Stem Cells From Fat Create Beating Heart Cells

Amenacier writes "Melbourne scientists recently discovered that stem cells isolated from human fat could be made to turn into beating heart muscle cells when cultured with rat heart cells. This discovery may lead to the use of fat stem cells in repairing cardiac damage, or fixing such cardiac problems as holes in the heart. It is proposed that culturing the stem cells with rat heart cells allows them to differentiate into heart muscle through signals from the rat cells. In the future it may be possible to inject/transplant the stem cells into the damaged area and have them naturally differentiate into the type of cell required, with only the natural stimuli provided by surrounding cells, without any danger of rejection by the body. Quoting: 'The next step is to implant the human heart cells onto the damaged heart of a laboratory rat to see whether they repair the heart. Then they would be trialled in higher species such as sheep and pigs before human applications could be considered. Clinical application could be five years away ...'" The Age has a multimedia treatment (Flash) of the discovery.

Re:Better hope

[acris]

That McCain/Palin don't get elected if you want this kind of research to continue.

no matter who gets elected in the USA, future research won't be effected by this. Unless said president decides to attack Australia. Please do more research next time before making off-hand comments about politics.

Adult stem cells vs. foetal stem cells

[Amenacier]

The beauty of using adult stem cells is that they can be taken from and used on the same person without fear of rejection because they are already marked as "self" by the body...foetal stem cells may still cause problems because they have their own unique DNA.

Not realistic

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot of questions that have to be answered here - it's not as simple as they say it is. Adipose-derived stem cells are definitely nothing new - adult stem cells are widely studied and commonly used in bioengineering labs. The problem is that translating this into a clinically useful tool is far from reality, and there are a lot of fundamental issues that have to be resolved before something useful can be made:

1. You have to isolate the stem cells from fat properly, which is not a simple task especially when you think about doing this en masse for many patients.
2. Then you have to transform the cells, which is costly and takes time and never works completely.
3. After you get the cells beating, they have to beat in rhythm with the electrical pulse from the heart.
4. Then you have to ensure that they stay that way and don't require any additional growth factors or other biomolecules to keep their differentiation.
5. You also need to anticipate possible immune responses, i.e. a host could reject its own cells.
6. Then you have to consider the cost of growing these cells ex vivo and you probably have to do this in advance, especially if you want to use autologous cells (the patient's own cells), since it will take a lot of time and patience to grow the cell number to something substantial that can be injected.

In Australia things might happen faster, but for the US, getting this particular system running is full of regulatory issues and problems that aren't going to be easily addressed - 5 years is frankly impossible. I'd say 10 years, and that's AFTER they get all of the animal studies up and running. Ah, and it will cost tens of millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions.

Re:its only fair

[daniorerio]

They're both derived from the mesoderm, so yes same germ layer.

Re:Better hope

[bonch]

Well, I wouldn't know what Christians are saying. As far as I can tell, they're not saying anything about adult stem cells. They were opposed to embryonic stem cells because of how they were harvested, and it wasn't just Christians who were opposed.

By the way, mocking Christianity on Slashdot for easy upmods is too easy.

OMG: Someone's been watching..

[maroberts]

Doctor Who [bbc.co.uk]

Re:Better hope

[MPolo]

Even more so, since this is not embryonic stem-cell research (to which McCain, Palin, and many other Christians object), but rather adult stem-cell research (to which only Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists object, as far as I know).

Personally, I have yet to read of truly successful research with embryonic stem cells (because they are generally rejected by the recipient), whereas many large advances have been made with adult stem cells (since the donor and the recipient are the same person, rejection is eliminated) -- for men at least, pluripotent cells have been found in the testicles, so that any type of cell could be produced without having to use embryonic stem cells. I also recently saw a report about a person with congenital heart disease who was apparently cured by an injection of his own bone-marrow stem cells.

So I suppose my question would be why the intellectual elites want to spend their research monies on embryonic stem-cell research that is more expensive, less successful, and morally questionable to a large sector of society, rather than on research in areas where successes keep coming, the cells are available without moral complications, and the costs are in general lower. A cynical person might think that it's all about getting drug patents and getting money out of the consumers and padding their own checkbooks...

