Calgary aviation engineer Don Adamson endured a dozen surgeries to keep him alive after a car fire burned 50 per cent of his body. Adamson remembers paramedics thinking he was dead that day 12 years ago. But he fought back, survived and today is one of the biggest advocates for stem cell researchresearch he believes will eventually improve the quality of life of burn survivors. Skin grafts just patch you up, and stop the bleeding, he says. Using stem cells potentially enable skin regeneration that will help future burn patients both function and look better. Adamsons confidence in the research being done into potential clinical applications of stem cells foundation cells for every body organ and tissue that also work to maintain and repair the body throughout life comes, in large part, from his association with University of Calgary Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (UCVM) researcher Jeff Biernaskie. Biernaskie, who is an associate professor in UCVMs Department of Comparative Biology and Experimental Medicine, is the Calgary Firefighters Burn Treatment Society Chair in Skin Regeneration and Wound Healing. He holds a joint appointment in the Cumming School of Medicine Department of Surgery and is a member of the Alberta Childrens Hospital Research … Continue reading →

Jason Lee/Reuters Former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping had Parkinsons disease, one of the first targets of embryonic-stem-cell therapies being tested in China. In the next few months, surgeons in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou will carefully drill through the skulls of people with Parkinsons disease and inject 4 million immature neurons derived from human embryonic stem cells into their brains. Then they will patch the patients up, send them home and wait. This will mark the start of the first clinical trial in China using human embryonic stem (ES) cells, and the first one worldwide aimed at treating Parkinsons disease using ES cells from fertilized embryos. In a second trial starting around the same time, a different team in Zhengzhou will use ES cells to target vision loss caused by age-related macular degeneration. The experiments will also represent the first clinical trials of ES cells under regulations that China adopted in 2015, in an attempt to ensure the ethical and safe use of stem cells in the clinic. China previously had no clear regulatory framework, and many companies had used that gap as an excuse to market unproven stem-cell treatments. It will be a major new direction for China, says … Continue reading →

A bill may soon grant Texans greater access to unapproved but promising stem cell therapies, Stat News reports. Its passage would make Texasthe first state to back the technology, which has not been approved by federal regulators and many experts consider risky. The bill, HB 810, is intended to give people with chronic diseases or terminal illnesses access to investigational stem cell treatments those that are being evaluated in clinical trials or that has in general not been approved by the FDA. With a doctors approval, patients who have had not had success withconventional treatments would be allowedto seek stem cell therapiesat any clinic that offers it, as long as the treatment is givenby a licensed physician and approved by an institutional review board. Already, hundreds of largely unregulated clinics around the country are quietly operatingunder regulatory loopholes; few states have taken legal steps to advance or hinder patient access to them. Texas has welcomed these clinics for years. In 2011, then-governor Rick Perry received an injection of stem cells intended to help heal his spine after spinal fusion surgery. Lets get Texas in on the ground floor and invest in adult stem cell research, the one area of that … Continue reading →