Are fat stem cells a drug? Today the FDA definitively indicated “yes” without leaving much of any room for exceptions on this question. This morning the FDA made a major announcement on stem cell policy regarding its current thinking on oversight of regenerative medicine and issued four guidances, including two each in final and in …
Fat stem cells are drugs: new FDA final guidances Read More »
Nominations are now open for the 2017 Stem Cell Person of the Year Award, which will be our sixth such award. You can leave nominations as comments on this post or email them to me (see my email on our Contact page). The Stem Cell Person of the Year Award is an honor I give out …
Stem Cell Person of the Year 2017 Award: Nominations Open Read More »
By Jeanne Loring There are ten million people in the world who have Parkinson’s disease. 125,000 of these are living in California. People with the disease often have to step away from their jobs because the main symptoms – tremor or freezing up of muscles – make it difficult to get through a whole day …
On the threshold of cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease Read More »
Grad school…would you do it all over again if you could jump in a time machine? It’s hard to imagine, but it was 24 years ago that I started at UCSD as a graduate student. Think how different the world was in 1993. Now almost a quarter century later, the world of science is very …
Twenty years later: would this dataholic still go to grad school? Read More »
Epidermis regeneration is an important approach to helping patients with a variety of serious skin problems that can arise due to genetic conditions or injuries such as severe burns. An exciting new Nature paper reports epidermis regeneration on a strikingly large-scale. The child who is the subject of the study suffers from a sometimes fatal genetic …
Extraordinary epidermis regeneration in child via combo stem cell-gene therapy Read More »
Human germline CRISPR raises major bioethical considerations, but what about technical issues? Setting aside the many ethical issue about the general idea of human modification itself, could this really work? Yes in theory it could, but there are some very tough technological challenges that could and likely would cause failures or unacceptable outcomes at many steps …
Here are some stem cell reads for the weekend, ranging from media to research articles. TGIF! What are your stem cell or other science weekend reads? Let’s start with how difficult it is to make IPS cells from naked mole rats! Naked Mole Rat Cells Have a Stable Epigenome that Resists iPSC Reprogramming. It takes more than …
Weekend Stem Cell Reads: Naked mole rats, geckos, brain gel, & more Read More »
The ability of for-profit stem cell clinics to pitch unproven, risky stem cell offerings to patients may soon get much tougher in Australia. The country’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), which has some similar responsibilities there as the FDA does here in the U.S., announced planned new reforms that’ll put stem cell clinics under more scrutiny and more …
Australia takes big step to curtail dangerous stem cell clinics Read More »
Some notable newly published Phase II data from the Duke cord blood for cerebral palsy trial unfortunately doesn’t give much reason for optimism that this approach is going to have a substantial positive effect for these kids. The double-blinded, placebo-controlled study did not find a meaningful benefit overall from infusions of autologous cord blood (ACB) for …
Cord blood for cerebral palsy: mostly discouraging new trial data Read More »
I recently flew up to Seattle from Sacramento to visit the UW Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine (ISCRM). It was a great trip just on the science front and seeing some old friends from the UW and the Hutch, as well as making some new ones (yeah, corny, but true). I not only …