The Niche’s recommended Weekly Reads on stem cell research and regenerative medicine.
RFK isn’t even confirmed as HHS Secretary and things are going south already with an NIH freeze. What do I mean? NIH freeze could do lasting damage to biomedical research The Trump Administration has frozen many NIH processes including meetings such as study sections that evaluate grant proposals. No study sections means almost no new […]
How will things change at the FDA under the second Trump Administration? It’s a key question for our field but not easy to answer. Most likely there will be more instability at the agency. Some leaders, like of CDER, have already left. in my overall regenerative medicine predictions for 2025, I’ve included more predictions about
Weekly reads: FDA modernization, TFs on the brain, mortality timer, pluripotent trials Read More »
If you tell a scientist that they should be growing a spine, they might take you literally. For instance, if you say this because you want a scientist to show some courage and speak out about something difficult, instead they might try to make an actual human spine in a lab. We’ll start there this
Weekly reads: grow a spine, China clears MSCs, Denise Richards, stem cell soups Read More »
How close are we to having new stem cell therapies that work? The field is nearly there on several fronts, but we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. Last week I noted the “soon” in a Nature News headline “Stem cells head to the clinic: treatments for cancer, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease could soon be here.”
Weekly reads: stem cell therapies that work, exosomes, H3.3 K27M, Joe Rogan Read More »
What is a stem cell therapy? Does it have to include stem cells put into the body? Would you include a therapy that uses differentiated cells made from stem cells? I generally do use the term in that broader way. A similar question comes to mind: what is regenerative medicine? Should it include both cell
Weekly stem cell reads: HSCT, old embryo models, aging stem cells Read More »
Remember former Trump’s FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb? Gottlieb’s back in the news in an interesting way related to the upcoming second Trump administration. I just wrote about what to expect from new FDA Commissioner nominee Marty Makary. In that piece, I noted that Scott Gottlieb first came to lead the FDA after a record of
Weekly reads: Scott Gottlieb v. RFK Jr., DNA typewriters, Arnold Caplan Read More »
What happens if unproven stem cell clinic firms like GIOSTAR start getting okays from the FDA to do clinical trials? On the one hand, it could reflect a positive trend of stem cell clinic firms working with the FDA and toward compliance. Having more robust data. However, I worry about some of these types of
Is there a proven stem cell therapy for vision loss? When I started The Niche back in early 2010, one major area of hope was that there might one day be a stem cell therapy for vision loss or even blindness. Maybe even a cure for blindness. While we’re not there yet as a field,
Cancer stem cells are stem cell-like cells in many tumors that are key contributors to the ability of tumors to persist and recur after treatment. For those reasons, they are also thought to be major targets, including of emerging therapies. Data also suggest that some therapies may create new types of cancer stem cells leading
Weekly reads: cancer stem cells, encouraging findings, Trump & NIH, proteomics Read More »
What do patients who go to stem cell clinics really think of their experiences? It can be hard to get good data on this important question. For that reason, it was great to see a new article on this topic. With perhaps around 2,000 unproven clinics in the U.S., these firms are likely to have