You may have read the commentary “Stem Cells Repair Injured Hearts” and then heard about the National Institutes of Health (NIH) decision to suspend a clinical trial using stem cells to treat heart failure due to oxygen deprivation, as occurs in a heart attack. The work highlighted in the commentary is by different authors and … Read more
Heart muscle has limited ability to regenerate. This is why heart attacks cause permanent heart damage. A goal in cardiovascular medicine is to induce healing rather than scarring, especially in patients with large areas of heart damage that compromise heart function. One strategy under investigation is injecting immature heart muscle cells, called cardiomyocytes, into the … Read more
Amyloid precursor protein (APP) is best known as the protein that is cleaved to form the plaque-associated protein in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. The APP gene encodes multiple alternatively spliced mRNA forms. The form that encodes a protein of 695 amino acids (APP695) is expressed in neurons. The transcript that encodes a 770 amino … Read more
Some friends recently asked me about getting stem cell injections for painful knees with osteoarthritis (Figure 1). Should they push their doctors for this treatment? Were they, and consequently their stem cells, going to be too old if they waited? I started my investigation at PubMed, searching for “stem cells” and “osteoarthritis,” which produced 1249 … Read more
Stem cells hold great promise for medical intervention. However, it has been difficult to leverage these cells effectively. In the study by Hirsch and colleagues, a collaboration between doctors and researchers saved the life of a child with a skin disorder called junctional epidermolysis bullosa (JEB). JEB is a genetic disease caused by mutations in … Read more