Month: May 2016

End of line for StemCells Inc., pioneering & controversial stem cell biotech

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A sad, but not surprising day for the stem cell field as the biotech StemCells, Inc. announced that it is winding down its operations after terminating its spinal cord injury trial called the Pathway Study. The data generated so far did not justify continuing the trial. StemCells, Inc. (stock symbol STEM) has struggled financially for …

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UC Davis CRISPR Meeting Panel: A View from the Trenches on Human Disease

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The second session at our CRISPR meeting was really powerful. As with other posts from the UC Davis CRISPR meeting, since I was taking notes on the fly during this session, this post is a stream of bits from the different talks, often trying to capture the essence of key questions or ideas as the speakers …

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UC Davis CRISPR Meeting: Big Picture from Ben Hurlbut

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The CRISPR meeting has started off wonderfully with a talk by Ben Hurlbut. His talk was entitled, “The Demands of CRISPR’s World: Imagination, Deliberation and Governance”. Since I took notes and listened this post is somewhat freeform. I liked how Ben asked a lot of questions. What is “CRISPR’s world” as Science Magazine called it? How …

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Blogging UC Davis CRISPR Science & Bioethics Meeting

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There’s a great meeting going on today here at UC Davis starting soon on CRISPR, focused on the intersection of the science with bioethical and legal issues. I’ve been helping to organize this meeting, but kudos and thanks go to my colleague Mark Yarborough who took the lead in organizing the meeting and did most …

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NgAgo a-go-go: main bullet points on upstart CRISPR challenger

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The gene editing technology CRISPR has been arguably the top story in the biomedical world in the last two years, but going forward there is a CRISPR challenger in upstart gene editing technology NgAgo. For more background on NgAgo and the key first published paper on its genetic modification characteristics see my post here.  In the comments on that …

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Anti-GMO poster in Switzerland invokes human GMOs

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Over on Twitter Magdalena Plotczyk (@MPlotczyk) posted a striking photo of an anti-GMO poster from Lausanne, Switzerland. The top part of the poster translates as, “‘After GMO corn, GMO children?’” As readers of this blog know, I do have concerns about the eventual production of genetically modified people using rapidly evolving genetic modification/gene editing technology such as CRISPR. …

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Haruko Obokata (小保方 晴子) website posts dubious STAP cell validation data

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Haruko Obokata is most well-known for her role as first author of the now retracted two STAP cell Nature papers. These manuscripts claimed to have made pluripotent and even totipotent stem cells simply by stressing cells out with acid treatment or in other ways. Nobody else could get this method to work to create the so-called …

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Huge clinical trial patient fees allowed by FDA at times, details often secret

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I am often critical of for-profit stem cell clinics on this blog for numerous reasons. For instance, one thing that concerns me greatly about these clinics is that they charge patients to get experimental “treatments” that have not been proven to be safe or effective. But as some patients have pointed out to me over the …

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