Liposuction Leftovers Make Easy Stem Cells 67
uuddlrlrab sends along this quote from a report in Nature:
"The Stanford researchers used liposuction to extract a couple liters of fat from the bellies of four overweight individuals aged 40 to 65. They then treated the tissue to remove all the gooey, globular fat, leaving behind a collection of fat tissue stem cells. Unlike standard techniques, which require about a month to culture skin biopsies to populations large enough for the reprogramming process, the fat tissue was ready to go after two days of pretreatment. What's more, the cellular reprogramming took only two more weeks and was 20-times more efficient than when converting fibroblasts using the same technique. 'We basically shave off six to eight weeks compared to what the other guys are doing with fibroblasts,' says [Stanford's Joseph Wu], who is now working to find safer ways to reprogram fat without using viruses."
I'm not getting fat, I'm helping humanity! (Score:2, Redundant)
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You've a lot of rage. Did a fat person sit on you as a child?
Insightful. Well asked.
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Perhaps you're confusing cause and effect
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One example would be if it contained the text of the summary.
Stem Cells vs Soap (Score:1)
Re:Stem Cells vs Soap (Score:4, Insightful)
The great thing is they only need the stem cells, not the fat itself, so they can get paid twice. Actually, if you factor in getting paid to remove it, they get paid thrice!
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1) steal Liposuction Leftovers
2) split out stem cells
3) use glycerol to blow up competition
4) ???
5)profit
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Finally !! (Score:1, Redundant)
Now being fat can be a new industry in the US !!!
At least we can say we are leading at something !
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It's the next logical step given that America's leading exports are Hollywood and McDonald's.
--Ethanol-fueled
Great excuse to be overweight (Score:1, Redundant)
Now my stomach is like a cord blood bank. I can maintain my pearish figure and have the excuse of regrowing body parts in the future. Sweet.
Woohoo! (Score:1, Redundant)
Use that beer belly to save your life, or just grow your penis.
See?! The american lifestyle is truly the best!
USA! USA! (Score:5, Funny)
Talk about an abundant national resource! Sucks to be one of you skinny Frenchies!
Wait... (Score:5, Funny)
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Outdated news (Score:1, Interesting)
This is old news. They've been doing this in Japan for a couple of years already through a technique called Cell-Assisted Lipotransfer. They're using it e.g. for breast enhancement and breast reconstruction. See the paper at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17518674
Typical: what's been common in Japan for 3 years now is being heralded as revolutionary in the US, simply because it's Stanford? Can't they think of something that other people HAVEN'T done yet?
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So wait, the japanese had the technology to do liposuction and generate induced pluripotent stem cells, and couldn't find anything other than boobs?
Seriously though: this is not the same thing. At all. That was taking fat out and putting fat back in. This is taking fat out and making a liver to put in... in theory. To use a car metaphor, we're talking about the ability to take any spare part from your car and turn it into a new engine. You're saying that's old technology because we have been able to us
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So wait, the japanese had the technology to do liposuction and generate induced pluripotent stem cells, and couldn't find anything other than boobs?
I'm sorry, I don't understand how that's a problem. I mean, if I were them, I'd have a very difficult time forcing myself to find other uses.
I Can't Believe It's Not Betty (Score:1, Funny)
They also make a delicious, buttery spread.
Now drug cos will pay ME to lose weight! (Score:1)
Or at least reimburse me for the surgery!
I understand now... (Score:3, Funny)
Here I thought we were just becoming a nation of lard-asses, when really it was a sneaky plot to build up our future stem cell reserves. Thank you, McDonalds for your SuperSized McWisdom.
Free liposuction? (Score:2)
Will the demand for stem cells create an industry of fat cell harvesters based on offering free liposuction? Oh, and to add a proper /. comment to this: Finally, America will no longer be the butt of all fat jokes.
STOP IT! (Score:3, Funny)
Just stop it with these "other source of stem cells" stories. Pretty soon the whole aborted fetus market bubble will crash and I'm still heavily leveraged!
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Just stop it with these "other source of stem cells" stories. Pretty soon the whole aborted fetus market bubble will crash and I'm still heavily leveraged!
You worry too much. People will just start aborting fat fetuses for stem cells.
