The personal finance expert Suze Orman, who found fame on Oprah, recently addressed the importance of making cord blood banking a priority. Her show features a segment called “Can I Afford It?” in which she takes calls from viewers and provides candid financial advice on the air.

An expectant mom called in for advice as to whether it made financial sense to store the baby’s umbilical cord blood. The caller explained that her doctor recommended banking baby’s cord blood, and based on her own research, she thought it was a good idea.

Suze advised the caller, saying “let me just make this easy for you, since I am a believer in stem cell research and I am a believer that we need to do things like this…even if you couldn’t quite afford it at this point, I would have you figure out how you could.” She added enthusiastically, “Go on, save your baby in the future.”

Two grants worth $10 million will help to further two stem-cell technologies more into clinical trials, while advancing research on a series of other nascent stem cell projects throughout Greater Cleveland.

The first grant of $5 million from Ohio’s Third Frontier Program will go to the Center for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, and an additional $5 million will be matched through project participants. The center’s members include Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals and the local biopharmaceutical company Athersys.

Some of the grant money will go to Athersys to perform a Phase II clinical trial on MultiStem, an adult stem cell therapy to help victims of heart attacks, strokes and a complication of bone marrow transplants.

Three organizations are joining together in an effort to further Stem Cell Research. The initiative looks to have mothers donate umbilical cord blood for use in stem cell research.

Wilmington’s St Francis Hospital and the Community Blood Services are working with the Brady Kohn Foundation on this effort to treat life-threatening diseases.

As part of this program all women giving birth at St Francis Hospital will be offered the opportunity to donate their baby’s umbilical cord blood.

Glioblastoma, the type of cancer that is diagnosed in about 10,000 Americans (and is the type suffered by U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy) each year, may originate in neural stem cells located in the brain.

Scientists studying in Michigan have found that a deficiency in a key tumor suppressor gene in the brain leads to Glioblastoma, the most common type of adult brain cancer. The study, conducted in mice that mimic human cancer, points the way to more effective future treatments and a way to screen for the disease early.

“We have to pay more attention to the stem cell niche” in both early detection and treatment, says Yuan Zhu, Ph.D., the study’s senior author and assistant professor in the departments of internal medicine and cell and developmental biology at the U-M Medical School.

If glioblastoma originates in neural stem cells in the subventricular zone in humans as it does in mice, the study suggests that doctors need to direct treatments there, as well as to the tumor, to eliminate the source of the cancer and keep it from returning, Zhu says.

Sophie Edward (age 8), who has been suffering from a rare form of leukemia underwent stem cell treatment three months ago and is making progress.

Leukemia is a cancer that affects the blood cells and is unfortunately one of the more common cancers found in children.

Regular control mechanisms in the blood break down and the bone marrow begins to produce large numbers of abnormal white blood cells, disturbing the  production of normal blood cells and ultimately affecting the vital functions that these blood cells carry out.

Leukemia is also classified as either lymphoid or myeloid, depending on the type of white blood cells affected.  It’s also categorized as either acute or chronic, depending on the speed of progression.

Sophie was diagnosed with a rare form of leukaemia, called acute lymphoblastic leukemia in February of 2008 and has tried bone marrow transplant previously, but eventually her bone marrow transplant did not take and she and her family had no other way left but to relay on stem cell transplant.

The original transplant that had eventually failed, took place at St James’s Hospital, in Leeds, UK back in October.

Three months ago Sophie underwent a special type of stem cell treatment that was the first of it’s kind in Leeds.

Doctors used part of the original bone marrow left over from the previous transplant, and it was transplanted unprepared (due to her being too ill and needing to be acted on immediately) and chemotherapy used to get rid of the cells she didn’t need.

According to Sophie’s mother, Emma Edwards of Newsome, Huddersfield, they watched carefully each day after the eight-year-old underwent the stem cell treatment three months ago, and after three months they are now very relieved as so far all the signs are good and she is starting to feel much better.

