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Dear manoj kumar valluru, Last week 3 patents of relevance to the area of stem cells were issued. - # 7,354,729 (Patent Spotlight), covers screening of compounds for activity on hematopoietic stem cells.
- # 7,354,763 teaches how to make embryonic stem celsl into smooth muscle cells.
- # 7,354,909 covers viral transfection of ES cells using SIV.
| | Patent Number: 7,354,729 This patent covers specific conditions for assessing ability of hematopoietic stem cells to proliferate or become metabolically active after exposure to a test agent in vitro. Essentially the patent is useful for the screening of small molecules using high throughput systems for identification of hematopoietic stem cell modulators. Specific hematopoietic stem cells covered in the patent include ones derived from the peripheral blood, bone marrow, umbilical cord blood, yolk sac, fetal liver and spleen. Specific methods of assessing activation includes assessment of ATP content. There are patents already issued for the hematopoietic stem cell, as well as for other methods of screening. Perhaps one of the reasons that this patent issued is due to the specific screening process that was novel and non-obvious according to the examiner. Ask a question OR leave your comments. | | |
| | "I need blood" says the embryoid body
Sunday April 13th, 2008 @ 15:39:22 EST Tokyo, Japan - Embryonic stem cells have a very high potential to generate various tissues, a potential so high that it actually serves as a drawback in some senses. See, embryonic stem cells, when grown in floating cultures form embryoid bodies, and in these embryoid bodies the embryonic stem cell starts differentiating into a wide variety of different tissues spontaneously. There are patents out there that teach people to "fish out" specific cells from the spontaneously differentiating embryonic stem cells through the use of surface markers or activation of a promotor. There are also patents on how to selectively push differentiation of the stem cell towards one lineage or another, for example into cardiac, brain, or pancreatic tissues. However it is still difficult to reproducibly generate specific tissues from the embryonic stem cells. In a recent paper (Fujimori et al. Vascular endothelial growth factor promotes proliferation and function of hepatocyte-like cells in embryoid bodies formed from mouse embryonic stem cells. J Hepatol. 2008 Mar 10) scientists tried to figure out how to make more hepatocytes in embryoid bodies. The scientists generated embryoid bodies and added the proangiogenic protein VEGF, additionally they added inhibitors of the VEGF receptor to demonstrate importance of the cytokine in expansion of liver like cells within the embryoid body. They found: - Addition of VEGF to embryoid bodies increased the number of endothelial cells in the embryoid bodies, as well as the number of hepatic-like cells - The VEGF inhibitor suppressed the number of hepatic-like cells, as well as their production of albumin and HGF These data suggest that the presence of endothelial cells is associated with increased differentiation of embryonic stem cells into hepatocytes. One wonders if in the adult situation whether stimulation of angiogenesis would also augment liver cell regeneration? This is of particular interest since it has been published that clinical administration of autologous bone marrow is associated with increased hepatic regeneration in patients with liver failure. Maybe the hepatic regeneration has nothing to do with transdifferentiation but simply augmentation of angiogenesis in the hepatic environment. Ask a question OR leave your comments. Read more StemCellPatents.com News | | |
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