What if you could get 8-year grants to do whatever biomedical research you wanted? This sounds like a dream for many of us in the life sciences, but the first news item this week is all about such a potential new funding approach. The item especially caught my eye as I’m going to be doing […]
Weekly reads: hydra heads, iblastoids, new 8-year grants Read More »
A clever idea to try to use AI to make cellular machines has produced something being called xenobots. However, the research is getting overblown in some ways. What does this have to do with Zambonis? Read on. What are xenobots? A xenobot is supposed to be a cellular robot made from frog stem cells. The robot part
Xenobots, Zambonis, and cellular hype Read More »
Part of being a grad student is dealing with technologies related to your projects and their limitations. Sometimes I feel old when I remember the way we used to have to do things in the lab. As a grad student, I manually poured, ran, and read giant sequencing gels. Back then, gene synthesis of a
Weekly reads: grad student life, cell barcoding, diabetes trial, more Read More »
If you celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday I hope you had a nice one and, right before it started a new article popped on the scene about the CRISPR babies. Before we discuss those three gene-edited people, who are now growing up into little kids, we hit a milestone on our YouTube Stem Cell Channel with
Regenerative reads: 3 CRISPR babies, FDA warning, diabetes, pubs Read More »
One of the core problems in the world of unproven stem cell clinics is something called therapeutic misconception. I’ll talk more about that in a minute, but first, let me tell you what brought this to mind now. Surprisingly, the story starts at Duke University. A Duke cell therapy team and the biotech Cryo-Cell have big
Therapeutic misconception & the planned Duke Cryo-Cell cord clinic Read More »
A stem cell clinic in the Cell Surgical Network chain has just been sued allegedly for causing vision loss in a patient. By my count, across the U.S. this makes at least 5 patients who have said they were either totally blinded or had some major vision loss after getting stem cells injected into their
New suit for vision loss against Cell Surgical Network clinic Read More »
Liveyon is a cord blood product marketer that distributed a batch of cells a couple of years back that led to many patients being hospitalized with infections. Some had sepsis and ended up in the ICU. It was thought at the time that about a dozen patients who had been injected with the Liveyon product
Liveyon product hurt many more patients says new CDC study Read More »
When I first learned about the multi-$10 million cord cell clinic deal between Duke and Cryo-Cell I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Duke’s involved in this? The problem: marketing unproven cells for kids Yes, this wasn’t some stem cell clinic operating out of a strip mall seeking to make big money off of injecting
Vice tackles dicey Cryo-Cell Duke mega-million peds clinic plan Read More »
Stem cell clinic firms often come and go rather quickly, but a few like Regenexx have persisted. It’s even become a brand name. I’ve been writing here on The Niche for more than twelve years about stem cell clinics. Regenexx has been around that whole time. Along with its founder Dr. Chris Centeno. Patients have
Fact-checking Regenexx: reviews, data & cost Read More »
The news of the week relates to an interim clinical trial report from gene-editing firm Editas on its CRISPR trial for a form of vision loss. On to that in a minute. What have you been reading the past week? Below, I include our weekly list of recommended reads. However, first I wanted to give
The Niche weekend reads: Editas mess, The Niche updates, papers Read More »