Month: August 2010

Grim reality of the impact of judge’s ES cell decision is emerging

Francis-Collins-ES-cell-research-lawsuit

The Obama administration has announced it will “quickly” appeal the ES cell decision, but I’m not hearing anything about a stay on the judge’s order in the meantime or anything like that. It’s quite the opposite. The NIH, in the form of Director Francis Collins, has finally spoken about the federal judge’s ruling that apparently banned …

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Parkinson’s Disease, promising new results on iPS cells

Parkinsons-Disease-stem-cells

UPDATE: A second recent study, this one in Nature Genetics has found a novel genetic link between the immune system and Parkinson’s Disease. The authors were screening for genomic variants unique to Parkinson’s patients, finding known ones but also a novel linkage. The link was with the HLA region, known to play a key role …

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Exciting stem cell progress on Alzheimer’s Disease

Test-for-Alzheimers-Disease

UPDATE: I have added more discussion at the bottom about therapeutics and how regenerative medicine might work for Alzheimer’s Disease. Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia throughout the world, affecting 10s of millions of people. The cost to society is staggering and on a personal level for those of us who …

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Huntington’s Disease, a major new finding

Huntingtons-Disease

This is the first post in a series focusing on stem cell advances related to specific diseases. Today we discuss Huntington’s Disease and a paper that came out yesterday in the journal Neuron that provides some significant insight into the mechanisms behind the disease. It is entitled: Huntingtin Is Required for Mitotic Spindle Orientation and …

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I Hate Your Paper: Dr. No and the Editors that are ruining peer review

Dr.-No-peer-review

Update: Now in 2020 it seems that peer review remains very problematic. The Scientist has a few pieces out on the trouble with peer review including my personal favorite: I Hate Your Paper. That article rings so true as do the quotes from the scientists. Peer review in the stem cell field and the IPS cell …

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Regenerative Medicine outlook: Five simple ways to protect your stem cells and your health

sep6_2016_salkinst_epithelialinvivoregeneration1822142291-1

Regenerative medicine is very exciting. But what’s even better than regenerative medicine? Preventative medicine. If one can prevent a problem for occurring in the first place, it is far better than trying to treat it after the fact. Of course in many cases we do not know the causes of diseases so it is difficult …

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Tumorigenicity and Pluripotency teased apart? Not yet for Myc

Fig.-5-Nakagawa-et-al.-Myc-in-cancer-and-IPScs

A paper just came out in PNAS entitled “Promotion of direct reprogramming by transformation-deficient Myc“. The main thrust of this paper is that the tumorigenic and pluripotency-related functions of Myc could be separated. It focused primarily on the lesser studied LMyc. The topic of the intertwined good (pluripotency) and bad (tumorigenicity) functions of Myc, addressed …

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Striking iPS cell research publishing trends: what do they mean?

Dopamine-neurons-derived-from-a-Parkinsons-disease-patients-iPSCs-Tyrosine-hydroxylase-1

Update in 2020: Wow, a lot has changed since this post almost 10 years ago, but Cell Stem Cell remains the main publisher of IPS cell articles still. The young iPSC field has published a truly massive number of papers in just 4 years. Searching ISI Web of Knowledge for papers with titles reflecting iPSC …

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