Weekly Reads

The Niche’s recommended Weekly Reads on stem cell research and regenerative medicine.

Regenerative medicine reads: retraction, FDA warning, CAR-T, ARM CEO

Timothy D. Hunt, new CEO of ARM, Alliance for Regenerative Medicine

I’ve tried to find some time to do some stem cell and other regenerative medicine reading too, but it’s been a busy week of teaching for me as a professor in our new academic year for the UC Davis School of Medicine. I help to teach the Histology part of the first-year curriculum. It’s an […]

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Weekly stem cell reads: space, plagiarism, HIV, diabetes, more

blood stem cell biology

I took a cross-country road trip earlier this month that was pretty amazing and barely thought about stem cell research for the first time in years. We did run across one stem cell clinic in Florida by accident. I’ll write about that trip soon, but first we have our weekly reads including some very cool

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Weekly reads: freeze-dried cloning, FDA signals, stem cell escapees

Human-cloning

Cloning is one of those topics that both fascinates and kind of scares people, especially the idea of duplicating people. I regularly cover the topic here on The Niche because stem cell technologies are involved. Also, one form of the process sometimes called “therapeutic cloning” involves embryonic stem cells. Duplicating mammals has now long been

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Weekly reads: NIH grants, side effect of darker hair, FDA warning, CRISPR

Grant writers handbook, grants cartoon

The last six months I’ve been spending even more time than usual writing NIH grants (and a few others). The last two weeks have been especially busy on this front as I am getting an R01 renewal out the door. My paper reading lately has been mostly related to the grant writing I’m doing. Still,

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Weekly reads: teratoma in iPSC trial, Piero Anversa & friends, Athersys, China Initiative

Dr-Piero-Anversa

It’s been mostly a downbeat week on the stem cell news front including a deep revisit by Reuters to the Piero Anversa case that has new revelations. It’s ugly stuff involving other folks too. We’ll start on the iPS cell front, where a trial participant had a teratoma. I’ve had a long-standing interest in the

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Weekly reads: Jan Nolta recognition, new director after Irv, FDA guidance

Dr. Jan Nolta UC Davis

People are the real driving force in the stem cell and regenerative medicine field including my colleague Jan Nolta here at UC Davis. She is the Director of our Stem Cell Program. There’s also news about Stanford’s stem cell Director Irv Weissman. Jan Nolta receives award Jan’s lab is prolific and in many ways is

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Weekly reads: $1B Saudi anti-aging push, OCT4 necklace, cancer trial wows, coffee brain

Stem-Cells-Aging, anti-aging

I recently wrote about stem cell-related ideas for anti-aging and even cheating death, but there are of course other approaches including drugs like metformin. A new article outlines a massive research funding plan to tackle aging. Let’s start with that. Recommend reads including anti-aging Saudi Arabia plans to spend $1 billion a year discovering treatments to

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Recommended reads: engineered niche, ALS, SCOTS trial, human genome “done”

SCOTS trial

David Weinberg over at Science-Based Medicine has his part two of a deep dive into the so-called SCOTS trial, which is a non-traditional pay-for-play study. I highly recommend it. SCOTS trial under the magnifying glass In this piece, Weinberg provides interesting background on the two people running SCOTS. I’ve had many concerns about the SCOTS

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Weekly reads: possible rare HIV cure, stem cell chicken, FDA commish

HIV infected T cell, HIV cure

The idea of stem cells outright curing diseases is exciting and has powerful appeal, but media need to be careful about using the word cure in headlines and articles as we saw this week related to a possible HIV Cure. HIV cure via stem cells and chemo? The big news of the week was that

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