Search Results for: adult stem cells

Victory for science and patients: what the appeals court ES cell ruling means (UPDATE)

judge-royce-lamberth

A Federal Appeals Court ruled 2-1 today to overturn Judge Lamberth’s injunction against federal funding of ES cell research. Great news! You can read the decision here (warning: big pdf). A key part of the ruling was the following: “the plaintiffs are unlikely to prevail because Dickey-Wicker is ambiguous and the NIH seems reasonably to

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Trumping hope

When does politics trump hope? It seems all the time. I think politicians frequently take positions on science-related issues that they either don’t really believe or understand. Perhaps I’m wrong, but for example, I don’t believe that most national level Republican leaders oppose ES cell research. Most of us have either ourselves faced injuries or

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Dishing on biobots like xenobots & anthrobots vs. organoids

Anthrobots

If you remember xenobots, mobile clusters of frog cells, now you might be interested to learn that some of the same team brings us human cell clusters called anthrobots. Both frog and human cellular clusters are considered types of biobots or robots made of cells. To me, anthrobots seem akin to human organoids or assembloids.

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Weekly reads: FDA OKs 2 gene therapies for sickle cell, new Paolo Macchiarini series, Fujifilm

Marie Tornyenu, Casgevy gene therapies for sickle cell

The big news broke Friday that the FDA approved two new gene therapies for sickle cell disease. While the approvals were expected and the actual use of these treatments will be complex on several levels, this is a historic development. 2 FDA-approved gene therapies for sickle cell Friday’s news follows on recent UK approval for

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Weekly reads: clonal expansion, Golden Retriever cancer, FTC hits genetics firm on testi-phony-als

clonal selection

Let’s start this week’s digest with a discussion of clonal expansion and mutations during cell and gene therapy development. Here’s the article that brought this to mind. Sickle cell gene therapy process may cause cancer-linked mutations in blood stem cells, Fierce Biotech. Clonal expansion This is a story about a non-CRISPR gene therapy using a

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Weekly reads: CRISPR sickle cell, Parkinson’s, pig-human chimera concerns

CRISPR gene editing

CRISPR gene editing has made rapid progress heading from bench to bedside. Perhaps the fastest has been its progress toward clinical use to combat sickle cell disease. We’ll start with a new paper on one major effort here. CRISPR gene editing. This process often involves cutting DNA, which then can be used as an opening to

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Is DNA methylation destiny? Diving into new epigenetic clock research

I’ve been thinking more about the steady stream of epigenetic clock research out there.  How convincing is the research on such clocks? Do they tightly relate to human biological age?  The related notion of turning back such hypothetical clocks to reverse aging is exciting but controversial. It doesn’t help that some are hyping all of

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