Viacyte is one of the most exciting biotechs in the stem cells for diabetes space. Dr. Kevin D’Amour, Director of Stem Cell Research at Viacyte, gave an excellent, extremely interesting talk Friday morning: Developing an Encapsulated Stem Cell Therapy for Diabetes. Viacyte talk In the talk, Dr. D’Amour gave a very detailed description of their […]
Why invest in stem cells? Ideas are the foundation of stem cell research, but funding makes those ideas a reality. We talk a lot about governmental funding of stem cell research through CIRM and NIH. The funding from these agencies is essential and will undoubtedly lead to new treatments and cures, possibly for millions of
Why invest in stem cells? Progress, Patients, and Patents Read More »
Who’s who in the field of iPS cells? In this post, I examine the people, journals, places, funding agencies, and companies that are the leaders in the iPS cell field. I start with publishing. Last year we did a post on publishing trends in the iPS cell field. It suggested that the iPS cell field was
Who’s who in iPS cells: scientists, journals, funding agencies, countries, and biotechs Read More »
It has been a rollercoaster few months between the anti-hESC court cases as well as Geron and Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) receiving the OK from the FDA to proceed with initial clinical trials of stem cell treatments. It’s OK to be excited about the clinical trials and I for one am, but we have to
Challenges translating stem cell treatments to patients Read More »
About one in ten people around the world will develop osteoarthritis (OA) at some point in their lives. In the U.S., it is the major cause of disability. This is an extremely serious illness in terms of its impact on society. At this time there is little in the way of effective treatments for OA.
Osteoarthritis stem cell research moving forward Read More »
Update in 2020: Wow, a lot has changed since this post almost 10 years ago, but Cell Stem Cell remains the main publisher of IPS cell articles still. The young iPSC field has published a truly massive number of papers in just 4 years. Searching ISI Web of Knowledge for papers with titles reflecting iPSC
Striking iPS cell research publishing trends: what do they mean? Read More »
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
iPS cells coming into focus: not quite so similar to ESC after all Read More »
In a landmark decision, today the FDA approved Ryoncil from Mesoblast for GvHD. This is the first time the FDA has approved a mescenchymal stromal/stem cell or MSC therapy of any kind. There have been many ups and downs for Mesoblast toward this approval of Ryoncil or remestemcel-L, an allogeneic marrow MSC product. See my
In landmark, FDA approves first MSC therapy, Mesoblast’s Ryoncil for GvHD Read More »
Where do things stand with potential applications of CRISPR and other gene editing technologies in patients? Overall, things are looking very positive. CRISPR human trials This week the third big international human genome editing meeting took place in London. The summit addressed numerous potential clinical applications. It was good to see the agenda included quite
Weekly reads: big CRISPR mtg, Mesoblast good news, Neuralink spiked Read More »
The recent news of Vertex Pharma buying small stem cell biotech ViaCyte and Doug Melton moving to Vertex brought to mind an old stem cell biotech called Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) and its leader, stem cell biologist Dr. Robert Lanza. Years ago, big pharma firm Astellas bought ACT and Lanza moved to be a leader of regenerative
In big shift Dr. Robert Lanza exits Astellas Read More »