Search Results for: cirm

Why scientists must be advocates too: Jeff Sheehy

Jeff-Sheehy

CIRM Board Member, Jeff Sheehy, has a wonderful piece in Nature Medicine on why patient advocates play a critical role in decision making on research priorities (hat tip to Amy Adams who first blogged on Sheehy’s piece). Patient advocates bring a unique and valuable perspective to the table. Their role in guiding CIRM research funding […]

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Anonymous stem cell scientist frankly answers questions about the field

Anonymous-scientist-stem-cell-field

Here an anonymous stem cell scientist frankly answers questions about the field in an interview with me. Of course I have to ask you about the recent U.S. court ruling essentially declaring all federal funding of human ES cell work illegal. What’s your take on this? ANSWER: The ruling has so many flaws in it.

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Grim reality of the impact of judge’s ES cell decision is emerging

Francis-Collins-ES-cell-research-lawsuit

The Obama administration has announced it will “quickly” appeal the ES cell decision, but I’m not hearing anything about a stay on the judge’s order in the meantime or anything like that. It’s quite the opposite. The NIH, in the form of Director Francis Collins, has finally spoken about the federal judge’s ruling that apparently banned

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Parkinson’s Disease, promising new results on iPS cells

Parkinsons-Disease-stem-cells

UPDATE: A second recent study, this one in Nature Genetics has found a novel genetic link between the immune system and Parkinson’s Disease. The authors were screening for genomic variants unique to Parkinson’s patients, finding known ones but also a novel linkage. The link was with the HLA region, known to play a key role

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Exciting stem cell progress on Alzheimer’s Disease

Test-for-Alzheimers-Disease

UPDATE: I have added more discussion at the bottom about therapeutics and how regenerative medicine might work for Alzheimer’s Disease. Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia throughout the world, affecting 10s of millions of people. The cost to society is staggering and on a personal level for those of us who

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Regenerative Medicine outlook: Five simple ways to protect your stem cells and your health

sep6_2016_salkinst_epithelialinvivoregeneration1822142291-1

Regenerative medicine is very exciting. But what’s even better than regenerative medicine? Preventative medicine. If one can prevent a problem for occurring in the first place, it is far better than trying to treat it after the fact. Of course in many cases we do not know the causes of diseases so it is difficult

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iPS cells coming into focus: not quite so similar to ESC after all

FaviconIPSCELL

Update in 2020: It seems now after all these years that the consensus in the now more mature field is that IPSCs and ESCs are nearly identical in most cases, and both have some of the same translational challenges such as teratoma-forming activity. It’s interesting to read this post from nearly 10 years ago and

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