One of the blogs I’ve really valued over the years was written by a pseudonymous academic blogger called DrugMonkey, but for two months the Monkey’s blog has been silent. Has he called it a day? Dropped the mic after successfully having big impact? What’s the deal? After many years could it be that the DrugMonkey decided to …
Two physicians are central to something called the SCOTS trial, Dr. Jeffrey Weiss and Steven Levy. Patients have claimed negative outcomes after participating in the trial. What’s going on here? SCOTS trial The recent NEJM paper reporting on the blinding of three patients in Florida may be just the beginning. More information has come out on negative …
Dr. Jeffrey Weiss, SCOTS trial, & Patient Claims of Blindness Read More »
The Future of Genomic Medicine conference last week down in La Jolla at Scripps was one of my favorite meetings ever. I wish I had time to have live blogged it more beyond the one post I did about some gene editing talks. Below I discuss 10 top takeaways from this great meeting that I’m planning to attend …
10 takeaways from Future of Genomic Medicine meeting Read More »
Can you make a synthetic embryo, also called an embryo model? Developmental biologist Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz has long been on the trail of this seemingly almost uncatchable quarry. With her team’s publication in Science today they took a big step forward on this path even if some major hurdles remain. You can see her discussion of …
Synthetic embryo or embryo model tech reported in Science: how big is this? Read More »
What is the future of Genome Medicine? The meeting by that same name that I’m at down here in La Jolla is all about tackling this question and the line up of speakers today on the first day is amazing. I’m speaking about IPS cells as a basis for personalized medicine tomorrow morning so that’s exciting. …
Live blogging Future of Genome Medicine: great talks by Feng Zhang & others Read More »
What’s your lab like? What do you work on? What are you most excited about? Is your lab hiring? What are your lab traditions? Superstitions? How messy/clean is your lab? You can see a picture of me in my lab below about 5-6 years ago…the usual busy semi-clutter of a lab. You can win $100 …
So everyone is buzzing about the CRISPR patent court decision (which BTW I think was flawed but that’s for another post), but the research roars on at warp speed. Here are 7 recent CRISPR articles that caught my attention. What are your favorite recent CRISPR papers? Genome surgery using Cas9 ribonucleoproteins for the treatment of …
It was just over a decade ago that I started making websites and it’s been a wild ride. My first site was at the domain name www.chromatin.com, which I was fortunate to have been able to get for a good deal way back when…I think in 2005. You can see here an early 2007 copy …
~10th anniversary of my 1st website: reflecting on wild ride Read More »
A new paper focused on human and other chimeras just came out today in Cell reporting a number of findings, but most strikingly successful generation of human-pig chimeras in utero. The paper, entitled, “Interspecies Chimerism with Mammalian Pluripotent Stem Cells” describes various chimeras including mouse-rat ones, although those have previously been reported. This work comes …
The 21st Century Cures Act specifies some new FDA rules about investigational stem cell-based regenerative medicine therapies and perhaps most importantly defined a new class of product called a “Regenerative Advanced Therapy” or RAT, which is entitled to an expedited review. The FDA already has a new page up on RATs, which specifies the specifics of …
FDA Regenerative Advanced Therapy Designation Rules Are Up in Response to Cures Act Read More »