Research

Stem cell research.

Vote for Screamers awards for worst science hype of the year: Gorilla Glue, COVID, diabetes ‘cure’, more

The Screamers Science Hype Awards.

The amount of biomedical science hype out there is mindboggling at times, but some media or other items really take the cake for being exceptionally bad. Today’s post highlights the worst of the year 2021 as the candidates for my annual The Screamers science hype award. Click on the link in the previous sentence to …

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Recommended reads: stem cell scientists, eggs from blood, Cryo-Cell

Nobel Laureate Shinya Yamanaka, the first to produce induced pluripotent stem cells

We’ll begin this week’s recommended reads with some news on two wonderful stem cell scientists. While there are thousands of stem cell scientists, some stand out for their especially creative work. News on stem cell scientists   Nobel laureate Yamanaka to retire as director of iPS cell center, Asahi Shimbun. Dr. Yamanaka will spend more time …

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Grading my 21 stem cell & regenerative medicine predictions for 2021

stem-cell-crystal-ball-300x3001

The world of stem cell research and regenerative medicine is unpredictable but it’s fun to be a part of it and try to do predictions. Each year in late December or early January I make prognostications for the coming year for stem cell research and regenerative medicine. I made 21 such predictions for the current …

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2021 scorecard for stem cell stocks: REGN, VCEL, CCEL, LCTX did best

Mesoblast stock

A quick review of the publicly-traded stem cell stocks I’ve been following in 2021 finds mostly discouraging news, but a few firms relatively outperformed the other publically-traded biotechs. One had some great news today. In this post, I’m doing a brief overview of how things went this year in the regenerative medicine space. I’m going …

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Weekly reads: hydra heads, iblastoids, new 8-year grants

Grant writers handbook, grants cartoon

What if you could get 8-year grants to do whatever biomedical research you wanted? This sounds like a dream for many of us in the life sciences, but the first news item this week is all about such a potential new funding approach. The item especially caught my eye as I’m going to be doing …

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Weekly reads: PRC2, 2 weird bits of news, pubs, COVID stem cell hype

PRC2 lineage commitment

I’d say the paper of the week is on how PRC2 mediated H3K27me3 can in some sense replace elements of DNA methylation to repress. Very cool. Here it is: Sex-specific chromatin remodelling safeguards transcription in germ cells, Nature. Weird stuff In a merger of opposites, City of Hope to buy Cancer Treatment Centers of America …

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Weekly reads: grad student life, cell barcoding, diabetes trial, more

ViaCyte capsule stem cells diabetes

Part of being a grad student is dealing with technologies related to your projects and their limitations. Sometimes I feel old when I remember the way we used to have to do things in the lab. As a grad student, I manually poured, ran, and read giant sequencing gels. Back then, gene synthesis of a …

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Questions remain after Stem Cells Translational Medicine retracts clinic pub

The Stem Cell Institute, Panama stem cells

I’ve been concerned that the journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine has been publishing some iffy papers from unproven stem cell clinics recently including from a Panama stem cell clinic called the Stem Cell Institute. Back in 2019, I took the unusual step of raising the question of whether a Stem Cells Translational Medicine paper from Neil Riordan, …

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Regenerative reads: 3 CRISPR babies, FDA warning, diabetes, pubs

CRISPR-baby

If you celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday I hope you had a nice one and, right before it started a new article popped on the scene about the CRISPR babies. Before we discuss those three gene-edited people, who are now growing up into little kids, we hit a milestone on our YouTube Stem Cell Channel with …

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Weekly reads: R01 grant trends, DPPA4, adult human neurogenesis debate

NIH R01 grant trends

Great ideas and talented scientists are not enough as biomedical research needs funding and here in the U.S. that means having R01 grant success. The trends since 1995 are slowly heading the wrong way. The average age of getting your first R01 grant keeps getting older. There is also still a bit of a possible …

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