men health blog 24

In the study, first author Michaela Patterson , a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Henry Sucov, and her colleagues focused on a regenerative type of heart muscle cell called a mononuclear diploid cardiomyocyte (MNDCM). Zebrafish and newborn mammals, including mice and humans, have large numbers of MNDCMs and a relatively robust ability to regenerate heart muscle. However, adult mammals have few MNDCMs and a correspondingly limited capacity for regeneration after an injury such as a heart attack. Even so, the situation for adult mammals is not uniformly dire: Patterson and her co-authors observed a surprising amount variation in the number of MNDCMs among different strains of adult mice. In some strains, MNDCMs accounted for only 1.9 percent of heart muscle cells. In others, a full 10 percent were MNDCMs. As expected, the higher the percentage of MNDCMs, the better the mice fared in regenerating their heart muscle after injury. "This was an exciting finding," s...

Despite the importance of this critical stage, scientists haven't had a good way to explore what can go wrong, or even what must go right, after the newly formed ball of cells implants in the wall of the human uterus. But a new achievement using human stem cells may help change that. Tiny lab-grown structures could give researchers a chance to see what they couldn't before, while avoiding ethical issues associated with studying actual embryos. A team from the University of Michigan reports in  Nature Communications  that they have coaxed pluripotent human stem cells to grow on a specially engineered surface into structures that resemble an early aspect of human development called the amniotic sac. The cells spontaneously developed some of the same structural and molecular features seen in a natural amniotic sac, which is an asymmetric, hollow ball-like structure containing cells that will give rise to a part of the placenta as well as the embryo itself. But the structu...

Researchers at the University of Bergen have transformed skin puncture cells from diabetes patients into insulin producing cells, using stem cell techniques. The researchers' aim is to transplant these cells under the skin of people with diabetes. "This study is a step towards discovering how "stand-in" cells can secrete insulin in the body," says Professor Helge Ræder, leader of the stem cell node at the K.G. Jebsen Centre for Diabetes Research, University of Bergen. Automatic insulin regulation In the long run, the researchers´ goal is to replace insulin shots and blood sugar measurements with insulin-secreting cells capable of automatically secreting insulin in response to the blood sugar level. This can become possible by implanting a capsule with tailor made cells in each diabetes patient. "Our study is a step further in the spare part or regenerative medicine, where a lot may go wrong but where a successful approach may cure diabetes,...

Allergy and asthma affect a high p ercentage of the population. Mast cells are specialised immune cells that play an important role not only in these conditions but also in other diseases such as mastocytosis, a haematologic disease involving an increased number of mast cells. It has been commonly understood that the growth factor stem cell factor, which stimulates mast cell development, is essential for the formation of mast cells. Now researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Uppsala University have shown that this is not the case. The researchers analysed mast cells and their progenitors in blood from patients with chronic myeloid leukemia, a disease of the blood. "When the patients were treated with the drug imatinib (Glivec), which blocks the effect of stem cell factor, the number of mature mast cells dropped, while the number of progenitor cells did not change. We were thus able to conclude that mast cell progenitors did not require stem cell factor," says Professor...