I took a cross-country road trip earlier this month that was pretty amazing and barely thought about stem cell research for the first time in years.
We did run across one stem cell clinic in Florida by accident.
I’ll write about that trip soon, but first we have our weekly reads including some very cool new stem cell papers.
- Longtime HIV patient is effectively cured after stem cell transplant, WaPo. Another person seems to be cured of HIV after HSCT for cancer. I think this makes four or five.
- Wnt Signaling in the Adult Hippocampal Neurogenic Niche, Stem Cells.
- Inflammatory exposure drives long-lived impairment of hematopoietic stem cell self-renewal activity and accelerated aging, Cell Stem Cell.
- Dynamic reprogramming of H3K9me3 at hominoid-specific retrotransposons during human preimplantation development, Cell Stem Cell.
- Mesoderm-derived PDGFRA+cells regulate the emergence of hematopoietic stem cells in the dorsal aorta, Nat Cell Bio. It’s notable how nestin can mark other kinds of stem and precursor cells besides neuronal ones. One has to keep this in mind with GFP reporter mice and nestin-cre transgenic mice. Our past research has noted how nestin-cre sometimes mediates gene deletion in gametes as well.
- A multimodal iPSC platform for cystic fibrosis drug testing, Nat. Comm.
- High-flying experiment: Do stem cells grow better in space? AP News. Space and stem cells make a hard to resist combination.
- Reactivated diabetic pancreatic stem cells produce insulin, Cosmos Magazine. I just wrote this week about the big development in this stem cells for diabetes area of Vertex buying ViaCyte.
- Investigators found plagiarism and data falsification in work from prominent cancer lab, Nature. This article reports on recent developments in the investigation of misconduct in Carlo Croce’s lab at OSU. While Croce himself was found not to have engaged in misconduct, the situation is a mess and at a minimum reflects poorly on how the lab was run.
- Is gene therapy an option to treat sickle cell disease? Medical News Today. Basically the answer seems to be yes. Approaches like CRISPR for sickle cell by activation of fetal hemoglobin so far seem to work. Hopefully long-term clinical trials will continue to be encouraging.