This 8 month old baby was born deaf, watch the moment as his cochlear implant is activated and he hears sound for the first time, and his mother’s voice…..Priceless!

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1. Donated but damaged liver bathed in detergent to remove the cells.

2. All that remains is a ‘scaffold’ made of collagen and blood vessels.

3. Scaffold is seeded with healthy liver cells, made from the stem cells created from the patient’s skin.

4. The new liver is used to replace the patient’s damaged one. As it is made from their own cells, the body will not reject it.

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The drug, called iloprost, is approved in inhaled forms to treat pulmonary hypertension, when blood pools near the lungs, a connective tissue disease called scleroderma and a nerve condition called Raynaud’s phenomenon.

Dr. Robert Keith of the Denver Veterans Affairs Medical Center and colleagues tested an oral version to see if it might prevent lung cancer in smokers and former smokers.

Keith, who has been testing several drugs to prevent lung cancer, looked at biopsies taken from the lungs of 125 current and former smokers.

They treated half with placebo and half with iloprost, and then performed bronchoscopy examinations to assess precancerous changes in the lungs.

Six months later, “former smokers showed significant improvements on all measures, indicating that treatment with iloprost may reduce the risk of developing lung cancer among former smokers,” the researchers said.

Reuters

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For the first time, human embryonic stem cells have been cultured under chemically controlled conditions without the use of animal substances, which is essential for future clinical uses.
The method has been developed by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and is presented in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

A research team at Karolinska Institutet has now managed to produce human stem cells entirely without the use of other cells or substances from animals. Instead they are cultured on a matrix of a single human protein: laminin-511.

“Now, for the first time, we can produce large quantities of human embryonic stem cells in an environment that is completely chemically defined,” says professor Karl Tryggvason, who led the study.
“This opens up new opportunities for developing different types of cell which can then be tested for the treatment of disease.”

Science Daily

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In what could lead to a new discovery of nerve cell regeneration for people paralyzed by spinal cord injuries, researchers claim the shells of sea creatures may repair damaged nerve membranes and restore the spinal cord’s ability to transmit signals to the brain.

After spinal cord injuries, many people become paralyzed because their brains are cut off from central pattern generators, which are networks of neurons in the spinal cord that are thought to produce an automatic walking motion.

Richard Borgens and his team comprising of physiologist Riyi Shi and chemist Youngnam Cho from the Center for Paralysis Research at the Purdue School of Veterinary Medicine have discovered that the simple sugar found in the crustacean shells of lobsters is capable of targeting damaged membranes.

Professor Richard Borgens stated, “This is the most exciting development for spinal cord and brain injury since Second World War.

“I am very excited. Using chemicals to repair the damaged nervous system is a completely new way to treat people with these terrible injuries. It’s amazing one of these special chemicals would turn out to be a sugar.”

Full report

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