duongwent into remission, but ten months later the cancer was back. And this time it was more aggressive and chemotherapy wouldnt work, she was told. Instead, she needed stem cells or a bone marrow transplant.

Even though Im on the international registry list for donors, I did not have a match for the bone marrow. I was devastated when they told me that, she toldGlobal News.

It turns out the problem of finding a match, and a perfect one at that, is more common among those of Asian descent. In 2012, 2-year-old Jeremy Kong of San Francisco was diagnosed with leukemia and couldnt find a match until he went public. After doing so, he found a nine out of tenbone marrow donor match and underwent a transplant, but died a year later. Experts say Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino and other South Asian populations are behind Caucasians when it comes to donating blood and organs.

Were severely underrepresented in the international list. So its not even a local or a national problem; its a global problem, said Duong.

Duong is turning to Vancouver because of its large Asian population, and urging people to get tested. She needs a donor of Vietnamese or Filipino descent for a perfect match, and she needs to find them within six weeks or its unlikely shell survive.

For more information on how you can help Duong, visit her Facebook pageor websiteand get tested at OneMatch.ca.

With files from Darlene Heidemann.

Shaw Media, 2014

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Montreal woman pleading with B.C. residents to save her life

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Patients's virus levels became undetectable after a bone-marrow therapy with stem cells

Scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of a lymphocyte with HIV cluster. Credit: National Cancer Institute via Wikimedia Commons

Scientists have uncovered two new cases of HIV patients in whom the virus has become undetectable.

The two patients, both Australian men, became apparently HIV-free after receiving stem cells to treat cancer. They are still on antiretroviral therapy (ART) as a precaution, but those drugs alone could not be responsible for bringing the virus to such low levels, says David Cooper, director of the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, who led the discovery. A year ago, a different group of researchers had reported cases with a similar outcome.

Cooper presented details of the cases today at a press briefing in Melbourne, Australia, where delegates are convening for next week's 20th International AIDS Conference. The announcement came just a day after the news that at least six people heading to the conference died when aMalaysia Airlines flight was shot down in Ukraine.

Cooper began searching for patients who had been purged of the HIV virus after attending a presentation by a US team last year at a conference of the International AIDS Society in Kuala Lumpur. At that meeting, researchers from Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, reported that two patients who had received stem-cell transplants were virus-free.

Cooper and his collaborators scanned the archives of St Vincents hospital in Sydney, one of the largest bone-marrow centres in Australia. We went back and looked whether we had transplanted [on] any HIV-positive patients, and found these two, says Cooper.

The first patient had received a bone-marrow transplant for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2011. His replacement stem cells came from a donor who carried one copy of a gene thought to afford protection against the virus. The other had been treated for leukaemia in 2012.

Unfortunately, several months after the 'Boston' patients stopped taking ART,the virus returned. An infant born with HIV in Mississippi who received antiretroviral therapy soon after birth, then stopped it for more than three years,was thought to have been cured, buthas had the virus rebound, too.

Natural resistance At the moment, there is only one person in the world who is still considered cured of HIV:Timothy Ray Brown, the 'Berlin patient', who received a bone-marrow transplant and has had no signs of the virus in his blood for six years without ART. The bone marrow received by the Berlin patient came from a donor who happened to have a natural genetic resistance to his strain of HIV.

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HIV Cleared in Two Patients via Cancer Treatment

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Leukemia patient Mai Duong is in desperate need of a bone marrow transplant -- something doctors say the Montreal resident requires within a matter of weeks.

While finding a well-matched stem cell donor is already a difficult task, the 34-year-old mother of one faces an added challenge: shes Vietnamese.

Duong was first diagnosed with acute leukemia in 2013, when she was 15 weeks pregnant with her second child. She was forced to terminate the pregnancy as she underwent seven months of chemotherapy, putting her cancer into remission for seven months.

But it returned in May, and doctors gave her two months to find a stem cell match.

"The only option for me to get cured is with the generosity of people," she says.

Duongs case is raising the alarm about a need for stem cell donors among Canada's minority groups, as those in need of transplants are more likely to find a donor from the same ethnic background.

Canadian Blood Services says less than 25 per cent of individuals in need of a stem cell transplant will be able to find a match within their own families and will have to turn to the public inthe hopes of finding a suitable donor.

But ethnic minorities are under-represented on donor lists in North America.

Less than one per cent of registered stem cell donors in Quebec are of South Asian descent, according to Hema-Quebec, the provinces blood services agency. The statistics are similar across Canada and in the international donor database.

"There is a cultural effect and religious effect," spokesperson Susie Joron told CTV News. "The other issue is that the biggest registries are in America and Germany, which has a big Caucasian population."