Re:STOP IT! (Score:5, Informative)
Not to ruin the joke, but there are two important points which I worry might get trampled
1. embryonic stem cells don't come from "aborted fetuses," they come from in vitro fertilization. I realize a lot of people don't think there's any difference, but these aren't from unwanted pregnancies being terminated at abortion clinics, these are embryos that were always headed for the biomedical waste pile. By the time you know you're pregnant, your embryo doesn't appear to contain any cells which are ESC.
2. ESC aren't alternatives to this. Embryonic stem cells come from another individual, unless that embryo is a clone of you, your body would probably reject tissues derived from ESC as it would from any other adult. Being able to make pluripotent stem cells more efficiently from YOUR OWN fat on the other hand wouldn't have that problem. If you needed a new heart in the future, you might undergo microliposuction one week, wait a week or month while they turned that tissue into induced pluripotent stem cells and made those cells into a new heart, then you'd undergo surgery to remove your original heart and put in the heart made from transformed fat cells. Or maybe they'd just enrich your original heart with fat stem cells turned into cardiomyocytes. Who knows. But you can't make a heart from ESC and put it into yourself without being on immunosupressant drugs for the rest of your life.
That's good turn-around time! (Score:4, Insightful)
So if someone has some sort of injury that could be treated with stem cells, they can use the patient's own cells to do the repair. This would probably bring about the fastest possible recovery time for a patient.
Can they make blood cells in a similar fashion I wonder?
Medical research seems to have really plateaued over the past 20 years or so. Money is spent on cancer research and all manner of other things but improvements have been incremental, meanwhile, the over-use of antibiotics has led to even more troubling problems. But this stem cell stuff really seems to be the right idea when it comes to healing and repairing things and that is some seriously productive progress. While I am sure we are a long way off from replacing lost limbs, simple, more consistent tissues seem to be an easy candidate for replacement and repair using these methods... even internal organs seem a good candidate for stem cell treatment.
Damn you "W!" You held progress back by at least 8 years and maybe more. (On the other hand, perhaps his dumbassed-ness led to further research into easier and more accessible means of getting stem cells...) Anyway, damn you "W" just the same.
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Yes, W's restrictions on funding of embryonic stem cell research lead to much more work on non-embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stem cells are typically too "wild" and lead to tumors when used for therapies. Adult stem cells (like these fat cells) are "tamer" and show far greater promise. I believe that most embyronic stem cell work has been a waste of effort and resources and was merely a useful club for the media and celebrities to bash the pro-lfe crowd.
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Adult stem cells (like these fat cells) are "tamer" and show far greater promise. I believe that most embyronic stem cell work has been a waste of effort and resources and was merely a useful club for the media and celebrities to bash the pro-lfe crowd.
You've misinterpreted the research. On their own, adipocyte stem cells haven't shown any therapeutic value. These researchers reprogrammed adipocyte stem cells into something that is indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells, which happen to be far more useful. In effect, they've made embryonic stem cells w/o using an embryo. Within the stem cell biology community (of which I am a member), there's little doubt that this general approach will provide the basis for future cell replacement therapies. It
Re:That's good turn-around time! (Score:4, Informative)
Damn you "W!" You held progress back by at least 8 years and maybe more. (On the other hand, perhaps his dumbassed-ness led to further research into easier and more accessible means of getting stem cells...) Anyway, damn you "W" just the same.
You do realize that this research was eligible for federal funding under George W. Bush, right?
As a matter of fact, because of his limitations on embryonic stem cell research, more money was available for this sort of research than would have been otherwise.
The only reason that medical research has "plateaued" is because treatment for the easy and/or obvious stuff has been developed:
Smallpox--infectious, frequently deadly---cured, infectious agent is extinct
Polio--infectious, results in devastating disability or death---effective vaccine developed and deployed
The fact of the matter of the drugs used to treat diabetes the majority were developed in the last 20 years. The reason that improvements appear to be incremental is because all of the developments that lead to massive increases in life expectancy are done.
That's funny (Score:2)
I think that was his point. He doesn't believe there are no more significant developments to be had, but none are happening.
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"treatment for the easy and/or obvious stuff has been developed: "
Easy, obvious and affecting well-off Westerners, yes.
Easy, obvious and generating zero revenue for drug companies? Not so much.
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Nah. We were only going to abort the insecure, easily frightened babies - they're the ones who grow up to be Republicans.
