Support Funding for the Roman Reed Spinal Cord Injury Research Program

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Before stem cell research was on everyone’s minds and before the phrase “regenerative medicine” was familiar to most scientists, The Roman Reed Spinal Cord Injury Research Act of 1999 funded research into treating paralysis. It was a revolutionary piece of legislation, named after my friend Roman Reed, a true hero.  Roman was playing college football […]

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Conservatives agree: proposed Republican budget cuts for NIH are mindless

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UPDATE: Judy Woodruff just posted an interesting piece on the budget battle for NIH. You can read it here. We have had a welcome surprise of late: conservatives are telling Republicans (yes, you read that right) not to cut the NIH budget. The federal government has been running on a string of continuing resolutions (CRs)

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Is RNA-based iPS cell production a flash in the pan/tissue culture dish?

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It was only six months ago that the stem cell field was aflutter over the report by the Rossi group that they could reprogram iPS cells with an astonishingly high efficiency using just RNAs. This completely non-genetic, high efficiency approach seemed like a revolution for the iPS cell field. It also seemed like what we

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Opponents of ES cell research launch stealth attack in Minnesota

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Knoepfler lab stem cells

What’s going on with legislation on ES cell research in Minnesota? I blogged before about how Oklahoma legislators were heading toward passing legislation that would make it a crime to do ES cell research. Unfortunately, that legislation just passed. As if that were not bad enough, now potentially life saving research in Minnesota is starting

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“Alternative” to IPS cells, ICSP, are very cool, but for now a no-go for the FDA

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A group of researchers led by Evan Snyder (paper discussed here) published a paper in PNAS on a new type of neural stem-like cell whose pluripotency can be turned ON or OFF by turning the v-myc gene ON or OFF using a conditional system of expression, called a “Tet-ON” system. In this system, tetracycline or its

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Secret Not so Secret Recipe for Safer iPS cells

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IPS cells, induced pluripotent stem cells, Knoepfler lab, stained for TRA-1-60, an ES cell marker., where do stem cells come from?

Just how tumorigenic are iPS cells?  The field really doesn’t know at this point. However, a steady stream of papers have raised red flag after red flag about genomic and epigenomic alterations/mutations that are linked to cancer. Of course, then there is the fact that all the genetic changes actually used to make reprogrammed cells

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New papers support growing serious safety concerns about iPS cells

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A growing body of evidence has convincingly argued that iPS cells contain numerous abnormalities at the genetic and epigenetic levels. Often these changes have links to the machinery in cells that is responsible for cancer. As a result, many in the stem cell field have raised the notion that iPS cells may never be able

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