Can a heart repair itself via their own stem cells and do hearts have meaningful populations of stem cells? Science evolves Sometimes what we scientists all know to be true turns out later on to be wrong and there are clear instances of this in the stem cell field. For example for decades the dogma was …
When you write a book like our new dragon book, as the first reviews of it start coming in you just never know what they’ll be like. When the person or outlet doing the review has a huge audience, the stakes are higher. How have the early reviews been for our new How to Build …
Our dragon book gets a flaming thumbs up in Nature review Read More »
Sometimes we could all use a jolt of good news and cool science. Those of us in the stem cell field probably get tired at times of all the bad-ish, even if important news (like this from Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times) out there surrounding certain unproven stem cell offerings and also clinics that …
Some stem cell good news, stuff for debate, & cool pubs Read More »
What is the Billionaire’s blood & stem cell club and how does one get into that? The focus of what I’m satirically calling this “billionaire’s club” is on anti-aging and prolonging life. If you have a lot of money and are willing to take risks on yourself toward some specific goal such as staying young …
Anti-aging and the billionaires young blood & stem cell club Read More »
One of the reasons I’m a scientist is that I find biology fascinating and admittedly novel biomedical science can really catch my eye, but more recently as a somewhat grizzled researcher, I’ve become increasingly skeptical about some “sexy” research and media coverage of it. A small red flag went up for me as I was …
Perspectives on uncritical NYT coverage of cardiac mitochondrial transplant trial Read More »
The Japan stem cell and regenerative medicine oversight system has been designed to move investigational therapies forward fast, much faster than the systems in other countries such as the U.S. But how well is it working so far? It’s an important question both for that country and more globally as the Japanese system was touted …
Where do things stand with IPS cell translational research? The newest development is that regulators in Japan just have given conditional approval to an Osaka University team to an induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cell-based study for ischemic heart disease. For years IPS cell-based products have been on-again off-again in active clinical study for macular degeneration, work …
Japan conditionally approves new IPS cell-based heart study Read More »
Can stem cells mend a broken heart via cardiac regenerative medicine? The idea of the use of stem cells and regenerative medicine strategies for heart disease has taken us on a roller coaster ride over the years. There are many controversial questions still such as whether the adult heart has meaningful populations of endogenous stem …
Stem Cells on Valentine’s Day: Cardiac Regenerative Medicine Read More »
Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In December I attended and spoke at the World Stem Cell Summit in Atlanta. It was a great meeting, but also I had the chance to go visit the Martin Luther King (MLK) Monument and tour his birth home. It was a very inspirational experience. MLK has been a hero …
What have been some recent stem cell and/or regenerative medicine papers that are worth some extra thought and reading? There have been some cool ones. Note, for fun you can fast forward ahead to 2020 to see some of the recommended reads there. There was of course the very important Mitalipov group paper comparing NT …
Some cool recent stem cell papers: recommended reading Read More »