Can Stem Cells Rescue Failing Hearts?

wugongliang submitted, created time 1 year 3 months (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

It's been more than 6 years since the first person was injected with stem cells to rescue a failing heart. Hundreds of patients have since followed the lead of that 46-year-old German man. But experts are still divided on how well the strategy works. At a 2-day symposium on cardiovascular regenerative medicine at the National Institutes of Health here that ended today, cardiologists, surgeons, pathologists, and other researchers debated the future of cardiac cell therapy. Clinical trials and animal studies are supplying a wealth of information; so far, the treatment seems safe

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Heart repair may soon be within reach

bigben submitted, created time 1 year 7 months (www.jem.org)

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN (Behfar et al., J Exp Med. 2007 Feb 19) found a simple way to isolate a large quantity of cardiac progenitors or cardiopoietic cells, to prevent tumor growth when stem cells are delivered in vivo, to escape from host immunity and ,finally, to repair injured heart. “Recruited cardiopoietic cells delivered in infarcted hearts generated cardiomyocytes that proliferated into scar tissue, integrating with host myocardium for tumor-free repair

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High Incidence of Non-Random Template Strand Segregation and Asymmetric Fate Determination In Dividing Stem Cells and their Progeny

diggman submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (biology.plosjournals.org)

"For each chromosome, the complementary DNA strands consist of a “younger” strand synthesized during the most recent round of DNA replication and an “older” strand synthesized during a previous cell division. When the strands separate to serve as templates for DNA synthesis during a subsequent round of replication, the two sister chromatids formed thus differ in terms of the template strand age

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