Year: 2021

Top stem cell stories of 2021: COVID, diabetes, human embryos, clinics in court

regenerative medicine, stem cells 2021

The past year was all over the place for the stem cell and regenerative medicine field. As you can see in my scoring of my 21 predictions for 2021, quite a few things were surprises in terms of what did and didn’t happen. Here’s an overview of the top stories of the year in our …

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Vote for Screamers awards for worst science hype of the year: Gorilla Glue, COVID, diabetes ‘cure’, more

The Screamers Science Hype Awards.

The amount of biomedical science hype out there is mindboggling at times, but some media or other items really take the cake for being exceptionally bad. Today’s post highlights the worst of the year 2021 as the candidates for my annual The Screamers science hype award. Click on the link in the previous sentence to …

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Recommended reads: stem cell scientists, eggs from blood, Cryo-Cell

Nobel Laureate Shinya Yamanaka, the first to produce induced pluripotent stem cells

We’ll begin this week’s recommended reads with some news on two wonderful stem cell scientists. While there are thousands of stem cell scientists, some stand out for their especially creative work. News on stem cell scientists   Nobel laureate Yamanaka to retire as director of iPS cell center, Asahi Shimbun. Dr. Yamanaka will spend more time …

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Grading my 21 stem cell & regenerative medicine predictions for 2021

stem-cell-crystal-ball-300x3001

The world of stem cell research and regenerative medicine is unpredictable but it’s fun to be a part of it and try to do predictions. Each year in late December or early January I make prognostications for the coming year for stem cell research and regenerative medicine. I made 21 such predictions for the current …

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2021 scorecard for stem cell stocks: REGN, VCEL, CCEL, LCTX did best

Mesoblast stock

A quick review of the publicly-traded stem cell stocks I’ve been following in 2021 finds mostly discouraging news, but a few firms relatively outperformed the other publically-traded biotechs. One had some great news today. In this post, I’m doing a brief overview of how things went this year in the regenerative medicine space. I’m going …

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Weekly reads: hydra heads, iblastoids, new 8-year grants

Grant writers handbook, grants cartoon

What if you could get 8-year grants to do whatever biomedical research you wanted? This sounds like a dream for many of us in the life sciences, but the first news item this week is all about such a potential new funding approach. The item especially caught my eye as I’m going to be doing …

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Explainer on 293 or HEK cells and their use in COVID vaccine research

HEK 293 cells Knoepfler Lab

A type of human cells used in research called HEK cells or 293s has been much in the news lately. This is mainly related to COVID-19 vaccine research. There seem to be many misunderstandings about 293 cells. For that reason, I thought I’d do this post to clear things up. I’ve been working with these …

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About that Joe Rogan stem cell treatment & clinic promotion

Joe Rogan Stem Cells Mike Tyson

Joe Rogan first popped up more squarely on my radar screen years ago because of a concerning video that’s out there of him talking with Mel Gibson about stem cells. At the time it was one of the most-watched videos on YouTube on stem cells. I took apart that stem cell video and its claims including …

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Weekly reads: PRC2, 2 weird bits of news, pubs, COVID stem cell hype

PRC2 lineage commitment

I’d say the paper of the week is on how PRC2 mediated H3K27me3 can in some sense replace elements of DNA methylation to repress. Very cool. Here it is: Sex-specific chromatin remodelling safeguards transcription in germ cells, Nature. Weird stuff In a merger of opposites, City of Hope to buy Cancer Treatment Centers of America …

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