Weekly Reads Archives

Weekly reads: FDA modernization, TFs on the brain, mortality timer, pluripotent trials

January 19, 2025 / Professor Paul Knoepfler, Ph.D. / 1 Comment

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 […]

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Weekly reads: grow a spine, China clears MSCs, Denise Richards, stem cell soups

January 12, 2025 / Professor Paul Knoepfler, Ph.D. / Leave a Comment

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

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Weekly reads: stem cell therapies that work, exosomes, H3.3 K27M, Joe Rogan

January 5, 2025 / Professor Paul Knoepfler, Ph.D. / Leave a Comment

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.”

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Weekly stem cell reads: HSCT, old embryo models, aging stem cells

December 15, 2024 / Professor Paul Knoepfler, Ph.D. / 3 Comments

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

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Weekly reads: Scott Gottlieb v. RFK Jr., DNA typewriters, Arnold Caplan

December 1, 2024 / Professor Paul Knoepfler, Ph.D. / 1 Comment

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

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Weekly reads: GIOSTAR stem cell clinic IND, cadaver marrow, NIH under Trump 2.0, tweets from a stem cell

November 24, 2024 / Professor Paul Knoepfler, Ph.D. / Leave a Comment

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

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Weekly reads: stem cell therapy for vision loss, cancer self-experimentation, Slovenia, 14-day rule

November 17, 2024 / Professor Paul Knoepfler, Ph.D. / 5 Comments

limbal stem cell deficiency LSCD, stem cell therapy for vision loss

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,

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Weekly reads: cancer stem cells, encouraging findings, Trump & NIH, proteomics

November 10, 2024 / Professor Paul Knoepfler, Ph.D. / 2 Comments

Liver cancer stem cells, cancer stem cells

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

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Weekly reads: patient views on stem cell clinics, vertebrate super-pygmies, Tasmanian tiger, low back pain

November 3, 2024 / Professor Paul Knoepfler, Ph.D. / 3 Comments

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

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Weekly reads: Rusty Gage & stem cell awards, ASCL1, stem cells for a vulture

October 27, 2024 / Professor Paul Knoepfler, Ph.D. / 2 Comments

There should be more stem cell awards. Why not recognize more scientists and advocates? I used to do a Stem Cell Person of the Year Award. I have thought about bringing it back. What do you think? Scroll through some past posts on the Stem Cell Person of the Year Award. ISSCR gives out stem

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