Stem Cell Nobel Prize and Other News

This year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine was given to three cellular researchers (Drs. Elizabeth Blackburn (University of California), Carol Greider (Johns Hopkins University) and Jack Szostak (Harvard Medical School)), each of whom made critical contributions to understanding one of the defining attributes of both stem cells and tumor cells—namely the urge to divide.

Photos Gerbil, Licensed by Attribution Share Alike 3.0 and Jussi Puikkonen

Drs. Elizabeth Blackburn (University of California), Jack Szostak (Harvard Medical School),   and Carol Greider (Johns Hopkins University).

The three scientists demonstrated that cells will age if a particular string of code at the end of a DNA strand (telomere) is shortened. Telomeres protect the ends of DNA and are critical to cell division—which, of course, stem cells and tumor cells are known to perform quite impressively. Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn compared telomeres to the tips on the ends of shoelaces that keep them from fraying.

Other stem cell pioneers, specifically Drs. McCulloch and Till—the two scientists who won the prestigious Lasker Award in 2005—were mentioned in the running for this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine.

While the Nobel Prize committee continues to watch and evaluate the stem cell arena, more news arrived on our desk last week of interesting and key new developments. Specifically, Spire Healthcare, a startup company in Manchester, United Kingdom, announced that it had successfully tested a new technique which uses stem cells to repair damaged bones. The leading investigator in the small study, orthopaedic surgeon Dr. Douglas Dunlop, collected stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow and mixed them with a composite of powdered bone from the patient’s previous hip replacement operation. Dr. Dunlop and his team then used the stem cell packed bone to replace dead tissue from the ball of the patient’s hip that had not been replaced.

The 39-year-old patient was suffering from necrosis of the hip. The doctor removed dead tissue from the ball joint and then filled it in with the mixture of autologous stem cells and powdered bone from the previous operation.

Dr. Dunlop has performed this procedure six times. While the information we’ve seen is only anecdotal, it is, nonetheless, very interesting for several reasons. First, it uses the patient’s own materials. Second, all patients had necrosis of the hip and, according to Dr. Dunlop, the new material resulted in rejuvenated bone. According to Dr. Dunlop, the stem cell packed material successfully engrafted and all six patients are able to walk without pain. Quoting Dr. Dunlop, “If this new procedure works, he won’t need a hip replacement. It will fix his hip for life.”

In the U.S., PearlDiver estimates that there are approximately 427, 000 cases of necrosis of the hip diagnosed annually.

Stem Cell IPO in Russia?

The Moscow-based Human Stem Cell Institute (“HSCI”) announced last week that it planned to complete an initial public offering of stock. The IPO’s price was set at 9 and 11 rubles per ordinary share ($0.30 per share). The company is planning to sell 15 million shares and raise about $4.5 million. Its market capitalization would be approximately $24 million.

The underwriting would put the shares onto the Innovative & Growing Companies (IGC) sub-sector of the Innovation and Investments Market on the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange (MICEX).

The Human Stem Cell Institute was founded in 2003 to advance projects in stem cell technology. HSCI has laboratories and offices in Russia (Moscow and St. Petersburg), Ukraine and Germany. HSCI has processing laboratories and storage facilities for cellular materials, as well as research laboratories such as the Laboratory of Stem Cell Technologies in Moscow and the SymbioTec Co. biotechnological laboratory in Saarbrücken, Germany. HSCI is also the main publisher of the scientific journal Cellular Transplantation and Tissue Engineering.

This would be, by the way, Russia’s first IPO this year.

NIH Dollars for Stem Cells

We’ve all heard about the billions of new stimulus dollars being made available to young companies and technologies. Well, NeoStem, Inc. (NYSE Amex: NBS), which is developing a system of collecting, processing and storing adult stem cells, was awarded the princely sum of $108, 746 for the repair of bone defects by human stem cells. The funds came to NeoStem as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (RRA) of 2009 from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Disease (NIAMS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

NeoStem plans to use the award to study the potential of very small embryonic-like stem cells to regenerate bone in an animal model. These very small embryonic-like stem cells are isolated from adults’ own peripheral blood using NeoStem’s proprietary isolation methods.

The principal investigator in the study is Dr. Russell Taichman, Professor of Dentistry, Department of Periodontics and Oral Medicine at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, and his colleagues, Drs. Paul Kresbach and David Kohn.

Under the RRA, the NIH has established a new program entitled Research and Research Infrastructure “Grand Opportunities, ” also known as the “GO” grants program. This new program is designed to support large-scale research projects that accelerate critical breakthroughs, early and applied research on cutting-edge technologies, and new approaches to improve the synergy and interactions among multi- and interdisciplinary research teams. The program is intended for research activities that have high, short-term impact, and a high likelihood of enabling growth and investment in biomedical research and development in new fields of investigation.

NeoStem is developing a network of adult stem cell collection centers that are focused on enabling people to donate and store their own (autologous) stem cells when they are young and healthy for their personal use in times of future medical need.

Twenty-Year Results Reported of Autologous Stem Cell Transplants for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma

Hodgkin’s lymphoma/commons.wikipediaIt is rare to find 20-year follow-up results under any circumstances. To find it in stem cells was downright amazing. Yet, last week, across our desk came news that researchers from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have reported on patients who’d received autologous stem cell transplants (ASCT) as part of a therapy regimen to treat refractory or relapsed Hodgkin’s lymphoma (HL).

The results were presented at the Joint ECCO 15 – 34th ESMO Multidisciplinary Congress in Berlin this past September 20-24, 2009. Autologous stem cell treatment has been the treatment of choice for patients with responsive relapse of HL for more than two decades.

While a common treatment regimen for patients with HL and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) is chemotherapy or high-dose total body irradiation (TBI), some researchers have argued that TBI is unnecessary and can be substituted with other treatments that are augmented with autologous stem cell transplants.

The study looked at 186 previously un-irradiated patients with relapsed or refractory HL who received a total lymphoid irradiation (TLI)-based regimen prior to ASCT. These patients were treated between 1985 and 2008. The researchers made the following observations:

• 5- and 10-year overall survivals were 68% and 56%, respectively.
• 5- and 10-year event-free survivals were 62% and 56%, respectively.
• 5- and 10-year HL-related deaths were 21% and 29%, respectively.
• 62% of patients were alive and free of disease at last follow-up.
• Patients who achieved a complete response to salvage therapy had improved outcomes.
• Primary refractory disease and extranodal disease predicted for poor outcomes.
• Introduction of peripheral blood stem cells in 1995 was associated with improved overall survival (P = .06).
• Early mortality decreased over time with only one death since 1998 (1.2%).

Conclusion: The data confirmed the long-term benefits of autologous stem cell therapy for patients with relapsed or refractory HL. They also suggest that total body irradiation is not essential for cure, and patients can be treated with less radiation therapy.