Weekly reads: Melton leaves Harvard, Fuji, BBC blunder, stem cell niche, more

• Douglas Melton, noted stem cell researcher, leaves Harvard for Vertex to create diabetes treatments, STAT News. I think many of us were surprised that Melton would leave Harvard but the deal with and environment at Vertex must both be exceptional. Melton is well known for his stem cell research related to diabetes treatment development, which Vertex is continuing.
• Fujifilm completes acquisition of Atara’s cell therapy manufacturing site near Los Angeles, Endpoints.
• BBC hype. This isn’t recommended but it’s notable when the BBC really blows it on a stem cell story. Here it is: Rejuvenation of woman’s skin could tackle diseases of ageing. Think for a minute what that headline is claiming. What’s the problem? First of all, the headline is total hype. The story is actually simply about reprogramming a 53-year-old woman’s skin cells, not her actual skin. Also, the method is very similar to making iPS cells but they produced skin cells that had some indications of younger cells. To be fair, the story itself contains some quotes from scientists for balance but overall it’s got big problems. I’m not going to link to it. Here’s the actual research article in eLife: Multi-omic rejuvenation of human cells by maturation phase transient reprogramming. It’s interesting and definitely seems worth a read.
• A complete temporal transcription factor series in the fly visual system, Nature. Mapping  the Drosophila optic lobe stem cell to neuron transcriptomic wiring.
• Strategies of pluripotentstem cell-based therapy for retinal degeneration: update and challenges, Trends in Molecular Medicine. This overview comes from pioneer Masayo Takahashi and co-authors.
• Therapeutic correction of hemophilia A by transplantation of hPSC-derived liver sinusoidal endothelialcellprogenitors, Cell Reports.
• DNA sequence-dependent formation of heterochromatin nanodomains, Nat. Comm.

Some Stem Cell Niche papers

• The embryonic node behaves as an instructive stem cell niche for axial elongation, PNAS.

• Restoration of hippocampal neural precursor function by ablation of senescent cells in the aging stem cell niche, Stem Cell Reports.