I'm proud of myself right now. I currently have mod points, but I displayed sufficient integrity that I was able to restrain myself from modding the parent +1, Insightful.
It wasn't easy, because yes, like a lot of people, I consider the Republican Party to essentially be the Satanic priesthood...but I managed it. ;)
I'm Not Usually Squeamish, But... (Score:2, Interesting)
Besides, what if the stem cells turn out to pass on the "fatty" gene?
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donors needed (Score:2)
Re:donors needed (Score:4, Funny)
All those years.... (Score:3, Funny)
a new source of income (Score:1)
Work it into the price of... (Score:2)
Can you imagine if the plastic surgeons actually worked this into the price of liposuction, everyone would be getting it, as their substantial donation of fat could give them a reimbursement of sorts....cool!
But once everybody has to pay health care.... (Score:1)
But once everybody has to pay health care premiums to the private insurance corporations you just know they'll whomp on "obese" people. They're - Baucus and "the Gang of Six" - already looking at charging smokers more, and charging people who are 60 (just about when their income goes into decline with retirement) five times as much as somebody who is 20.
So we'll end up without any fat to fill the jugs for the people who can afford to buy the life-extending treatments that will come on-line with ready acces
Of course .... (Score:2)
It turned out that this new development eventually put Tyler Durden's soap-making enterprise out of business.....
Lack of quality control in bulk cell therapies (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with any approach using "bulk" cell therapies, particularly from older individuals, is the lack of quality control over the cells involved. With large cell numbers harvested from individuals the cells will have accumulated a variety of mutations, some of which are likely to make the cells cancer prone. Anyone undergoing therapy using large volumes of cells which may not have been subject to multiple levels of quality screening is asking for cancer. Any physician performing therapies using such cells is asking for a malpractice suit. You may be able to get away with this in 40 year old patients where the accumulation of mutations is lower, but with 60+ year old patients the risks will be higher and the success rate of the therapies will be lower. You have to ask why a company, such as Regenexx, which is actually performing human stem cell therapies, is (a) using marrow derived stem cells (which have lower mutagen and free radical exposure compared with adipose tissue); and (b) makes clear distinctions between the GOOD/FAIR/POOR prospects of people undergoing therapies. There are several cases in the literature and conference reports that stem cell therapy success becomes progressively poorer with the age of the donor. For example bone marrow transplants from old mice into young mice have a well deserved reputation for failure.
It is useful to note that all living humans are the product of a single cell, and that those humans are subjected to some fairly rigorous quality control tests (conception and gestation) and that if 60-70% of human conceptions end in miscarriages (as currently is believed) then the quality control is fairly ruthless. If one is playing with numbers of cells which may exceed the number of humans on the planet [1] it is reasonable to start discussing that they have a natural (cumulative) "mutational load" equal to that of all of humanity (plus all of humanity that has ever been conceived). I think the odds may be better at Russian roulette.
Disclosure: I am the author of a pending patent on methods to identify "pristine", e.g. "least mutated", stem cells which can be used for therapeutic purposes.
1. Dealing with billions of cells is not uncommon in bulk therapies if one considers that the human body by various measures probably contains 10-100 trillion cells.
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Not to be flippant, but it almost sounds like you are spreading peremptive FUD against a treatment that might end-up competing with procedures that use "your baby".
Any physician performing therapies using such cells is asking for a malpractice suit. You may be able to get away with this in 40 year old patients where the accumulation of mutations is lower, but with 60+ year old patients the risks will be higher and the success rate of the therapies will be lower.
You fail to define the timescale which this increased risk of cancer operates on, and how the risk increases over-time. For example if the increased risk is only a few percent in the first 10-20 years, but then increases dramatically afterwards, I doubt many patients in their 60+ would care if it ment having the tissue/organs they needed without
What a boon to restaurant critics! (Score:1)
Makes pretty good soap too. (Score:2)
Just saying....
How much can I get for my fat? (Score:2)
I've got a spare lots of lbs of fat to get rid of, how much can I get per lb for selling the stem cells?
Unfortunately it's likely a commodity market since over 60% of the USA is obese. Sigh.
So, in the future... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll take three triple cheeseburgers, a 40-pack of McNuggets and two "pounders", thanks.
great! (?) (Score:1)