World Congress on Stem Cell Biology and Biobanking September 03-04, 2018 Tokyo, Japan

Stem cell genomics analyzes the genomes of stem cells. The study of stem cell genomics has wide reaching implications in the study of stem cell biology and possible therapeutic usages of stem cells. Application of research in this field could lead to drug discovery and information on diseases by the molecular characterization of the pluripotent stem cell through DNA and transcriptome sequencing and looking at the epigenetic changes of stem cells and subsequent products. One step in that process is single cell phenotypic analysis, and the connection between the phenotype and genotype of specific stem cells. 

Cancer stem cells are cancer cells (tumor cells) that possess characteristics associated with normal stem cells, specifically the ability to give rise to all cell types found in a particular cancer sample. CSCs are therefore tumorigenic (tumor-forming), perhaps in contrast to other non-tumorigenic cancer cells. CSCs may generate tumors through the stem cell processes of self-renewal and differentiation into multiple cell types. Such cells are hypothesized to persist in tumors as a distinct population and cause relapse and metastasis by giving rise to new tumors. Therefore, development of specific therapies targeted at CSCs holds hope for improvement of survival and quality of life of cancer patients, especially for patients with metastatic disease.

Tissue engineering is the use of a combination of cells, engineering and materials methods, and suitable biochemical and physicochemical factors to improve or replace biological tissues. Tissue engineering involves the use of a scaffold for the formation of new viable tissue for a medical purpose. The goal of tissue engineering is to assemble functional constructs that restore, maintain, or improve damaged tissues or whole organs. Artificial skin and cartilage are examples of engineered tissues that have been approved by the FDA; however, currently they have limited use in human patients. The term regenerative medicine is often used synonymously with tissue engineering, although those involved in regenerative medicine place more emphasis on the use of stem cells or progenitor cells to produce tissues

Stem Cell Therapy (SCT) is the treatment of various disorders, non-serious to life threatening, by using stem cells. These stem cells can be procured from a lot of different sources and used to potentially treat more than 80 disorders, including neuromuscular and degenerative disorders.                                                                                                                                                                             Stem cells from a donor (either from cord blood or bone marrow) are known to reconstitute the defective bone marrow and permanently overcome the disorder.

Degenerative disorders arise from degeneration or wear and tear of bone, cartilage, muscle, fat or any other tissue, cell or organ. This could occur due to a variety of reasons, but it's normally the process known as aging, or 'getting old' that is the biggest cause. The disorders have a slow and insidious onset but once contracted, can be long-standing, pain-staking and lifelong. These disorders can affect any organ of the body. The common degenerative disorders are diabetes, osteoarthritis, stroke, chronic renal failure, congestive cardiac failure, myocardial infarction, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease etc

Stem cell transplantation, sometimes referred to as bone marrow transplant, is a procedure that replaces unhealthy blood-forming cells with healthy cells. Stem cell transplantation allows doctors to give large doses of chemotherapy or radiation therapy to increase the chance of eliminating blood cancer in the bone marrow and then restoring normal blood cell production. Researchers continue to improve stem cell transplantation procedures, making them an option for more patients.

The basis for stem cell transplantation is that blood cells (red cells, white cells and platelets) and immune cells (lymphocytes) arise from the stem cells, which are present in marrow, peripheral blood and cord blood. Intense chemotherapy or radiation therapy kills the patient's stem cells. This stops the stem cells from making enough blood and immune cells.

The stem cell niche is the in vivo microenvironment where stem cells both reside and receive stimuli that determine their fate. Therefore, the niche should not be considered simply a physical location for stem cells, rather as the place where extrinsic signals interact and integrate to influence stem sell behavior. These stimuli include cell-to-cell and cell-matrix interactions and signals (molecules) that activate and/or repress genes and transcription programs. As a direct consequence of this interaction, stem cells are maintained in a dormant state, induced to self-renewal or commit to a more differentiated state.

Regenerative medicine is a broad field that includes tissue engineering but also incorporates research on self-healing where the body uses its own systems, sometimes with help foreign biological material to recreate cells and rebuild tissues and organs. The terms “tissue engineering” and “regenerative medicine” have become largely interchangeable, as the field hopes to focus on cures instead of treatments for complex, often chronic, diseases. This field continues to evolve. In addition to medical applications, non-therapeutic applications include using tissues as biosensors to detect biological or chemical threat agents, and tissue chips that can be used to test the toxicity of an experimental medication.  Regenerative medicine includes the generation and use of therapeutic stem cells, tissue engineering and the production of artificial organs. Regenerative medicine seeks to replace tissue or organs that have been damaged by disease, trauma, or congenital issues, vs. the current clinical strategy that focuses primarily on treating the symptoms. The tools used to realize these outcomes are tissue engineering, cellular therapies, and medical devices and artificial organs.

