China announces stem-cell rules

http://www.nature.com/news/china-announces-stem-cell-rules-1.18252

• David Cyranoski

26 August 2015

 

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Many scientists have been itching to get started.

Qi Zhou, a stem-cell and cloning scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Zoology in Beijing, has been waiting for the guidelines so he can move his research from animal models to humans. In unpublished work, his team has already implanted dopamine-producing neurons derived from stem cells into monkeys that have been chemically induced to show symptoms similar to those of Parkinson’s disease. The monkeys have shown some improvement, and he now hopes to try the treatment on humans. “I think it’s time, time to start doing some clinical research,” he says.

Jianwu Dai, a regenerative-medicine specialist at the CAS Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology in Beijing, hopes to implant a small collagen scaffold seeded with stem cells into humans to try to repair spinal-cord injuries. His team has treated some 25 people using the scaffold seeded with mononuclear cells, a type of blood cell taken from bone marrow, and Dai says he has seen some improvements. But he thinks that neural stem cells derived from embryonic stem cells will deliver better results.

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Fish Oil May Slow Schizophrenia

Omega-3 supplementation reduced progression rates among people with early-stage symptoms of schizophrenia, according to a small trial.

Seven years ago, investigators enrolled 81 people aged 13 to 25 with early signs of schizophrenia in a clinical trial to test the effects of omega-3 fish oil pills. A paper published this week (August 11) in Nature Communications reported on 71 of those participants, pointing to a notable benefit of the supplements: only 10 percent of those taking fish oils ultimately developed schizophrenia, compared with 40 percent of the placebo group.

“I don’t want to sound like a cynic or a skeptic, but it’s almost too good to be true,” psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman of Columbia University Medical Center in New York City who was not involved in the study told ScienceNews.
Schizophrenia usually starts to manifest in the first 20 to 30 years of life, with minor delusions and paranoid thoughts often occurring in the teenage years or younger. But only about a third of people who present with such early symptoms eventually develop psychosis, New Scientist reported. After researchers found that the blood cells of schizophrenia patients have lower levels of omega-3 fatty acids than those of healthy controls, scientists in the field began to investigate the possibility that supplementing these compounds could treat the disorder. Results of early trials have been mixed, but this latest study points to the potential benefit of fatty acids if taken early enough.
“Schizophrenia is a major cause of disability, but early treatment has been linked to better outcomes,” coauthor Paul Amminger at the University of Melbourne in Australia told The Guardian. “Our study gives hope that there may be alternatives to antipsychotic medication.”

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/43733/title/Fish-Oil-May-Slow-Schizophrenia/

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150811/ncomms8934/full/ncomms8934.html