HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

The symposium was the second annual event aimed at bringing a broad community together to discuss stem cell research. (Staff photo T.J. Kirkpatrick/Harvard News Office)

These findings were among several presented Dec. 2 at the Harvard Club of Boston during the Second Annual Tony and Shelly Malkin Stem Cell Symposium, which drew more than 300.

The symposium, titled "Stem Cell Biology and Therapy in Organ Systems: Challenges and Opportunities," was the second annual event aimed at bringing a broad community together to discuss stem cell research.

Harvard Stem Cell Institute Co-Directors Douglas Melton, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences, and Professor of Medicine David Scadden opened the event, giving a brief summary of progress at the institute in the past year.

The Stem Cell Institute has 38 principal faculty, 42 affiliated faculty, and more than 600 affiliates, Scadden said. It holds regular inter-laboratory meetings to foster exchanges of ideas among researchers and has established core laboratory facilities. It hosts a series of discussions on ethics in society and a summer student program, and has begun giving out seed grants to foster work in innovative areas.

"We are continuing to grow this program, and its success is dependent on our ability to engage the broader community," Scadden said.

The presentations were moderated by Kenneth Chien, director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.

Presenters discussed a variety of fields including the correction of heart defects in embryonic mice through the use of mouse embryonic stem cells, stem cells in adult mammal epidermis, regulatory circuitry of human embryonic stem cells, liver tissue engineering, and new stem-cell-related models of cancer biology.

Sean Morrison of the University of Michigan Center for Stem Cell Biology said understanding stem cells has brought a new understanding of cancer biology. The growth of certain cancers - leukemia, breast, and brain cancers, specifically - has been linked to stem-cell-like tumor cells that appear able both to reproduce themselves and to differentiate into other tumor cells. Researchers believe these cancer stem cells may be responsible for the proliferation of cancer cells in these illnesses, providing a new target for treatment, Morrison said.

"The ability to proliferate widely is limited to a particular type of cancer cell as opposed to cells forming the bulk of the tumor," Morrison said.

If researchers can effectively destroy these cancer stem cells, they can stop tumors from growing, effectively changing a tumor from malignant to benign. This would eliminate the need to eradicate every cancer cell in the body and potentially reduce the need for the highly toxic treatments today that kill many healthy cells along with the cancer cells.

"The cancer stem cell model has deep implications in how we treat cancer patients," Morrison said.

Because cancer stem cells are so similar to normal stem cells, however, researchers have had a difficult time finding compounds that will kill the cancer stem cells but leave healthy stem cells alone. Morrison presented recent research that, in mice, has shown a way to kill cancer stem cells without harming normal stem cells.

While much embryonic stem cell research has focused on the ability of these cells to help adults with certain defects, Robert Benezra of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center presented the results of research on the ability of mouse embryonic stem cells to repair heart damage in embryonic mice. The mice, which typically die before birth because of heart defects, were born with apparently normal hearts when embryonic stem cells were injected at an early stage of development.

Other speakers included Sangeeta Bhatia of the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Fiona Watt, of the London Research Institute; and Richard Young, of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Harvard Business School Professor William Sahlman addressed the symposium at dinner Friday on "Leveraging Human Capital at Harvard University."

Morrison said there's a lot of excitement in the broader scientific community around Harvard's stem cell efforts.

"There's so much excitement about the things that are going on at Harvard. Things going on here will affect [stem cell] science for years to come," Morrison said.

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