Almost all childhood leukaemias are of the acute form, meaning they progress rapidly.

Acute lymphoblastic (lymphoid) leukaemia (ALL) accounts for more than 80% of childhood leukemia cases.  It is the only form of leukaemia – and one of the few forms of cancer – that is less common in adults than in children.

Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) accounts for most of the remaining cases.

Chronic leukaemias, which progress slowly, are very rare in childhood.

Chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) accounts for less than 3% of childhood leukemias

Chronic lymphoblastic leukaemia is very rare in children.

Earlier this year, President Obama lifted restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research with many scientists hailing the decision as a fantastic boost for stem cell research, one of the most promising fields of research in medicine.

Since that signing, there have been several that have concluded that the plan could have the opposite effect, putting off-limits for federal support much of the research underway, including work that the Bush administration endorsed. “We’re very concerned,” said Amy Comstock Rick, chief executive of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, “If they don’t change this, very little current research would be eligible. It’s a huge issue.”

The main concern is the focus on strict new ethics criteria that the National Institutes of Health has proposed. Current advocates of stem cell research say that the majority of the research being done in the field at this time has passed close scrutiny but that the procedures varied and usually did not match the details specified in these newly proposed guidelines.

“It’s not that past practices were shoddy,” said Lawrence S. Goldstein, director of the stem cell program at the University of California at San Diego. “But they don’t necessarily meet every letter of the new guidelines moving forward. We’d have to throw everything out and start all over again.”

Cord Blood America, an umbilical cord blood stem cell preservation company, has received a commitment for up to $2.3 million to either buy or build its own laboratory for the purpose of storing of multiple stem cell products including umbilical cord blood stem cells. About $300,000 of the funding has already been received by the Cord Blood America to begin the laboratory purchase or construction, with the additional $2 million to be paid out in future installments.

Matthew Schissler, founder and CEO of Cord Blood America, said: “The funding is from a private, institutional investor and allows us to focus even further on our due diligence efforts that I announced earlier. Certain properties of the funding will be recorded as both an asset and a liability on our books.”

President Barack Obama’s recent lifting of restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research has puts him at odds with Pope Benedict and the American Roman Catholic Church. After Obama signed the order, the Vatican immediately condemned the move.

Obama’s executive order reversed restrictions placed on the research by his predecessor, George W. Bush, which freed up laboratories to start working with the cells, which can give rise to any kind of cell in the body.

Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said “This action is morally wrong because it encourages the destruction of innocent human life, treating vulnerable human beings as mere products to be harvested.”

Now that Mr. Obama has lifted the restrictions, Catholic theologians have been debating how embryonic stem cell research can be made “less morally repugnant”, in the words of one theologian, Father Thomas J. Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center of Georgetown University, who then suggested several ways the Obama administration could find middle ground.

His suggestions included not creating embryos for the sole purpose of research but instead using only excess embryos produced at fertility clinics that are scheduled to be destroyed anyway. He also said researchers should show that the work they are doing can’t be done with non-embryonic stem cells, and that the research done using the embryonic stem cells should try advancing toward the goal of using only non-embryonic stem cells.

Embryonic stem cells are once again getting attention this year, because of work being done by scientists at the University of Minnesota.

“Embryonic stem cells are often talked about to treat things like diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and spinal cord injury,” says researcher Dan Kaufman. “Now we really can add cancer to that list.”

Dr. Kaufman says his research team used embryonic stem cells to produce natural killer cells. Those killer cells were then used on a dozen mice that had leukemia tumors. “Every mouse that we treated with these cells, the cancer went away completely,” said Dr.Kaufman.

The scientists also produced natural killer cells from other sources, like umbilical cord blood, with less positive results. It’s proof, Dr. Kaufman says, that embryonic stem cells will play a key role in cell-based cancer therapies. In lab experiments, researchers also found the natural killer cells derived from embryonic stem cells were effective in killing breast cancer, prostate cancer, testicular cancer and brain tumor cells.