Some of you may know that gardening is one of my hobbies and I see it as akin to science, even like growing stem cell cultures. Tomatoes are my favorite thing to grow. About ten years ago I started sprouting my own tomato plants from seed. It’s surprisingly easy with grow lights. This way you get to choose the type of plants, when to have the plants ready, and so forth.
Twice this week I decided my workout would be digging big holes in my garden beds. Why? For my 2025 batch of tomato seedlings. Some years I just dig a little hole for each seedling. This makes the plants work harder to send out their roots deeply into the soil. However, if you dig a big hole for each plant and backfill in all the loose soil around the seedling plus some “growth factors” like manure, they seem much happier. Yes, digging dozens of large holes, say 18 inches deep and across at least, is work. Still, it seems a better use of energy than spending time on an elliptical or treadmill.
Are there tomato stem cells?
Research on tomato stem cell programming
While there is research on tomato and other plant stem cells, I have not been able to find anyone having grown entire tomato plants from stem cells. Are meristem cells in plants pluripotent? It turns out that gene function related to tomato stem cells can impact tomato development and size. More stem cells can mean larger tomatoes like beefsteaks shown above.
And tomatoes can have too many stem cells.
You knew I had to connect tomatoes and stem cells.
The week had some big stem cell stories related to people so let’s go through them and some other recommended reads.
Breathless headline on stem cell research in Japan
Japan’s big bet on stem-cell therapies might soon pay off with medical breakthroughs Induced pluripotent stem cells are being tested to treat blindness, paralysis, Parkinson’s disease and more. Subtitle: “Approvals might be around the corner”, Nature News. I’m a big fan of the Japanese stem cell research field. It has huge talent and has had major government support. There are tangible signs of progress too. However, the title and subtitle of this Nature News piece are just too much.
The actual text of the article is more balanced, but the implications of “soon” and “around the corner” are too exuberant up top. If we’re talking about more potential early conditional approvals in Japan where the system requires much less data, maybe some could be coming in years. The stem cell power couple Masayo Takahashi and Jun Takahashi are some of the top researchers to watch in the field.
Speaking of Jun, I just wrote over at STAT News about promising new U.S. and Japanese clinical trial research on stem cells for Parkinson’s.
Of course, stem cells are often hyped in the media here in the U.S. and in other countries too.
Stem cells for vision loss good news
Stem cell transplant restores vision in patient who was blinded in left eye after injury, ABC News. In this case the injury was due to fireworks. “The treatment, called a cultivated autologous limbal epithelial cell transplantation — or CALEC — can help restore surface corneal epithelial cells, which can be destroyed after chemical burns, infections or other injuries, according to Dr. Ula Jurkunas, an ophthalmologist and associate director of the cornea service at Mass Eye and Ear who performed Kharufeh’s surgery.” Considering how much my friends and I played around with fireworks it’s remarkable none of us got seriously hurt. We’d even take apart fireworks and then make them into other fireworks.
FDA blacklist
John Warrington Kosolcharoen: Final Debarment Order, Federal Register. The FDA can bar individuals or firms from ever doing certain healthcare-related activities. I’ve written before about the FDA blacklist. It’s a real thing. There have been surprisingly few entries on this blacklist from people or firms doing stem cell-related things. The list has a new entry as of last month in former Liveyon leader John Kosolcharoen, who pled to felony charges related to the firm’s actions. The entry in the federal register has a detailed account of what happened with Liveyon. Why aren’t other stem cell folks or firms on this list given how much harm others have done? Note that some recent state AG settlements with cell therapy actors have also included a form of disbarment at the state level. Check out this recent Georgia stem cell case as an example.
More recommended reads
- A call to action for deciphering genetic variants in human pluripotent stem cells for cell therapy, Cell Stem Cell.
- Inside an anti-vaccine autism summit in the age of RFK Jr., NBC News. This article highlights all kinds of troubling stuff going on in Kennedy’s orbit. The article includes mentions of people trying unproven stem cells and, of course, claiming too-good-to-be-true results.
Imagine how much further along we’d be in the stem cell field if human embryonic stem cells (and SCNT) weren’t so ethically controversial in the U.S. and the field had received a similar amount of investment from the NIH.