Bone Stem Cells can be used to mend damaged hips

March 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

London, Mar.20 (ANI): Bone stem cells could in future be used instead of bone from donors as part of an innovative new hip replacement treatment, according to scientists at the University of Southampton.

A team from the University’s School of Medicine believe that introducing a patient’s own skeletal stem cells into the hip joint during bone grafting would encourage more successful regrowth and repair.

The grafting technique is used to repair the thigh bone and joint during replacement (known as ”revision”) hip replacement therapy, a procedure in which surgeons introduce donor bone to the damaged area to provide support for the new hip stem.

In this collaborative study between the University of Southampton and The University of Nottingham, researchers will use adult stem cells from bone marrow in combination with an innovative impaction process and polymer scaffolds.

In a two-year study, funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), researchers aim to improve the outcomes of this high impact procedure.

“Surgeons currently use bone from donors during bone grafting, so introducing a patient’s own stem cells to create a living cell or material composite would be a totally new approach,” comments Professor Richard Oreffo, an expert in musculoskeletal science at the University of Southampton, who is leading the project.

“This is very much the beginning of a project to investigate the potential for this new technique, but our preliminary work suggests this may have significant therapeutic implications.”

When a hip joint is damaged, part of the thigh bone or femur, including the ball, can be removed and a new, artificial joint fixed to the remaining thigh bone. Revision hip replacement occurs when that artificial joint needs to be changed.

Professor Oreffo will introduce the stem cells to the hip joint using a scaffold, or support structure, which is designed to protect them, and a new impaction process. The polymer scaffolds will be developed by Professors Steve Howdle and Kevin Shakesheff, experts in chemistry and tissue engineering at the University of Nottingham.

Professor Howdle explains: “Building upon strong collaborations with tissue engineering experts, this new grant will allow researchers at Nottingham to take their materials nearer to the clinic.

“This could have great benefits for patients, and also offer a significant cost saving for healthcare authorities; but first we need to verify and build upon our preliminary data.”

“A major part of the work at Nottingham will involve scaling up the supercritical fluid processing apparatus to create larger and more uniform batches of polymer scaffolds for testing.”

Dr Chris Watkins, MRC’s Translation Theme Leader, says: “Resilience, repair and replacement is a priority research area in the MRC’s strategic plan, ‘Research Changes Lives’. This study highlights how a regenerative approach can offer real hope in addressing a significant problem for an ageing population.”

This funding will allow the groups to build on initial studies that show that degradable polymer scaffolds prepared using supercritical carbon dioxide technology can have a dramatic effect on surgical procedures, such as inserting a hip implant in revision hip surgery.

The provisional studies carried out in Southampton show that the polymers can aid bone formation through the creation of a living cell/material composite and aid attachment of the hip implant.

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Fossil of “Mini T. rex” unearthed in China

September 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, September 18 (ANI): Researchers in China have unearthed a small tyrannosauroid fossil in China, which is no more than three meters long, and predates the Tyrannosaurus rex by tens of millions of years.

This finding means that such specialized physical features did not evolve as the prehistoric predators grew in size.

Instead, they were present for feeding efficiency at all sizes of the dinosaurs during their reign in the Cretaceous Period.

Paul Sereno from the University of Chicago, along with colleagues, studied the new, small-bodied fossil, naming it Raptorex kriegsteini, and estimated that it was a young adult when it died.

They examined the skull, teeth, nose, spine, shoulders, forearms, pelvis, and hind legs of the new fossil, comparing the features to larger evolutionary versions of tyrannosauroid dinosaurs.

“First, we used the best mechanical preparation of the specimen possible, which entails the finest needles and air abrasives under a microscope,” Sereno said.

“Then, we made molds and casts of the cranial bones, assembled a cast skull, and sent that skull through a CT scanner at the University of Chicago hospital to get the snout cross-section,” he added.

“We used silicone on the skull roof to cast the forebrain of R. kriegstein. Finally, I made a thin-section from one femur, or thigh bone, for microscopic examination, and determined that the individual had lived to be five or six years old,” he further added.

The researchers conclude that the “predatory skeletal design” of R. kriegsteini was simply scaled up with little modification in its carnivorous descendants, whose body masses eventually grew 90 times greater.

Sereno and his colleagues also use this new fossil to propose and describe three major morphological stages in the evolutionary history of tyrannosauroid dinosaurs. (ANI)

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World’s first patient implanted with smallest rechargeable neurostimulator completes one year

September 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Sep 12 (ANI): The world’s first patient to have been implanted with the smallest ever neurostimulator for chronic pain is celebrating the one-year anniversary of his procedure today.

