One of the more exciting stem cell biotechs out there today is Advanced Cell Technology (ACT). At this time ACT has the only two ES cell-based FDA-approved clinical trials ongoing and so far they have looked quite promising in terms of preliminary safety data. However, ACT has much more in the pipeline including potentially iPS […]
Interview with Gary Rabin of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) Read More »
The ISSCR Annual Meeting will be held In Boston, MA in June. In advance of the meeting I was looking through the Preliminary Program that showed up in my mail box and then I checked out the confirmed speakers page on the web. What a cool lineup of speakers, I thought, but something seemed different….at
ISSCR Breaks Tradition with 2013 Annual Meeting Read More »
Five legends and a blogger walk into a bar together. The bartender asks the first legend “What can I get for you?” The legend orders their drink. The bartender eventually serves up drinks to all five legends and turns to the blogger, “And what can I get for you?” The blogger replies, “Do you have Wi-Fi?
Every year around this time I put my “best of” the year in stem cells including awards such as my Stem Cell Person of the Year Award. For example here are the 2011 awards. This year I’m also trying with difficult to decide on what was the craziest thing for stem cells that happened in
What was the strangest event for stem cells in 2012? Pick from top 5 in poll Read More »
The fellow at the center of what appears to be a made up story about iPS cell transplantation into humans is named Hisashi Moriguchi. Two new articles in the Japanese media support the notion that he has made the whole iPS cell transplant story up: here and here. Most people I’ve talked to in the
More on Moriguchi: bogus iPS cell transplant poster guy Read More »
More and more evidence is accumulating that the alleged iPS cell transplantation in human patients by Dr. Hisashi Moriguchi was bunk. Nature today has a piece out today on the story providing more quotes about the case that suggest the whole thing was made up. Rather than re-hash all the details, in this post I’m going
The Moriguchi iPS transplant fable: key lessons & where do we go from here Read More »
My phone has been ringing and my email flowing at an even faster rate than usual over this still breaking story of the reported transplant of iPS cells into human patients by a Japanese scientist, Hisashi Moriguchi , who at some point was a visiting scientist at Harvard, apparently no more recently than 12 years ago.
My thoughts on the Moriguchi iPS cell controversy Read More »
It has been a big week in very different ways for the stem cell field related to induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. First, we had the Nobel Prize deservedly going to stem cell hero, Shinya Yamanaka. Great news! Congratulations to Dr. Yamanaka. Unfortunately, now, we have a puzzling story that iPS cells have been reported
It seems like just yesterday I was blogging about how concerned I was that iPS cells might be used in early phase human clinical trials as early as next year and that would be high risk given safety concerns about iPS cells. Oh, it was yesterday. Now today….. Yomiuri Shimbun, one of the top newspapers
The iPS cell field has run fast and furious over the past 6 years reaching a big milestone surprisingly quickly on Monday with Shinya Yamanaka winning the Nobel Prize. But is the field going too fast? In August I argued that iPS cells are not quite ready for primetime (i.e. clinical trial studies). Now in
Are iPS cells being rushed to the clinic or has their time come? Read More »