AdultStemCell.com

Cleveland, Ohio leveraged buyout firm Riverside Co. has acquired private cord blood bank Celvitae Biomedica S.A. in Madrid, Spain for undisclosed terms.

Celvitae is one of two cord blood banks licensed in Spain and authorized to work in the public health system, Riverside said in a release. It also has major commercial agreements with some of the leading insurance companies in the Spanish market.

Last year, Celvitae struck a strategic agreement with MD Anderson Internacional Espana, a cancer treatment center in Europe that ensures all cord blood stem cell samples collected in Spain are processed within 24 hours at its Madrid facilities.

). On * average, the noscript tag is called from less than 1% of internet * users. */–>Riverside will add Celvitae to its Crioestaminal platform, the Cantanhede, Portugal company that is a pioneer and market leader in the isolation and storage of cord blood stem cells. More than 40,000 parents have trusted the company to store their children’s stem cells.

Riverside acquired Crioestaminal last year. The Celvitae acquisition was made from Riverside Europe Fund IV. Riverside is co-headquartered in New York City.

Adult Skin

The British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, reports that scientists are working on research that will expand the use of skin cells beyond skin grafts for burn victims that may be the answer for curing a broad range of conditions, from cancer to spinal cord repair.

Sheila MacNeil, Professor of Tissue Engineering at the University of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England states, “There is the potential to take a biopsy of skin from a patient with disease, culture the cells, alter them to make them grow into tissues you are interested in and also use them to study the basis of the genetic disease and then to design therapies that you can put back into the patient.”

Professor MacNeil added that the adult stem cells were less likely to be rejected as they are from the donor’s own body, unlike stem cells from embryos.

The University of Sheffield is a leading research university and ranked 40th in the World’s Top 100 Universities by one study.

At Michigan State University’s Cellular Reprogramming Laboratory researchers are conducting studies on transforming ordinary skin cells into “anything” cells, known as pluripotent cells. The research team at the Laboratory takes adult human skin cells and converts them to a stem cell type known as Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells. They then grow these cells under conditions that push the cells to adopt a new identity as cells of specific types, such as neurons.

One of the benefits of using skin is that it is the largest organ of the body – adults carry around 8 pounds and 22 square feet of it.