Part of being a grad student is dealing with technologies related to your projects and their limitations. Sometimes I feel old when I remember the way we used to have to do things in the lab. As a grad student, I manually poured, ran, and read giant sequencing gels. Back then, gene synthesis of a …
Weekly reads: grad student life, cell barcoding, diabetes trial, more Read More »
I’ve been concerned that the journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine has been publishing some iffy papers from unproven stem cell clinics recently including from a Panama stem cell clinic called the Stem Cell Institute. Back in 2019, I took the unusual step of raising the question of whether a Stem Cells Translational Medicine paper from Neil Riordan, …
Questions remain after Stem Cells Translational Medicine retracts clinic pub Read More »
There are so many stem cell clinics out there that it can be hard to keep track of them and the news about them, but a big court victory against a Manhattan stem cell clinic by New York State Attorney General Letitia James is notable for several reasons. Injunction on Park Avenue Stem Cell clinic …
New York wins $5.1 million in suit against Manhattan stem cell clinic Read More »
If you celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday I hope you had a nice one and, right before it started a new article popped on the scene about the CRISPR babies. Before we discuss those three gene-edited people, who are now growing up into little kids, we hit a milestone on our YouTube Stem Cell Channel with …
Regenerative reads: 3 CRISPR babies, FDA warning, diabetes, pubs Read More »
One of the core problems in the world of unproven stem cell clinics is something called therapeutic misconception. I’ll talk more about that in a minute, but first, let me tell you what brought this to mind now. Surprisingly, the story starts at Duke University. A Duke cell therapy team and the biotech Cryo-Cell have big …
Therapeutic misconception & the planned Duke Cryo-Cell cord clinic Read More »
Great ideas and talented scientists are not enough as biomedical research needs funding and here in the U.S. that means having R01 grant success. The trends since 1995 are slowly heading the wrong way. The average age of getting your first R01 grant keeps getting older. There is also still a bit of a possible …
Weekly reads: R01 grant trends, DPPA4, adult human neurogenesis debate Read More »
A stem cell clinic in the Cell Surgical Network chain has just been sued allegedly for causing vision loss in a patient. By my count, across the U.S. this makes at least 5 patients who have said they were either totally blinded or had some major vision loss after getting stem cells injected into their …
New suit for vision loss against Cell Surgical Network clinic Read More »
One of the most interesting parts of running The Niche is that I get all these questions about stem cells and related matters from readers. I try to answer questions regularly by email, but sometimes the volume catches up with me. For that reason I periodically try to do posts answering such questions, which has …
Answering reader questions: snorting stem cells, Regenexx, exosomes Read More »
What are your favorite cells? The stem variety? T-cells? I have a hard time choosing just one favorite. The first news item I feature talks new imaging methods to see deep inside any cells. Have a favorite organelle? The secret lives of cells — as never seen before, Nature. This news item covers newer imaging techniques …
Recommended reads: secrets of cells, T-cells, CRISPR Read More »
Leigh Turner’s new Cell Stem Cell paper on the unproven stem cell clinic industry following up on our collaborative work together in 2015-2016 is great work but very discouraging. He found more than 2,700 clinics run by more than 1,000 firms in the U.S. This is several-fold growth since 2016. I’m very glad that Leigh has continued this line of …
Turner pub charts runaway stem cell clinic industry; FDA needs to think big now Read More »