The Essentials of Stem Cell Biology (second edition) is a book edited by Dr. Robert Lanza, Chief Scientific Officer of Advanced Cell Technology. Additional editors include Dr. John Gearhart, Dr. Brigid Hogan, Dr. Douglas Melton, Dr. Roger Pedersen, Dr. E. Donnall Thomas, Dr. James Thomson, and Dr. Ian Wilmut. This post has notes from the book featuring the results of a few of the experiments cited in the book. The book itself has many pages of useful instructions for working with stem cells.
• Stimulating the Mueller glia allows them to form neurospheres.
• Murine ES cells cultured with PA6 develop into aggregates with eye-like layers.
• Multipotent adult progenitor cells injected in a mouse model of limb ischemia led to significant and persistent improvement in limb perfusion and muscle function.
• Grafting multipotent adult progenitor cells into the peri-infarct zone of the heart of allogenic swine led to an improvement in left ventricular ejection fraction.
• Lin-/c-kit+ cells rebuild large portions of the injured myocardial wall when injected into an ischemic rat heart.
• Clinical trials to repair spinal cord injury are in progress to test the use of porcine-derived stem cells, allogenic transplantation of olfactory ensheathing glia, and human umbilical cord blood mononuclear cell transplants.
• A study found that c-kit positive adult bone marrow cells helped regenerate the endocrine pancreas in diabetic mice.
• An experiment in mice found that preincubation of human mesenchymal stem cells in porous ceramics in the presence of osteoinductive medium, followed by intraperitoneal implantation, resulted in the formation of thick layers of lamellar bone and active osteoblasts.
• A study showed that autologous mesenchymal stem cells loaded into HA/TCP carriers healed a critical-sized segmental defect in dogs.
• An experiment demonstrated that bone marrow-drived and periosteum-derived mesenchymal stem cells embedded into a collagen-based scaffold were able to heal articular cartilage defects in rabbits.
• An experiment showed evidence of spinal fusion in rats treated with mesenchymal stem cells expressing BMP-2.