Re:Not realistic

[wdef]

To respond to your issues: 1. Isolate a few, then culture the rest? 2. Tranformation appears here to be quite simple and spontaneous. The rat cells are doing the work. 3. Rhythm can be synchronized with an electric current. 4. Additional maintenance - speculation until we know more. 5. Wondering how a host rejects its own cells - unless an autoimmune disease has been triggered? They all have the same HLA complex, or am I out of date? 6. Time to culture cells - so what? Heart failure is a slow and costly way to die. Drugs have greatly extended life. There is time enough. Industrial processes and technology should be able to streamline the process. Regulatory and funding issues: you're forgetting how many fat arses sit on funding and ethics committees and are shit scared of dying from heart problems. In short, I think you are being prematurely negative. Wait until the data is in. Personally I'd be more concerned that, if it works, it'll be *suppressed*. After all, what are we going to do with all the old people that live to 120+ because death from heart failure has been eliminated?

Re:The easy way

[dbrutus]

The religious problem of Galileo was that he was saying that the Church must change the way it taught Scripture so that it conformed to heliocentrism. The Church, reasonably in my view, said that Galileo had to either say it was a theory, prove it was a fact, or shut his pie hole. Within a few short years, Galileo's works were in free circulation in Catholic Christendom using the formulation that heliocentrism was a theory. The last actual scientific objection to heliocentrism was laid to rest in the mid 1800s when stellar parallax was finally observed, centuries after Galileo claimed it as fact, instead of theory and got into trouble over it.

Galileo was an SOB and pissed off a great many early supporters. They *did* behave badly to him but that doesn't make Galileo right in his theology any more than Galileo's theory of comets was right. Eventually the Church admitted the personal revenge part of the affair, made a minor penance, and moved on.

Re:Untrue and ignorant

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was closer to "organizations doing embryonic stem cell research cannot receive federal funding at all" as opposed to receiving federal funding for that project. I'm not certain on that, but if that was the case, it is effectively a ban, as no academic or research institution is going to give up all access to grant money over one line of research, and ditto for most private ventures, exacerbated by private venture disliking research that doesn't have a clear and obvious product that is likely to be approved and unlikely to cause them much grief involved.

I don't know the exact rules, but I'm quite sure your idea of them is incorrect.

Stanford University does huge amounts of human embryonic stem cell research. For example, look at this faculty member's recent publications [stanford.edu] (I don't mean to single this guy out -- it's a random page from a Google search). Or look at this page [stanford.edu], or this page [stanford.edu]. But at the same time, it's well known that Stanford University also receives hundreds of millions of dollars in funding per year from federal grants for various (unrelated) research projects.

Re:Rat hearted overlords?

[philspear]

I would be a terrible scientist if I didn't preface this with the disclamer: I could be wrong in every word, current theories may be wrong and I could also not be current. Having said that...

The evidence suggests that adult stem cells are not pluripotent and are fate restricted. An adult stem cell population that could give rise to any cell type would be a big liability to the organism, as that would be a population of cells much closer to producing tumors than a fate-restricted stem cell.

It is unlikely that an adult stem cell will be able to regenerate central nervous system neurons for two reasons. One: adults generally do not reproduce neurons of the CNS due to integration problems, thus after the age of 18 it appears unlikely you have a population of stem cells that can produce CNS neurons. Two: Since the neural progenitor cells line the ventricular lumen in the embryo and young children, that's where adult CNS stem cells would be. Unfortunately, this is at the center of the brain, getting to them even if they do exist would require significant damage to the brain.

So we don't think they exist in most people, and if they did you'd have to tear apart your brain to get at them.

Having said that, I should come right out and ask, is there evidence that you know of that adult stem cells can regenerate brain or spinal cord neurons? I'm far from an expert on that subject.

Barring an unexpected finding that bone marrow stem cells can naturally make CNS, the barrier to using adult stem cells to make CNS seems higher than the barrier of tissue rejection and tumorgenesis.