Philadelphia, PA, January 25, 2012 - A significant obstacle to progress in understanding psychiatric disorders is the difficulty in obtaining living brain tissue for study so that disease processes can be studied directly. Recent advances in basic cellular neuroscience now suggest that, for some purposes, cultured neural stem cells may be studied in order to research psychiatric disease mechanisms. But where can one obtain these cells outside of the brain?

Increasingly, schizophrenia research is turning to the nose. Strange as it may seem, the idea makes sense because the olfactory mucosa, the sense organ of smell in the nose, is continually regenerating new sensory neurons from "adult" stem cells. These neurons are among the very few nerve cells outside of the skull that connect directly to nerve cells in the brain.

Over several decades, researchers found that these cells can be collected directly by obtaining a small tissue sample, called a biopsy. By taking small pieces of olfactory tissue from the nose, researchers of this new study were able to gain access to the stem cells from patients with schizophrenia and compare them to cells from healthy individuals.

January 24, 2012

The National Institutes of Health has funded a multi-year study to determine what role adult stem cells might play in repairing damaged coronary arteries, a complication that often occurs in patients after they undergo angioplasty and stenting.

The five-year, $3.3 million grant was awarded to a Creighton University School of Medicine researcher.

With angioplasty, a catheter-guided balloon is inserted to open a narrowed coronary artery. A wire mesh stent is typically implanted during the procedure to keep the artery open.

But eleven to18 percent of all patients experience restenosis, a re-narrowing of the artery, within three to four years of an angioplasty.

Men in need of penis reconstruction could soon enjoy the benefits of a special ingredient: stem cells. A new study in rats shows that lacing a penis graft with adult stem cells yields better healing and sexual function than using the graft alone. The finding may point the way to improved treatments for a variety of human penile impairments.

Men with penis injuries, deformities, or severe Peyronie's disease-which causes excessive scarring that can curve or shrink the penis-sometimes need surgery to reconstruct their genitalia and restore their sexual function. Many receive a graft made of their own tissue, cadaver tissue, or pig intestines, but the surgery can cause complications, including erectile dysfunction.

Wayne Hellstrom, a urologic surgeon at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, Louisiana, who regularly treats men with Peyronie's disease and other penile problems, wanted to offer his patients a surgical intervention with fewer side effects. So he teamed up with colleagues in California and China to build a better penis graft.

January 17, 2012

Jonathan Dordick

Chemicals in pharmaceutical drugs can obviously save lives. But as more and stronger chemicals have been introduced, our basic knowledge of the broader health impact of all these chemicals has not kept up with the rapid pace of innovation. There is exceptionally little information on how chemicals in our drugs and also in the environment around us, including on the food we eat, impact some of the most important cells in our body: stem cells. Without basic knowledge and tests on the impact of chemicals on our stem cells, we may be unwittingly damaging essential regenerative functions in our body.

Bioengineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, have been awarded a more than $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study how chemicals in drugs and our environment impact our stem cells.

Leading the research effort for Rensselaer is Jonathan Dordick, director of the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) and the Howard P. Isermann '42 Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering. Dordick is co-principal investigator on the grant with David Schaffer, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and co-director of the Berkeley Stem Cell Center at the University of California, Berkeley.