Cord blood - $27.80 per click!

by Peter Raaymakers, Stem Cell Network

They’ve become ubiquitous in Web browsing, but those little text-based ads you see everywhere from the biggest newspaper to the smallest blog are called Google AdWords, and they’re big business in just about every industry—including stem cells and regenerative medicine.

A recent report in Wired published some of the top Google AdWords keyword categories and, perhaps unsurprisingly, stem cells were on the list. Most directly related to the field was the twentieth-most-expensive keyword category, “cord blood.”

Cell fate conversion: Bypassing the climb back up Waddington’s hill

by Angela C. H. McDonald

Shinya Yamanaka’s first report of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) challenged what biologists thought they knew about terminal cell differentiation and caused a wave of excitement and hope for regenerative medicine applications. A second wave of excitement is swooping through the field today, as many researchers shift their focus from iPSC reprogramming to cell fate conversion. A number of studies have described the conversion of skin fibroblasts directly to other somatic cell types including neurons, cardiomyocytes and blood progenitor cells (as described in a previous SCN blog post) by forced expression of tissue specific genes.

The concept of converting cell fate by forced expression of transgenes is not entirely new. In the 1980s, a study was published reporting the induction of myotubes (muscle cells) by forced expression of one gene in fibroblasts (described in this review article).

Recently, the field of cell fate conversion has been picking up momentum. Last month at the International Society for Stem Cell Research meeting in Toronto, unpublished reports of cell fate conversion were presented, including the derivation of cardiomyocytes from cardiac fibroblasts as well as the conversion of fibroblasts to motor neurons. The journal Nature has recently published a number of cell fate conversion studies. Caiazzo et al. described the generation of dopaminergic neurons (dopamine-producing neurons) from mouse and human fibroblasts last month. Additionally, Huang et al. and Sekiya and Suzuki reported two strategies for converting mouse fibroblasts directly into hepatocytes in May and June, respectively.

Could stem cells be a solution to organ harvesting and donation?

by Michelle Ly

Susan Lim is perhaps not the likeliest of candidates when one brings to mind the image of a stem cell researcher. A surgical pioneer, Dr. Lim performed the first liver transplant in Asia, for which she received numerous honours. She brings a refreshing outlook on stem cell research with her recent TED talk, entitled “Transplant cells, not organs”.

While those of us in the stem cell community may be well aware of the moral, legal and ethical concerns surrounding the use of stem cells, particularly embryonic stem cells, Dr. Lim’s talk brings to light many ethical issues surrounding organ transplant.  

Often portrayed as the “gift of life”, organ transplants are now regular performed to replace ailing kidneys, hearts, livers and lungs. As the skill of doctors has increased, so too has the need for organ transplants, such that demand has easily outpaced availability. The Western world has tried to keep pace by relaxing the rules for organ donations – for example, by allowing unrelated donations from living donors. But as these rules have expanded, so has the opportunity for exploitation. While the need for informed medical consent for organ donors is stressed, it is easy to see how people can be pushed into “donating” an organ, through outside authority, familial pressures, or social-economic pressures. Living donors undertake risk by going under the knife and may suffer medical complications, as a teenager in China found out after selling his kidney for an iPad.

Isolating single human hematopoietic stem cells

by David Kent

For those who followed the Stem Cell Foundation campaign last year, you may have come across the article I wrote about what inspired me to enter the field of stem cell biology. The power of a single blood stem cell to recreate all of the elements of the blood system for the lifetime of a mouse (and beyond) and the ability to isolate them prospectively at near purity in mammals is a luxury primarily limited to the mouse blood stem cell system. With the breast (John Stingl, former SCN trainee under Connie Eaves) and prostate (Owen Witte) fields catching up quickly, scientists are very excited to pursue high-level studies of pure populations in multiple tissues of the mouse.

This week, even more excitement was generated with news from one of the pioneering stem cell labs in Toronto: John Dick and his team of researchers at the Ontario Cancer Institute have achieved this feat in human blood stem cells. In a splendid display of teamwork indicative of the collaborative atmosphere in the Dick lab, the dynamic duo of Faiyaz Notta and Sergei Doutlatov (PhD students and SCN trainees) led the work that demonstrated for the first time, the capacity of single blood cells isolated from a human cord blood sample to make all of the cell types of the blood system for a sufficiently long time post-transplantation to be deemed a bona fide blood stem cell. This is the same pair of students who also recently published the Nature Immunology paper that mapped the various progenitor compartments in the human blood system by phenotype and function – a strategy now widely used to help study the panoply of diseases arising in the blood system.