Adult stem cells, like all stem cells, share at least two characteristics. First, they can make identical copies of themselves for long periods of time; this ability to proliferate is referred to as long-term self-renewal. Second, they can give rise to mature cell types that have characteristic morphologies (shapes) and specialized functions. Typically, stem cells generate an intermediate cell type or types before they achieve their fully differentiated state. The intermediate cell is called a precursor or progenitor cell. Progenitor or precursor cells in fetal or adult tissues are partly differentiated cells that divide and give rise to differentiated cells. Adult stem cells are rare. Their primary functions are to maintain the steady state functioning of a cell-called homeostasis-and, with limitations, to replace cells that die because of injury or disease.

Embryonic stem cells are obtained from the inner cell mass of the blastocyst. They can give rise to every cell type in the fully formed body, but not the placenta and umbilical cord. These are incredibly valuable because they provide a renewable resource for studying normal development and disease, and for testing drugs and other therapies. Human embryonic stem cells have been derived primarily from blastocysts. Embryonic stem cells possess the capacity to divide for long periods and retain their ability to make all cell types within the organism. These are termed pluripotent stem cells. The undifferentiated embryonic stem cells are next stimulated to differentiate into the desired type of cell. For this, the cells are allowed to clump together to form embryoid bodies. This helps them differentiate spontaneously. They make nerve cells, heart cells, brain cells, muscle cells and other types of cells.

Self renewal and proliferation of stem cell populations is controlled, in part, by induction of apoptosis. The number of stem cells is therefore a balance between those lost to differentiation / apoptosis and those gained through proliferation. Apoptosis of stem cells is believed to be a dynamic process which changes in response to environmental conditions. For example, the release of stem cell factor inhibits apoptosis following spinal cord injury, presumably in an attempt to promote tissue repair. Dysregulation of apoptosis in stem cells is believed to underlie some cancer pathologies, where apoptotic resistance results in uncontrolled growth (i.e. glioblastoma). Controlling apoptosis is also an important focus for studies of stem cell transplantation, where inhibition may increase the survival of grafted cells during replacement therapy. Harnessing the full therapeutic potential of stem cells will require full elucidation of the signal transduction cascades for proliferation, differentiation, and apoptosis.

Computational biology, a branch of biology involving the application of computer science to the understanding and modeling of the structures and processes of biology, that referred to as bioinformatics. It entails the use of computational methods for the representation and apply advanced analysis techniques that make it possible to dissect complex collections of data from a wide range of technologies and sources.

The fields of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine research are fundamentally about understanding dynamic cellular processes such as development, reprogramming, repair, differentiation and the loss, acquisition or maintenance of pluripotency. Whereas bioinformatics is used to interpret the information produced by such technologies. In order to precisely decipher these processes at a molecular level, it is critical to identify and study key regulatory genes and transcriptional circuits. Modern high-throughput molecular profiling technologies provide a powerful approach to addressing these questions as they allow the profiling of tens of thousands of gene products in a single experiment. Whereas bioinformatics is used to interpret the information produced by such technologies.

Epigenetics is the study of potentially heritable changes in gene expression that does not involve changes to the underlying DNA sequence - a change in phenotype without a change in genotype -which in turn affects how cells read the genes. Gene expression can be controlled through action of repressor protein that attach to silencer regions of DNA. Many types of epigenetic processes have been identified-they include methylation, acetylation, phosphorylation, ubiquitylation, and sumolyation. Other epigenetic mechanisms and considerations are likely to surface as work proceeds. Epigenetic processes are natural and essential to many organism functions, but if they occur improperly, there can be major adverse health and behavioral effects. One example of an epigenetic change in eukaryotic biology is the process of cellular differentiation. During morphogenesis, totipotent stem cells become the various pluripotent cell lines of the embryo, which in turn become fully differentiated cells. In other words, as a single fertilized egg cell - the zygote - continues to divide, the resulting daughter cells change into all the different cell types in an organism, including neurons, muscle cells, epithelium, endothelium of blood vessels, etc., by activating some genes while inhibiting the expression of others.

