• Researchers have found a way to reprogram cells from mouse tails to behave like mature liver cells, which appear to be able to repair damaged livers, according to a study published in Nature. Read more... According to this research the hepatocytes generated from a patient’s own induced pluripotent stem cells could theoretically avoid immunological rejection! 

Evidence for human lung stem cells!

• Translational Nephrology: Tubular regeneration and the role of bone marrow cells: ‘stem cell therapy’ – a panacea? (by Marc E. De Broe): The kidney possesses an impressive regeneration capacity and is the most performant among all tissues in the body. Yet ischaemic injury to the kidney produces acute tubular necrosis and apoptosis followed by tubular regeneration and recovery of renal function. Although mitotic cells are present in the tubules of postischaemic kidneys, the origins of the proliferating cells were considered until recently as the result of this regeneration capacity of the kidney, whereby the surviving remaining tubular cells start proliferating and migrating along the denuded basement membrane... Oliver and colleagues demonstrated that the adult kidney contained numerous (resident) stem cells in the renal papilla, which proliferate and disappear from the papilla during the repair phase of ischaemia. In other words, the adult kidney possesses a ‘reservoir of kidney stem cells’... read more at Oxford journal "Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation" 

• Although the kidney has been suspected, though not definitively proven, to contain organ-specific pluripotent stem cells, their role in regeneration after renal injury is uncertain (1–3). Recently, however, several investigators found evidence for a renoprotective role of non–organ-specific stem cells in acute renal failure. Arriero et al. (4) reported dramatic protection of the kidney against ischemia/ reperfusion injury after injection of in vitro expanded skeletal muscle-derived stem cells, differentiated along the endothelial lineage (but not after injection of nondifferentiated stem cells). The renal function after ischemia was improved and engraftment of the transplanted cells into the renal microvasculature was documented... read more at Journal of American Society of Nephrology.

• Poulsom et al. reported that bone marrow derived cells expressing epithelial cell markers could be detected in histologically normal mouse kidneys. In men who received a kidney transplant from female donors, Y chromosome containing cells expressing renal tubular cell markers were observed in the kidneys after injury. Similarly, Gupta et al. reported that in men who received female kidneys, 1% of the tubular cells were Y chromosome positive after the kidneys had recovered from acute tubular necrosis... read more at the Journal of American Society of Nephrology

Antioxidant properties of AFA

• Antioxidant properties of a novel phycocyanin extract from the blue-green alga Aphanizomenon flos-aquae (AFA): Aphanizomenon flos-aquae (AFA) is a fresh water unicellular blue-green alga (cyanophyta) rich in phycocyanin (PC), a photosynthetic pigment with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties... read more

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