There’s an idea floating around out there called “young blood” to use donations from young folks to infuse older people to reverse aging. I’m skeptical. Imagine an old man and a teenager sitting side by side, with blood flowing from the kid to the oldster in a stab at anti-aging. Sort of like a one-way …
Young blood as anti-aging fountain of youth: hype or hope? Read More »
A new Cell paper from Juan Carlos Izpisua Berlmonte’s group has made headlines about anti-aging across the globe because it suggests that the four core induced pluripotent stem cell (IPSC) factors use by Shinya Yamanaka to make IPSC can reverse aging. I’ve pasted the graphical abstract from the paper below and done a quick journal club style …
Quick journal club on IPSC anti-aging paper: cool, but outstanding questions Read More »
Parabiosis and aging When it comes to anti-aging science, creepy meets cool with “young blood” in new blood mixing studies just published. The researchers report that blood from young animals literally makes older animals younger. That striking claim is made by both of two independent teams. They published high-profile papers that just came …
Can Google’s new anti-aging company, Calico, have you Googling at age 140? Don’t sell your burial plot just yet. The idea of anti-aging has been around for a very long time and efforts to combat aging have spanned millennia largely without any success so Calico (apparently short for California Life Company, which sounds more like …
Has anti-aging finally come of age with Google’s Calico? Read More »
Remember Stemage? They are the cosmetic company with Kathy Ireland as their spokesperson whose anti-aging cream includes extracts from human stem cells. In Part 1 of this blog series on Stemage I gave some key background and raised some important questions. I also sent some questions to the company and now more recently to the …
Stemage Stem Cell Anti-Aging Cream 2.0: Interview with Dr. David Scharp Read More »
Who is Peter Nygård? A few days ago at the World Stem Cell Summit prior to the awards dinner there was a social gathering. This kind of thing is usually a good opportunity for more dialogue. When I got there I noticed two very famous people having what appeared to be an intense meeting of …
Peter Nygård anti-aging guru draws a crowd at WSCS2012 Read More »
If you remember Monty Python, then you probably recall John Cleese. We’ll start with Cleese’s stem cell baloney. Not spam. Secret to eternal youth? John Cleese extols virtues of stem cell treatment, The Guardian. I’ve written before about John Cleese’s stem cell anti-aging efforts. As I told the author of The Guardian piece, I love …
My lab is focused in part on chromatin states in stem cells and cancer including heterochromatin. In fact, my lab’s website is chromatin.com. Heterochromatin is dense, often inactive chromatin. By H&E staining and electron microscopy, heterochromatin looks dark compared to the rest of the nucleus, largely composed of euchromatin. Toward the end of my postdoc …
Weekly reads: heterochromatin, H3.3, Mesoblast bump Read More »
Last week one of the most popular stories was about a preprint from a mammoth de-extinction research group led by George Church having made elephant stem cells. I finally got a chance to look carefully at their preprint. Elephant stem cells preprint and mammoth de-extinction The elephant stem cells preprint has solid data. It looks like …
Weekly reads: elephant stem cells, RIP Connie Eaves, AI cell biology Read More »
Vertex Pharmaceuticals has a lot going for it right now on the cell therapy front. For instance, they have the strongest type 1 diabetes cell therapy pipeline after some recent acquisitions. Still it’s not a simple matter to succeed in the cell therapy space even with one therapy for one targeted disease. Trials are tough …
Weekly reads: Vertex, stem cells for MS, Athersys, 900-day paper review at Nature Read More »