More:
Montreal woman desperately seeks Vietnamese stem cell donors

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July 21, 2014

Michigan State University

Not unlike looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack, a team of Michigan State University researchers have found a gene that could be key to the development of stem cells cells that can potentially save millions of lives by morphing into practically any cell in the body.

The gene, known as ASF1A, was not discovered by the team. However, it is at least one of the genes responsible for the mechanism of cellular reprogramming, a phenomenon that can turn one cell type into another, which is key to the making of stem cells.

In a paper published in the journal Science, the researchers describe how they analyzed more than 5,000 genes from a human egg, or oocyte, before determining that the ASF1A, along with another gene known as OCT4 and a helper soluble molecule, were the ones responsible for the reprogramming.

This has the potential to be a major breakthrough in the way we look at how stem cells are developed, said Elena Gonzalez-Munoz, a former MSU post-doctoral researcher and first author of the paper. Researchers are just now figuring out how adult somatic cells such as skin cells can be turned into embryonic stem cells. Hopefully this will be the way to understand more about how that mechanism works.

In 2006, an MSU team identified the thousands of genes that reside in the oocyte. It was from those, they concluded, that they could identify the genes responsible for cellular reprogramming.

In 2007, a team of Japanese researchers found that by introducing four other genes into cells, stem cells could be created without the use of a human egg. These cells are called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs.

This is important because the iPSCs are derived directly from adult tissue and can be a perfect genetic match for a patient, said Jose Cibelli, an MSU professor of animal science and a member of the team.

The researchers say that the genes ASF1A and OCT4 work in tandem with a ligand, a hormone-like substance that also is produced in the oocyte called GDF9, to facilitate the reprogramming process.

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Researchers Find Gene That Could Make It Easier To Develop Life-saving Stem Cells

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ViaCyte, a privately held regenerative medicine company developing a cell replacement therapy for the treatment of diabetes, has filed an Investigational New Drug application with the United States Food and Drug Administration, seeking to start a Phase 1/2 clinical trial in patients with type 1 diabetes, it was reported on Friday.

The trial will assess the safety and efficacy of ViaCyte's VC-01 product candidate, a stem cell-derived, encapsulated cell replacement therapy. The company has also submitted a Medical Device Master File to the United States Food and Drug Administration in support of the Encaptra drug delivery system, the device component of the VC-01 product candidate. The company's VC-01 product candidate includes pancreatic progenitor cells, called PEC-01 cells, which are derived from a proprietary human embryonic stem cell line.

Paul Laikind, Ph.D., president and chief executive officer of ViaCyte, said, 'The filing of this IND represents the culmination of many years of research and development by a dedicated team focused on developing a cell replacement therapy for patients with type 1 diabetes and advancing our VC-01 product candidate to human clinical trials. The ViaCyte team has been assisted and supported by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) a leading organisation focused on advancing the field of stem cell-based technologies, and JDRF, the leading advocacy organisation for patients with type 1 diabetes.'

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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

18-Jul-2014

Contact: Meng Zhao eic@nrren.org 86-138-049-98773 Neural Regeneration Research

Adipose-derived stem cells-transdifferentiated motoneurons after transplantation can integrate in the host cord. However, cell survival has been restricted by a lack of ideal environment for nerve cell growth. Taki Tiraihi, Shefa Neuroscience Research Center at Khatam Al-Anbia Hospital, Iran developed rat models of spinal cord injury (SCI) and injected adipose-derived stem cells-transdifferentiated motoneurons into the epicenter, rostral and caudal regions of the impact site and simultaneously transplanted glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF)-gelfoam complex into the myelin sheath. Motoneurons-like cell transplantation combined with GDNF delivery reduced cavity formations and increased cell density in the transplantation site. The combined therapy exhibited superior promoting effects on recovery of motor function to transplantation of GDNF, adipose-derived stem cells or motoneurons alone. These findings suggest that motoneuron-like cell transplantation combined with GDNF delivery holds a great promise for repair of spinal cord injury. Related results were published in Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 10, 2014).

###

Article: "Intraspinal transplantation of motoneuron-like cell combined with delivery of polymer-based glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor for repair of spinal cord contusion injury" by Alireza Abdanipour, Taki Tiraihi, Taher Taheri (Shefa Neuroscience Research Center at Khatam Al-Anbia Hospital, Tehran, Iran) Abdanipour A, Tiraihi T, Taheri T. Intraspinal transplantation of motoneuron-like cell combined with delivery of polymer-based glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor for repair of spinal cord contusion injury. Neural Regen Res. 2014;9(10):1003-1013.

Contact: Meng Zhao eic@nrren.org 86-138-049-98773 Neural Regeneration Research http://www.nrronline.org/

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

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Motoneuron-like cell transplantation and GDNF delivery for repair of SCI

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