After the COVID-19 pandemic started clinical trials quickly sprouted up to test various kinds of cell therapy for COVID-19 including stem cells. The most common rationale for this approach is to suppress damaging overactive immune responses. Trials of cell therapy for COVID-19 including stem cells I’ve written quite a lot about these cellular medicine and …
Our new paper assessing trials of cell therapy for COVID-19 Read More »
Professor Joanne Kurtzberg’s clinical work at the Duke Autism Center on umbilical cord blood for autism and cerebral palsy (CP) involves a partnership with a publicly-traded cord blood banking firm called Cryo-Cell. Kurtzberg is also the Medical Director at the firm. In addition they have intellectual property in this area. The Duke team’s efforts, including …
Duke & Cryo-Cell plan big clinic for unproven infusions of kids Read More »
It was a couple of years back that researcher He Jiankui claimed he made three “CRISPR babies.” No one would think about doing any kind of rogue gene-editing again, right? Not even somatic gene edits. After all, as far as we know he’s in jail. We still don’t know the health risks that these three …
Ukraine clinic plans to sell CRISPR enhancements: hair color, skin, & breast size Read More »
There are many ways to classify different stem cells including yours versus someone else’s cells, or in a clinical sense what we call an autologous vs allogeneic stem cell transplant. This post is focused on the difference between allogeneic (someone else’s cells) and autologous (your own) stem cell injections. As a stem cell biologist I …
Autologous vs allogeneic: all you need to know on therapy Read More »
During the week as I’m doing other stuff I keep my eyes open for interesting things to read, including over the weekend about stem cell research, COVID, CRISPR, and more for The Niche weekly recommended reads. This week a lot was going as we updated The Niche site to our new theme and format. I …
Recommended reads: jobs, FDA letter, & The Niche new look Read More »
Sometimes on The Niche or while teaching students as a professor here at UC Davis School of Medicine, I’ve been asked: What is a teratoma? Not all tumors are created equal and some like teratomas are particularly unusual. Exactly what is a teratoma tumor? Teratomas are germ cell tumors. What this means is that the …
This is a post by Mina Kim, a UC Davis student intern for The Niche blog, about the main types of cellular therapies being studied clinically for COVID-19. During the novel coronavirus pandemic with millions of COVID-19 cases, the development of safe and effective treatments for patients is vital. Cellular medicine treatments are one of …
Review of 4 cell therapy types under study for COVID-19 Read More »
When the number of stem cell clinical studies and trials listed for COVID-19 first started spiraling upward it seemed likely that stem cell clinics and other firms in that arena would get interested. I thought that we’d see the unproven regenerative medicine coronavirus bandwagon quickly grow. Unfortunately, there are reasons to be increasingly concerned here. For instance, …
As clinics buzz about coronavirus, COVID19 patient given non-FDA-approved exosomes? Read More »
Should we call it stem cell synchronicity for stem cell supplier firm Invitrx? What was it about March 16? Sometimes strange things happen in the stem cell world such as last week on March 16 I wrote that the FDA needs to do more about unproven exosomes, and then on the same day a new FDA warning …
‘Captain Kirk’ regenerative clinic supplier Invitrx gets long FDA warning letter Read More »
Remember our old friends Liveyon? Their leader John Kosolcharoen? Liveyon’s continuing metamorphosis This biologics supply firm has gone through several stages of corporate metamorphosis as a supplier of biologics including at first a purported living umbilical cord stem cell product. That stem cell thrust ultimately landed a dozen or more people in the hospital as …
Liveyon is back (again) with unproven exosome product Read More »