The Knoepfler Lab conducts stem and cancer cell as well as chromatin/epigenetics research at the UC Davis School of Medicine. Our team has two big picture goals: (1) catalyzing the development of more effective treatments for cancers based on targeting stem cell-related machinery in tumorigenesis and (2) producing safer stem cell-based regenerative medicine therapies. We are particularly […]
A team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel led by Jacob Hanna reports today near perfect reprogramming efficiency to make induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) by eliminating a single factor called Mbd3 from the cellular equation. On first glance, the Nature article (Rais, et al.) seems to be all about boosting cellular reprogramming efficiency to close
100% reprogramming efficiency reports Jacob Hanna Read More »
What if you could reprogram cells inside of an organism to a different fate and, for instance, make IPS cells? We can, right? But when most of us think about making induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, we imagine it all happening in a little plastic dish in our labs or in our colleague’s labs, not
Stem cell journal club: dishing on Nature paper on making iPS cells inside mice Read More »
What is the deal with the crazy hullaballoo over the so-called stem cell test tube burger? On the surface, this pseudo-burger sounds kinda cool in a geeky, comic book kind of way, but when I dug just a little deeper, it turns out I’m left asking: where’s the beef? After the burger was mentioned briefly on
Where’s the Beef? Reality Check on Test Tube Burger Baloney Read More »
Cellular Dynamics, the stem cell company founded by Dr. James Thomson, is filing for an IPO. Hat tip to David Jensen. The company, which will go under the stock symbol ICEL, is focused on iPS cell-produced products. They describe their portfolio as follows: Cellular Dynamics is developing and deploying a number of cell types derived from
Cellular Dynamics IPO: big money, iPS cell IP rights, trade secrets Read More »
It has been fascinating in the last year to see the unfolding story of mutations in histone variant H3.3 in pediatric glioblastoma and related tumors. It seems amazing that in just over a year, a whole new area of cancer research has rapidly progressed. As I discussed in a recent post, histone H3.3 is a
Allis lab Science paper on histone H3.3 in pediatric brain cancer Read More »
I’m doing this series called “The Elephant in the Lab” where I discuss controversial or taboo laboratory topics that people are usually too afraid to publicly discuss. I started with iPS cells (for a description and definition of iPS cells go here) and now have updated this post for 2013 because the field is changing rapidly. iPS
Taboo topics about iPS cells: updated for 2013 Read More »
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
Are iPS cells being rushed to the clinic or has their time come? Read More »
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
iPS cells are similar to cancer cells: part 1 of discussion of new paper Read More »
Medulloblastoma is the most common pediatric brain tumor. However, treatments for children who are diagnosed with so-called medullos have not evolved much over the years and are largely similar to treatments given to adults for other brain tumors. One frequent event in certain medullos is amplification of two members of the MYC family of oncogenes
New medulloblastoma paper suggests novel avenues to treat this childhood cancer Read More »