A team led by Shinya Yamanaka has published a new study reporting analysis of defective induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells in the journal PNAS. Part of what I liked so much about this paper is that it tackled a very real, but controversial area of stem cell research. By this I mean the reality that a […]
Review of New Yamanaka Paper on Defective iPS cells Read More »
You can jailbreak your iPhone, but perhaps you can jailbreak a cell too to turn it into a stem cell. In his very cool talk up here at the Till & McCulloch Meeting on Stem Cells yesterday, Andras Nagy characterized the reprogramming process to make iPS cells as “jailbreaking” cell fate. Nagy described some intriguing studies done on
Jailbreak Cell Fate to Reprogram Stem Cells 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 »
Are MUSE cells for real? Stem cells come in different types that vary in a key property called “potency”, but very few are pluripotent. The more potency, the greater the flexibility of a stem cell to make other cell types. Flexibility in the cellular world is power. The most powerful stem cells generally used are
Jury is still out on purported adult pluripotent stem cells despite new MUSE paper Read More »
When are iPS cell-based therapies ready to be tested in actual people? It’s the million or perhaps even billion dollar question of today in the stem cell field. I realize that perhaps it is also a dangerous question, politically-speaking, for me to ask in a public forum, but patient lives as well as potentially the
Over the last few weeks, I have enjoyed talking with and interviewing Dr. Allan Wu, of The Morrow Institute on stem cell cosmetic procedures. I was impressed greatly by his talk at the World Stem Cell Summit last year. Dr. Wu is a fellowship trained Surgical Molecular Biologist with a background in Molecular Embryology and a board
Interview with Regenerative Surgeon, Dr. Allan Wu Read More »
I’ve already talked with science writer Ed Yong about the new Nature iPS cell paper Araki, et al. (you can read Ed’s well-written piece here and you can another one on it by another one of my favorite writers, Monya Baker here), which suggests that iPS cells don’t trigger much in the way of an immune
Some thoughts on the Araki Nature iPS cell paper: an advance, but a few key caveats 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 »
I love paradoxes. The great artist M.C. Escher was famous for his paradoxical drawings such as the one above. Paradoxes make people think in a whole new way about something they thought they understood. The stem cell field is full of paradoxes. Below I list my favorite ones. Some of these resonate with stem cell
Intriguing stem cell paradoxes: from Pepsi to Pluripotency Read More »
Last year around this time I presented my first stem cell awards of the year, in that case for 2010. You can see whom I thought deserved awards here. Now it is time for our 2011 stem cell awards. These awards reflect my opinions and those not mentioned will hopefully forgive me as there is
Stem Cell Awards for 2011 Read More »