Search Results for: ips cells

How did Japan’s top newspaper get tricked about iPS cells by Moriguchi?

February 1, 2021 / By / 1 Comment

How could the biggest newspaper in Japan, Yomiuri, get so badly tricked without even trying to verify facts prior to splashing it across their front page? A commenter on this blog named Mulboyne says that competing newspaper Mainichi was offered the Moriguchi story but solid investigative reporting made them decline it. Here’s the quote: “The …

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Major Japanese newspaper reports iPS cells already transplanted into human patients at Harvard

February 1, 2021 / By / 5 Comments
iPS-cell-headline-clip1

It seems like just yesterday I was blogging about how concerned I was that iPS cells might be used in early phase human clinical trials as early as next year and that would be high risk given safety concerns about iPS cells. Oh, it was yesterday. Now today….. Yomiuri Shimbun, one of the top newspapers …

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Are iPS cells being rushed to the clinic or has their time come?

February 1, 2021 / By / 2 Comments

The iPS cell field has run fast and furious over the past 6 years reaching a big milestone surprisingly quickly on Monday with Shinya Yamanaka winning the Nobel Prize. But is  the field going too fast? In August I argued that iPS cells are not quite ready for primetime (i.e. clinical trial studies). Now in …

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Primary challenges facing iPS cells in late 2012

February 1, 2021 / By / 1 Comment
iPS-cell-figure

One of the questions I get asked most often is whether induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) are well on their way to replacing ES (embryonic stem) cells. My answer? No. Not yet. iPS cells are great, but the original notion pushed by some that iPS cells would somehow replace ES cells, which would be …

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iPS cells are similar to cancer cells paper, part 2: unsettled reviewers

February 1, 2021 / By / 2 Comments

I’m a fan of iPS cells, but my lab has been concerned about the similarities between induced pluripotency and cancer formation for many years. We just now published a paper that directly addressed the similarities of cancer and iPS cell transcriptomes. These are cause for concern and need to be faced as we contemplate clinical …

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iPS cells are similar to cancer cells: part 1 of discussion of new paper

February 1, 2021 / By / 2 Comments

My lab just published a somewhat provocative paper (still in unproofed form at this point) arguing that iPS cells are very similar in some ways to cancer cells. How did we get to that conclusion (discussed in this post today, part 1 of the story) and what’s the back story on this paper (discussed in a later …

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Jaenisch’s new Cell paper on iPS cells 2.0: a helpful, brief analogy

February 1, 2021 / By

Yesterday I just did a post on Jaenisch’s very dense, interesting Cell paper on iPS cells, but understandably it still is confusing to many people. I think I’ve come up with a helpful analogy. Imagine you are on a plane (this is your fibroblast cell) and the pilot dies. You have to fly the jumbo jet …

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