ISSCR News
Researchers Develop Personalized Stem Cell Model ALS for Fast, Individualized Drug Testing
In amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), motor neurons that are required for muscle contractions die off, leading to progressive paralysis affecting most muscles of the body. The molecular causes of ALS are poorly understood, and effective treatments are missing.
To study ALS in the lab, Hideyuki Okano and his colleagues from Keio University, Japan, developed a new method to make motor neurons from stem cells taken directly from ALS patients. The results were just published in the journal Stem Cell Reports.
New Podcast Episode. SeqVerify: A New Easily Accessible Tool for Comprehensive Cell Line Quality Assessment
During the last decade, advances in genome editing and pluripotent stem cell (PSC) culture have let researchers generate edited PSC lines to study a wide variety of biological questions. However, abnormalities in cell lines such as aneuploidy, mutations, on-target and off-target editing errors, and microbial contamination can arise during PSC culture or due to undesired editing outcomes. To ensure valid experimental results and the safety of PSC-derived therapeutics, it is important to detect these abnormalities and choose PSC lines without them. Existing quality control methods typically focus on detecting one type of abnormality. Whole genome sequencing is an all-in-one detection method for any abnormality involving changes to DNA sequences but until now it has required considerable computational expertise. Today’s guests will discuss a new computational tool, SeqVerify, that analyzes short-read WGS data for quality control of wild-type or edited PSCs. The platform provides an end-to-end analysis framework that can be a valuable quality control method for researchers working with PSCs, and more broadly, for cell line quality control in general.
New Podcast Episode. Guidelines for Managing and Using the Digital Phenotypes of Pluripotent Stem Cell Lines
The ability of human pluripotent and somatic stem cells to differentiate into multiple cell types of the human body makes them uniquely useful to model human development and disease. As a result, these cells are shared, edited, and differentiated by laboratories across the world for basic research, clinical translation, and commercial applications. Large and genotypically diverse collections of pluripotent stem cells are being generated to support large cohort-scale research into conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, among many others. However, information about these cells, their derivatives, and the resulting data can be difficult to track due to a myriad of factors including poor naming practices, siloed datasets, and incomplete information on experimental practices in the published literature. As a result, the ability to maximize the utility of these cells and data from them is limited, and the rigor and reproducibility of the research and its application may be seriously compromised. Our guests today, who were part of the ISSCR Task Force that developed the Standards for the Use of Human Stem Cells in Research, will discuss in detail a framework to manage these issues using stem cell registries.
Stem Cells Shed Insight Into Cardiovascular Disease Processes
When thinking about the immune system, most people think about B and T cells and how they can be trained to recognize pathogens, preventing re-infections. Besides this “adaptive” immune system, we also have an “innate” immune system which acts as first line defense against e.g. bacteria and viruses. The textbook view is that the innate immune system is non-specific so that it’s response always follows the same pattern, even for recurring infections. However, research published today in Stem Cell Reports provides evidence that brief exposure to certain “danger signals” can prime the body’s innate immune system into a long-term hyperreactive and inflammatory state termed “trained innate immunity.”
Repurposing Drugs to Eliminate Cellular Origins of Brain Tumors
In an effort to rapidly identify new treatments effective against BTSCs, a team of researchers from the University of Ottawa, Canada, tested Edaravone, an FDA-approved drug, for its efficacy against BTSCs, knowing that Edaravone blocks cellular processes which are important for the growth and survival of BTSCs.
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