The International Stem Cell Registry debuted with the efforts of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, with financial backing stemming from Gov. Deval Patrick’s $1 billion life sciences economic initiative passed over the summer.

The free resource will provide information on nearly 200 embryonic stem cell lines, including properties, how they’ve been used to date, as well as scientific reports about the cells. The database will be updated regularly by staff at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

The primary recipient of the information will be the research and medical community, which will have in this way a centralized resource center, but patients looking for more information on cutting-edge research will also benefit from the project.

The site, at www.umassmed.edu/iscr, will be hosted at the Medical School’s Shrewsbury campus where the Massachusetts Stem Cell Bank will be launched this fall. Both projects have been funded by the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center.

Meanwhile, Japan has given Kyoto University a patent for their landmark technique of reprogramming skin cells into stem cells. Teams at Kyoto University and at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the United States have discovered the groundbreaking technology which will circumvent ethical problems created by traditional stem cell harvesting technologies, which rely on killing embryos who are days old.

The patent will enable Kyoto University to continue research without being hindered by intellectual property issues.

In other stem cell news, researchers from the Institute of Medical Biology (IMB) and Bioprocessing Technology Institute (BTI), under Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A STAR), and the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands managed to improve survival and recovery rate after a heart attack by using secretions from stem cells, rather than the cells themselves. The positive results were obtained in experiments on pigs. The technique avoids most of the risks of tumor formation or rejection by the body, associated with normal stem cell transplants.