What’s life as an academic scientist really like now? It’s gotten worse in the U.S. recently.
There’s more stress about funding including on levels that we can’t control. I’m writing too many grant proposals these days. I’m wondering how much researchers are now using AI for grant writing, which I have not done. Does AI make the whole grant sphere more or less fair?
As I’m juggling writing a half dozen grants right now and all kinds of other work, I still try to take at least small breaks to read and think. The grant writing can eat up the day though. Grant reviewing can eat up huge amounts of time too. Lunch can be an opportunity for a little change of pace.
One day this week I ended up getting irritated during lunch by Colossal Bioscience’s incorrect claim that they had de-extincted dire wolves. Here’s more on the dire wolf hoopla by my friend and great science writer Ricki Lewis on her blog. Any grants on dire wolves out there?
Scientist chatting about gene editing iPS cells
This week as I was emailing with another scientist, we got on the topic of gene editing human iPS cells. Then we talked about trying to get clonal lines of the gene-edited iPS cells. He brought up the growing sense that sometimes non-clonal lines could have advantages too.
One worry about clonal gene-edited cells of any type is that since they originate from one cell, if that cell already has one or more mutations or other unusual characteristics, it could skew results. In the process of making the clonal line the selected cell or later multiple cells could also acquire mutations that allow them to grow better or just tolerate being alone. Or earlier allowed them to tolerate the gene editing, which is stressful.
These kinds of considerations can come into play when making iPS cells in the first place. Some cells in a mixed population of starting cells like fibroblasts may be far more ready to be reprogrammed into iPS cells. That readiness could relate to how proliferative they are or even if they have certain mutations.
These are the sorts of things that a scientist might spend a lot of time thinking about on any given day.
More recommended reads
- Man gets sperm-making stem cell transplant in a first, Live Science. Here’s the preprint from a team led by Kyle Orwig: Ultrasound-Guided Rete Testis Approach to Sperm Aspiration and Spermatogonial Stem Cell Transplantation in Patients with Azoospermia.
- Human assembloid model of the ascending neural sensory pathway, Nature. Cool new research from Sergiu Pasca.
- Progress and challenges in developing allogeneic cell therapies, Cell Stem Cell.
- Multipotent neural stem cells originating from neuroepithelium exist outside the mouse central nervous system, Nat Cell Bio.
Dear Jeanne,
thanks for your note. I agree with your scenario, but I was not implying mixing individual iPSC clones derived from a single donor (which can be genetically different as you said). I was referring to a mixture of a transgenic (presumably isogenic) cell population derived from a single iPSC line before single cell cloning. Again, many thanks.
Paul take look at Orbit SDS trademark from Roche it is a delivery system that is less invasive than vitrectomy for RPE cell treating dry AMD
The note on genome edited iPSC clones is an interesting one. When we site-specifically insert a transgene into a single locus and compare resulting single transgenic cell clones, transgene expression can vary substantially. This also implies that the choice of the locus, amongst other things like promoter type etc, needs to be carefully considered. In addition, after iPSC differentiation, transgene expression may become even more heterogeneous or silences in many cells. Hence, a bulk transgenic culture may be a good thing. Wonder, though, how regulatory authorities view this when it comes to clinical trails etc…
Peter, the New York Stem Cell Foundation developed a robotic system for reprogramming cells that resulted in all of the iPSC clones in a dish being combined. As you know, individual iPSC clones from a single donor are not all the same (we are all genomic mosaics), and mixing clones makes the challenge of mutations acquired during iPSC proliferation giving selective advantage even more difficult. Assuming that you told the FDA that you were combining clones, I think they would not like it. You might argue that they don’t require cloning of transgenic T cells for CAR/T therapy, but the acute requirements of cancer therapy would make cloning an impossibly lengthy process.