Hi everyone, St. Baldrick’s is the top children’s cancer foundation and does amazing work for kids with cancer and their families. Their top fundraising event is a head-shaving program where people make pledges in support of a “shavee” who gets their head shaved in solidarity with kids with cancer who often lose their hair due …
How baldness can cure kid’s cancer: find out & please help! Read More »
It seems like a lot of my blogs have the word “baldness” in them, huh? The latest post today is on the apparent inverse correlation between baldness and pediatric cancer, not using stem cells to try to treat baldness. You might be scratching your head (bald or not) at this point. The connection is …
A month ago I did a very widely read piece on cosmetic applications of stem cell technologies in the U.S. called “from boobs to baldness”. Many cosmetics websites asked for permission to run the piece and it was re-run in a number of languages around the world as well. It is clear there is big …
From boobs to baldness 2.0: Cosmetic stem cell clinics proliferate Read More »
The use of stem cells for cosmetics and cosmetic procedures is exploding even while many important questions remain. How legitimate are these stem cell cosmetic products and procedures? Are they safe and effective? What kinds of medical conditions are they being used to treat? I also recently did a post on another area of medicine …
There seems to be a never-ending supply of stem cell for hair loss research but a new article invokes a novel mechanism. Stem cell for hair loss research and cell mechanics Here’s a recent news item about a PNAS paper: Coaxing hair growth in aging hair follicle stem cells, NW Now. A common theme is things …
Weekly reads: stem cell for hair loss, clinic lawsuit update, 2 big retractions Read More »
It’s a big challenge to get a cell therapy approved by the FDA and if you look at my list of FDA-approved stem cell therapies, it’s not as long as we might hope. FDA OK on cell therapy from Gamida Cell For this reason, it was excellent news to see that the FDA approved a …
Weekly reads: FDA nod on new cell therapy, gray hair, pong-playing cells Read More »
I often learn about new supposedly stem cell-related products like the LifeWave X39 Patch from readers. Sometimes such products are used by tens of thousands of people, in my view potentially raising risks to the public. If nothing else, people might be spending their money on something that isn’t worth it. As a stem cell biologist, …
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 …
Weekly reads: freeze-dried cloning, FDA signals, stem cell escapees 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 »
The paper of the week is An isoform of Dicer protects mammalian stem cells against multiple RNA viruses published in Science. The take-home from the abstract is that the data, “demonstrate that mammalian stem cells can protect themselves from some RNA viruses by expressing an alternatively spliced isoform of the enzyme Dicer called aviD, which potentiates …