What is morally acceptable and where do we draw the line at behaviors that might just go too far such as human reproductive cloning? Over the years American attitudes have shifted on a number of potentially hot button moral behaviors including reproductive human cloning and pollsters including Gallup have tracked these attitudes. Gallup just came out …
Americans relatively more comfortable with human cloning Read More »
I invited the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of Bioheart, Kristin Comella, to do an interview after hearing some buzz that this could be a critical time for the company and that it might have been recently visited by the FDA. Note that Comella not just Bioheart CSO, but also the primary instructor for physician training in stem …
Interview with Bioheart CSO, Kristin Comella including on FDA Read More »
Remember that old TV show the Odd Couple with very proper Felix Unger and his polar opposite Oscar Madison who has all kinds of baggage? They’ve cloned it into a remake to be on TV soon here in the US in 2015. It seems only fitting then that actual human cloning research has a new …
The Odd Couple of Cloning Research: Mitalipov & Woo Suk Hwang Unite Read More »
Stem cell biotech BioTime announced the news today that its subsidiary Cell Cure Neurosciences (Cell Cure) has filed an IND with the FDA for an embryonic stem (ES) cell-based therapy for Dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The product to be tested is OpRegen, which the company indicates is “the first IND for an ES cell-based …
BioTime’s Cell Cure Files IND with FDA for ES cell AMD therapy Read More »
Sometimes in science there are unexpected threads tying seemingly very different things together. Unraveling the knots in these threads can lead to new insights into important developmental processes and mechanisms of disease. My lab studies epigenomic and transcription factors including a molecule called histone variant H3.3 (more here on H3.3). H3.3 binds to the actual …
There is more good news from leading stem cell biotech Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) on preclinical rodent studies using stem cells to treat mice with an MS-like condition. They published a new paper in the journal Stem Cell Reports entitled “Human ESC-Derived MSCs Outperform Bone Marrow MSCs in the Treatment of an EAE Model of …
Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) Revs Up Pre-Clinical Studies for MS Read More »
A small group of the STAP authors via RIKEN have now released a detailed protocol also available at Nature Protocol Exchange for making STAP stem cells entitled “Essential technical tips for STAP cell conversion culture from somatic cells”. This comes about 5 weeks after publication of their Nature STAP stem cell papers. 2020 update: With the 4th and …
This is a crowdsource page for people who want to post their findings on their attempts to validate the STAP stem cell ( ＳＴＡＰ細胞) method. I’m going to color successful or even moderately encouraging reports green and failures/discouraging results in red. *For those with longer attention spans, see some additional important considerations for this crowdsourcing effort at …
I spend some hours each week reading and thinking about the recent scientific literature and I’m sure many of you do the same thing, but do we gravitate towards hyped “holy crap” papers? Every so often, a new paper erupts on the scene. It makes a big splash with a flashy entrance that captures people’s …
The ‘Holy Crap’ Effect: Reflecting on Big Splash Papers Read More »
Should a company be able to have a gene patent and more generally and practically speaking can genes be patented? Patent and IP issues always raise a myriad of questions so what about a patent case on a company called Myriad? Complicated, right? If genes in their natural form cannot be patented, does that mean …
Myriad SCOTUS Decision: Can you have a gene patent? Read More »