The severe spinal cord injury sustained by Jockey Michael Martinez and the possibility (not realized) that he might be enrolled in Geron’s hESC-based spinal cord regenerative medicine trial, have drawn recent attention to spinal cord injury. Christopher and Dana Reeve (see foundation here) as well as Don C. Reed (see site here) were instrumental in bringing […]
Stem cells for Spinal Cord Injury update Read More »
In Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece, Alice in Wonderland, there is a wonderful passage that came to mind as I read the latest response from the self-proclaimed ‘adult stem cell researchers’ suing the government to stop federally-funded ES cell research: “I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you
Stem Cells in Wonderland 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 »
We live in a plastic world, full of BPA. Over the last 1/2 century, the proportion of our food and beverages that are consumed out of plastic containers has skyrocketed. Unfortunately, the concentrations of plastic-related chemicals in people around the world, even in remote corners, has gone up in parallel. I’ve written about avoiding plastic
Keep Your Stem Cells Away From BPA Read More »
The Obama administration has announced it will “quickly” appeal the ES cell decision, but I’m not hearing anything about a stay on the judge’s order in the meantime or anything like that. It’s quite the opposite. The NIH, in the form of Director Francis Collins, has finally spoken about the federal judge’s ruling that apparently banned
Grim reality of the impact of judge’s ES cell decision is emerging Read More »
UPDATE: A second recent study, this one in Nature Genetics has found a novel genetic link between the immune system and Parkinson’s Disease. The authors were screening for genomic variants unique to Parkinson’s patients, finding known ones but also a novel linkage. The link was with the HLA region, known to play a key role
Parkinson’s Disease, promising new results on iPS cells Read More »
UPDATE: I have added more discussion at the bottom about therapeutics and how regenerative medicine might work for Alzheimer’s Disease. Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia throughout the world, affecting 10s of millions of people. The cost to society is staggering and on a personal level for those of us who
Exciting stem cell progress on Alzheimer’s Disease Read More »
Regenerative medicine is very exciting. But what’s even better than regenerative medicine? Preventative medicine. If one can prevent a problem for occurring in the first place, it is far better than trying to treat it after the fact. Of course in many cases we do not know the causes of diseases so it is difficult
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 »