One year ago, former U.S. Army parachutist Adam Hammond became the first patient in the world to have been implanted with an Eon Mini neurostimulator.

Adam got the chronic pain after a skydiving accident when his parachute deployed incorrectly, leaving him in a coma with life-threatening injuries, including a severed spine, broken femur, fractured pelvic bone, and torn aorta.

Although Adam recovered from his accident, he battled chronic pain that left him dependent on a wheelchair.

But, today, the picture has completely changed and Adam is active and exercising, studying for his law degree and no longer in need of a wheelchair.

Adam also went to Washington, D.C., recently to meet with representatives and advocate for pain legislation.

However, Adam is not the only chronic pain sufferers who have been helped with neurostimulation, an FDA-approved therapy that uses electrical pulses to interrupt pain signals to the brain.

Over 60,000 St. Jude Medical neurostimulation devices have been implanted in patients in 35 countries around the world. (ANI)

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Pre-Hispanic Zapotec rulers carried around human thighbones as symbol of power

July 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, July 13 (ANI): New findings from a Field Museum (Chicago) excavation team has confirmed that pre-Hispanic Zapotec rulers carried around human femurs, or thigh bones, as a symbol of power and legitimacy.

Scientists had earlier found evidence of this theory from a carved lintel at the site of Lambityeco, where a ruler is depicted with a femur in his hand.

Now, a Field Museum excavation team has confirmed that they did remove femurs from earlier graves and that this custom may have been widely practiced by heads of households outside of the ruling class.

The missing femur was located in an early adobe cist internment, circa 500 AD, that lay under an excavated house at the Mitla Fortress, in the Valley of Oaxaca, some 322 miles southeast of Mexico City.

While excavating this residential terrace, or house lot, the Museum team found a total of 16 burials that include 21 individuals.

The systematic excavations are the largest ever conducted at this site well known to archaeologists for more than 150 years.

Field Museum Curator of Mesoamerican Anthropology, Gary Feinman, and Adjunct Curator of Anthropology, Linda Nicholas, are analyzing the burial sample and other finds from the Mitla Fortress.

The Fortress is less than two miles west of Mitla, which is indigenously known as the “Place of the Dead.”

Although this ancient Zapotec custom of bearing a femur of a corpse has long been recognized, the excavated burial provides clear evidence of the re-opening of an earlier burial in order to remove a bone.

The evidence could further reveal that this bone-carrying custom may apply beyond rulers – since the excavated house is not a ruler’s residence.

Field Museum archaeologists hope to excavate a more elaborate house in the future to gain more perspective. (ANI)

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‘T. rex’ protein may have contained traces of ostrich rather than chicken

March 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

London, Feb 28 (ANI): A fresh analysis of ancient protein from a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex has revealed traces of ostrich haemoglobin in the original samples, which in an earlier study, were determined to have matched that of a chicken.

In the previous study, researchers identified seven fragments from a protein called collagen1, found in connective tissue, and said their sequences most closely matched the chicken version of the protein2.

The samples came from the fossilized femur of a T. Rex. As well as further strengthening the evidence for the link between dinosaurs and birds, the findings would make the protein the oldest ever to be sequenced – by around 68 million years.

Now, according to a report in Nature News, Martin McIntosh, a mass spectrometrist at the University of Washington in Seattle, has claimed to have identified ostrich haemoglobin protein in a cache of 48,000 protein spectra.

McIntosh suspects the samples were somehow contaminated with proteins from modern species.

McIntosh’s findings came to light on February 23 at the sixth annual meeting of USHUPO – part of the international Human Proteome Organisation – in San Diego, California.

In the course of a lecture, Pavel Pevzner, a computational biologist at the University of California, San Diego, cited McIntosh’s work and called for an independent review of the original results.

He said that his analysis provides statistical support for two of seven collagen proteins the Science authors said were from T. rex.

But now, the contamination issue has raised new concerns about the validity of the earlier findings.

McIntosh also wrote a technical comment for Science, suggesting contamination on the basis the haemoglobin spectra – but it was rejected.

Peer reviewers said that one fragment of ostrich haemoglobin was not enough to suggest contamination had occurred.

Though McIntosh accepted that his paper doesn’t prove contamination, he still believes the samples may be tainted. (ANI)

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