A biobank is a type of biorepository that stores biological samples (usually human) for use in research. The wide array of biospecimens (including blood, saliva, plasma, and pure DNA) maintained in biobanks is delineating as libraries of the human organism. They’re rigorously characterized to see the final and distinctive options of the continual cell line and therefore the absence or presence of contaminants, thus establishing a basic understanding regarding the staple from that the biological product is being derived and maintained. Biobanks have become an important resource in medical research, supporting many types of contemporary research like genomics and personalized medicine. For example, many diseases are associated with single-nucleotide polymorphisms, and performing genome-wide association studies using large collections of samples which represent tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals can help to identify disease biomarkers. Many researchers struggled to acquire sufficient samples prior to the advent of biobanks.

Ethical issues are commonly present in many aspects of Biobanking. The fact that Bio banks deal with human samples, invading an individual autonomy or limiting self-control, provokes a number of ethical issues. Who is actually competent to give informed consent and donate a sample? When individuals donate part of their body to a bio bank, how is that human sample processed? Who is the owner of the sample? Who should decide how it should be used? Who has the right to know individual results of research? These and many more ethical dilemmas exist in the ethical framework of bio banks. With the recent rapid developments in Biobanking, all of these issues are magnified with plenty of further new questions continuously arising. Ethical framework has been the most controversial issue in the domain of bio banking. Thus, it is not surprising that there is a substantial literature focusing on ethical dilemmas in bio banking, such as informed consent, privacy, protection, and returning of results to participants. For many years, researchers at CRB have provided constructive advice on how to deal with ethical aspects of research using human tissue material and personal data. For more than 80 years tissue has been derived from human bodies, stored, distributed and used for therapeutic, educational, forensic and research purposes as part of healthcare routine in most western countries.

Stem cell therapy has opened a new avenue in the area of drug discovery and development. Biopharmaceutical companies have been working in deciphering vital applications of stem cell technologies in the drug development processes so as to reduce the high attrition rate of late stage drug candidates, which has been growing at a fast pace in the past decade. Advent of stem cell technologies has provided new prospects to build innovative cellular models. The constantly evolving methodologies used for isolation of human/animal embryonic stem cells (ESCs), bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells, umbilical cord stem cells, adult tissue-specific neural stem cells and human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) have led to the advancement of numerous high throughput and combinatorial screening technologies thus supplementing the role of stem cell models in drug discovery

Cell therapy or cryotherapy is the transfer of cells into a patient with a goal of improving the disease.  From beginning blood transfusions were considered to be the first type of cell therapy to be practised as routine. Later, Bone marrow transplantation has also become a well-established concept which involves treatment of much kind of blood disorders including anaemia, leukaemia, lymphoma and rare immunodeficiency diseases. Gene therapy is an experimental technique that uses genes to treat or prevent disease. In the future, this technique may allow doctors to treat a disorder by inserting a gene into a patient’s cells instead of using drugs or surgery. cell and gene Therapies have made vital therapeutic advances in less than three decades. Inside this brief span traverse, both gene and cell treatments have investigated numerous ideas, created different innovations, surveyed the advances in various animal models, and tried the novel treatments in numerous human clinical trials of dreaded infections. Some energizing changes have been seen in a few infections by the medications. Although a few trials did not give the hope for advancements, every trial has propelled our comprehension of the complex interactions between various tissues and highlighted challenges for further research

Bio marker is a biological molecule found in blood, other body fluids, or tissues that is a sign of a normal or abnormal process, or of a condition or disease. A bio marker may be used to see how well the body responds to a treatment for a disease or condition. In cancer research and medicine, bio markers are used in three primary ways:

·      To help diagnose conditions, as in the case of identifying early stage cancers (Diagnostic)

·      To forecast how aggressive a condition is, as in the case of determining a patient's ability to fare in the absence of treatment (Prognostic)

·      To predict how well a patient will respond to treatment (Predictive)

Human beings suffer from a myriad of disorders caused by biochemical or biophysical alteration of physiological systems leading to organ failure. For a number of these conditions, stem cells and their enormous reparative potential may be the last hope for restoring function to these failing organ or tissue systems. To harness the potential of stem cells for biotherapeutic applications, we need to work at the size scale of molecules and processes that govern stem cells fate. Nanotechnology provides us with such capacity. Therefore, effective amalgamation of nanotechnology and stem cells - medical nanoscience or nanomedicine - offers immense benefits to the human race. stem cell nanotechnoogy research focuses   on several important areas such as stem cell visualization and imaging, genetic modifications and reprogramming by gene delivery systems, creating stem cell niche, and similar therapeutic applications.