Misc
In a promising finding for the field of regenerative medicine, stem cell researchers at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC have identified a source of adult stem cells found on the walls of blood vessels with the unlimited potential to differentiate into human tissues such as bone, cartilage and muscle.
The scientists identified cells known as pericytes that are multipotent, meaning they have broad developmental potential. Pericytes are found on the walls of small blood vessels such as capillaries and microvessels throughout the body and have the potential to be extracted and grown into many types of tissues.
art: and then this popped up - stem cells from testicles. The article says "men's testicles" so that you don't think it might be from women's testicles, but you get the idea.
Health and life insurance companies have access to a powerful new tool for evaluating whether to cover individual consumers: a health "credit report" drawn from databases containing prescription drug records on more than 200 million Americans.
This article has a brief description of a new MS genetics study, looking at a couple of areas with high incidence of MS. They provide an interesting table of MS rates for countries around the world.
This page has a silly little quiz about MS you can use to test what dogma about the disease you've absorbed. But don't worry if you get the "what causes MS?" question wrong - it's totally broken.
A researcher at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory has pinpointed stem cells within the spinal cord that, if persuaded to differentiate into more healing cells and fewer scarring cells following an injury, may lead to a new, non-surgical treatment for debilitating spinal-cord injuries.
Full text available here.
More than half of Americans would rather die than live with a severe disability, according to a survey.
In the online poll commissioned by Disaboom, a Web site and social network for people affected by disabilities, 52 percent of the 1,000 "nationally represented" adults chose death over losing the ability to live an independent life.
Scientists discovered that watermelon has an effect similar to well-known drug Viagra. The positive effect is attributed to an ingredient citrulline found in watermelons.
I wonder if watermelon sales will sky-rocket now?
Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies manipulated adult neural stem cells still in place in the brain. They successfully coaxed mouse brain stem cells bound to join the neuronal network to differentiate into support cells instead.
In patients with multiple sclerosis, the immune system attacks oligodendrocytes, which leads to the thinning of the myelin layer affecting the neurons' ability to efficiently conduct electrical signals. Being able to direct neural stem cells to differentiate into oligodendrocytes may alleviate the symptoms.
NIAMS Scientists Find Potential New Way to Block Inflammation in Autoimmune Disease
Researchers from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), a part of the NIH, have identified a promising new target for autoimmune disease treatment — a cell-surface receptor called DR3. Their research in mice, published on line in the journal Immunity, suggests that blocking this receptor could slow or stop the damaging inflammation characteristic of autoimmune diseases, potentially without leaving the body vulnerable to serious infections, as many current therapies do.
Working with mouse models of asthma and multiple sclerosis, both immune system diseases, the researchers found that mice engineered to lack DR3 were resistant to those diseases. "The implication is that blocking DR3 in mice, and possibly in humans, is a potential therapy for these diseases and perhaps others in which the immune system goes awry," said Richard Siegel, M.D., Ph.D., a scientist in the NIAMS' Immunoregulation Group, who led the research effort.
Old muscle got a shot of youthful vigor in a stem cell experiment by bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley, setting the path for research on new treatments for age-related degenerative conditions such as muscle atrophy or Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.
"We are one step closer to having a point of intervention where we can rejuvenate the body's own stem cells so we don't have to suffer from some of the debilitating diseases associated with aging," said the study's lead author, Morgan Carlson, a recent Ph.D. graduate of Conboy's lab.
