Monday April 25, 2011
One of the most popular articles on my site is entitled "Why all the Excitement About Stem Cells?" It seems a lot of people are still asking that question, even though so there are so many reports on new developments in regenerative medicine and stem cell therapies. Some of the simpler examples of how stem cells might help us, ideas that were just that, ideas, not so long ago, are actually becoming a reality. Yesterday I blogged about some ground-breaking research in tissue engineering that demonstrated we can possibly grow entire organs, hollow organs, and organs composed of more than one different cell type, if we just get the scaffold for the bioreactor, mix of pluripotent cells, and growth conditions right. While this research is still in early to mid-stages, the simpler stem cell solutions are already making it to market. Some of these are:
- A spray-on epidermal stem cell solution, for treating second-degree burns, made using a kit marketed by Avita Medical.
- The Apollo Bramwell Hospital Stem Cell Therapy Program offers a variety of autologous stem cell treatments for non-union bone fractures, osteonecrosis and spinal fusion.
- Bone marrow transplants for leukemia patients are successful in part due to stem cells in the marrow. According to the University of Utah Genetic Science Learning Centre, doctors can also use stem cells from the blood (peripheral blood stem cells) and umbilical cord stem cells to treat blood-based diseases.
Sources:
Gravitz, L. 2009. Spraying on skin cells to heal burns. Technology Review, MIT, November 5, 2009.
Epigenetics and Control of Cell Differentiation
Nanotechnology and Stem Cells
NIH Funding for Embryonic Stem Cells: What's Your Opinion?
Sunday April 24, 2011
I don't get PBS's Nova ScienceNow program in Canada, which is really too bad because I would have loved to have seen the episode aired in January about regenerative medicine, called "Replacing Body Parts". According to a reader who emailed me, the show featured Harvard Bioscience Inc., maker of the LB2 Lung Regeneration Bioreactor. Harvard Bioscience is primarily a manufacturer and marketer of specialized equipment for biotechnical applications. One of their projects is to develop bioreactors, like the LB2, for making hollow organs for transplant into people. The bioreactor was also featured on National Geographic in February, in an episode called "How to Build a Beating Heart". Just last week, the company was also featured on the marketing and investment website TheStreet.com, in a video interview called "Growing Organs - Growing Sales".
According to reports by Harvard, the requirements for successful tissue regeneration are a "suitable scaffold, cells, ideal mechanical properties and absence of antigenicity". Apparently they have been successful, since they reported in 2009 that a bioartificial trachea was used to replace the airway of a 30-year old woman who suffered from broncomalacia and loss of normal airway function. The clinical trial demonstrated that Harvard was able to create the ideal conditions for generating a replacement airway for the woman, using cells from her own body (autologous cells). Use of the autologous cells meant avoiding the need for immunosuppressive drugs which are required by other transplant recipients.
Images of the bioreactor design, a tubular scaffold, can be seen in Harvard's paper published in the Lancet (Asnaghi et al., 2009). Harvard has also published an article in Nature Medicine descibing the transplant of a bioartificial lung into rats (Ott et al., 2010).
Sources:
Asnaghi et al. 2009. A double-chamber rotating bioreactor for the development of tissue-engineered hollow organs: From concept to clinical trial. Biomaterials 30:5260-5269.
Ott et al. Regeneration and orthotopic transplantation of a bioartificial lung. Nature Medicine published online 13 July 2010; doi:10.1038/nm.2193.
Revivicor and Regenerative Medicine
The Xenotransplantation Debate
Why the Excitement about Stem Cells?
Thursday April 21, 2011
Joshua Lederberg (1925-2008) was a molecular biologist and visionary who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1958 for discovering bacterial conjugation. His work lead him to study bacteria in space, work in artificial intelligence, and research viral antibodies. During the course of his career, he coined the term microbiome, in reference to the "totality" of microbes, or the genetic makeup and interactions with their environment. One of his legacies is a little-known branch of biotechnology research that is the study of the human microbiome.
The Human Microbiome Project, supported by the NIH Common Fund, is a collaborative effort to characterize the various microbial communities found at different key area on the human body. The International Human Microbiome Consortium is an international team of working groups and committees dedicated to promoting human microbiome research and the sharing of data, in order to "understand the role of the human microbiome in the maintenance of health and causation of disease and to use that knowledge to improve the ability to prevent and treat disease".
The Nobel Prize: Who Would You Nominate?
Nobel Prize-Winning Discovery: GFP
Nobel Prize-Winning Discovery: PCR
Monday April 18, 2011
According to corporate research company EvaluatePharma, this year marks the beginning of a six-year "patent cliff" that will see record-breaking expiries of "blockbuster" drugs sold by the pharmaceutical giants of the world. In 2011, five top products, the IP of Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly and Pfizer, will go off-patent. The biggest loser is Pfizer which will lose rights to it's cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor in June, and stands to lose an estimated 90% of revenues from that drug by 2012. Within the next three years, both Pfizer and Eli Lilly could lose two-thirds of their respective portfolios.
The patent cliff began in January with the expiry of Pfizer's Protonix, the marketing exclusivity of which had already been extended from last year. The next to go will be Eli Lilly's Zyprexa, on April 23rd. The top products going off-patent in 2011, according to EvaluatePharma data, are:
- Lipitor - cholesterol (Pfizer), June.
- Zyprexa - schizophrenia/depression/bipolar disorder (Eli Lilly), April.
- Levaquin - antibacterial (Johnson & Johnson), June.
- Protonix - heartburn (Pfizer), January.
Also on the list was Concerta, a drug for ADHD by Johnson & Johnson, for which the basic patent already expired but no generic approvals have been granted.
Participate in a Clinical Trial
Licensing Genetic Inventions
What is an Orphan Drug?