Japan

Japan Aiming For a Commanding Position on New Stem Cells

Masayo-Takahashi-ISSCR-300x239

Stem cell technology is poised to wow the world with biomedical advances in the coming decades and Japan wants to lead the way. They want to forge ahead particularly with applications that focus on a relatively new kind of stem cells called induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells. Japanese researcher, Shinya Yamanaka, first reported production …

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Trial of Stem Cells for Parkinson’s Disease on Horizon

Is a treatment based on stem cells for Parkinson’s Disease on the horizon? A Japanese team of researchers led by Dr. Jun Takahashi, professor at Kyoto University is reportedly aiming to start on human studies of an induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell-based treatment for Parkinson’s Disease (PD) as early as fiscal year (FY) 2014. In …

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My thoughts on the Moriguchi iPS cell controversy

Moriguchi

My phone has been ringing and my email flowing at an even faster rate than usual over this still breaking story of the reported transplant of iPS cells into human patients by a Japanese scientist, Hisashi Moriguchi , who at some point was a visiting scientist at Harvard, apparently no more recently than 12 years ago. …

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