Weekly Reads Archives - Page 2 of 19

Weekly reads: Beth Shapiro & de-extinction, mice with two dads, stem cell patches

February 2, 2025 / Professor Paul Knoepfler, Ph.D. / 3 Comments

Biologist and ancient DNA expert Beth Shapiro is becoming more well known for doing de-extinction research. Yet Shapiro used to be a de-extinction skeptic. Ten years ago she wrote “How to Clone a Mammoth.” In the book she mentioned serious challenges related to de-extinction. Now she is the CSO for a firm trying to make […]

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Weekly reads: NIH freeze even before RFK confirmation, FDA warnings, RP stem cell trial data

January 26, 2025 / Professor Paul Knoepfler, Ph.D. / 6 Comments

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

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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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