When you sit down to read science on the weekends lately, assuming you are not primarily a COVID-19 researcher, how much COVID stuff seeps into your reading?
As I was going over some of this year’s recommended weekly reads posts here on The Niche, I’ve realized that an increasing amount of COVID-19 research has joined the list.
Part of this is because of the explosion of cell therapy work and news on COVID, but also I’m just interested in the science of COVID.
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Senior FDA officials on interference
In a USA Today opinion piece, top long-term FDA leaders make a pledge of a sort to focus on science and allude to possible interference: Senior FDA career executives: We’re following the science to protect public health in pandemic. The authors of the piece include Dr. Peter Marks, the Director of CBER who has done a great job on the stem cell clinic problem.
COVID updates, including Russian Vaccine
- Celularity Doses First Patient in Clinical Trial Evaluating CYNK-001 in COVID-19 Patients. The patient was at UC Irvine. We’ll see how this and other cellular medicine trials for COVID-19 go. Here’s my take on the potential role of politics via Rudy Giuliani in Celularity’s trial evaluation by regulators.
- Science Immunology, Natural killer cell immunotypes related to COVID-19 disease severity.
- Bloomberg, Scientists Cast Doubt on Results From Russian Covid Vaccine
Recommended pubs
- eLife, Histone deposition pathways determine the chromatin landscapes of H3.1 and H3.3 K27M oncohistones
- NPJ Regenerative Medicine, Global trends in clinical trials involving pluripotent stem cells: a systematic multi-database analysis
- Cell Stem Cell, Organoids Model Transcriptional Hallmarks of Oncogenic KRAS Activation in Lung Epithelial Progenitor Cells
- Scientific Reports, IRF2 maintains the stemness of colonic stem cells by limiting physiological stress from interferon
- Communications Biology, Stirred suspension bioreactors maintain naïve pluripotency of human pluripotent stem cells, from Leili Rohani, et al.
- Cell Death & Differentiation, Kap1 regulates the self-renewal of embryonic stem cells and cellular reprogramming by modulating Oct4 protein stability
- Oncogenesis, Altering MYC phosphorylation in the epidermis increases the stem cell population and contributes to the development, progression, and metastasis of squamous cell carcinoma
- Stem Cells, The landscape of GPCR signaling in the regulation of epidermal stem cell fate and skin homeostasis
Stem cell & other science jobs
- Knoepfler lab right here at UC Davis School of medicine is looking for a lab manager
- Madeline Lancaster is hiring a postdoc
- Jason Rasgon has been looking for up to 8 postdocs (wow)
Blast from the past: stem cells for hair loss
From 2013: L’Oreal now claims baldness cure with stem cells. This was not too long after the FDA had warned the company. I was curious so I searched for the product in question, Kérastase Densifique, now in 2020 and it’s still being sold related to hair loss.