Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more
•••

Ian Copland

Freezing stem cells disrupts their function

What applies to meat, vegetables and fish may also apply to cells for use in cell therapy: frozen often isn’t quite as good.

Ian Copland and colleagues from Emory’s Personalized Immunotherapy Center have a paper this week in Stem Cells Reports discussing how freezing and thawing stem cells messes them up. Specifically, it disrupts their actin cytoskeletons and impairs their ability to find their niches in the body. Culturing the cells for 48 hours after thawing does seem to correct the problem, though.

The findings have some straightforward implications for researchers planning to test cell therapies in clinical applications. The authors conclude:

Until such time as a cryopreservation and thawing procedure can yield a viable and fully functional MSC product immediately after thawing, our data support the idea of using live MSCs rather than post-thaw cryo MSCs for clinical evaluation of MSCs as an immunosuppressive agent.

Notably, the Emory Personalized Immunotherapy Center has built a process designed around offering never-frozen autologous (that is, the patient’s own) mesenchymal stem cells, as therapies for autoimmune disorders such as Crohn’s disease.

Posted on June 6, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment