So many things have gotten very expensive these days that it got me thinking this past week again about stem cell cost. For this reason, I’ve been running polls asking people what they’ve paid for stem cells and how many therapies they’ve gotten. Before jumping into our weekly reads, check out those running polls on …
Weekly reads: stem cell cost, trial death, HSCT for MS, Neuralink Read More »
Totipotency literally means all powerful, but it refers in biology to specific cells. These cells can make every type of cell in the body of an organism plus the extraembryonic tissues needed for development. This includes humans. So if you could reprogram human cells like blood or skin cells into totipotent stem cells, you might …
Weekly reads: gene therapy nod, Nature pub ethics, CRISPR LDL Read More »
I’ve written before about Liz Parrish and her life-extension firm BioViva. Now they appear to have connections with another entity called Integrated Health Systems or IHS, according to a new Wired article. Some of what is going on with IHS and maybe BioViva in Mexico seems extremely risky to me. BioViva, Parrish, and Integrated Health Systems The …
Weekly reads: BioViva & life-extension clinic, RMATs, universal cells Read More »
I’ve been writing The Niche now for more than 13 years and the idea of stem cells for ALS has been around that whole time. Unfortunately, it has been slow going on this front, but there are still reasons for hope. Probably now much more than ever before. I’ll start with news on one path …
Weekly reads: stem cells for ALS, cell wrinkles, editors quit Read More »
It’s mostly been a week of good and encouraging news in the regenerative medicine space including with gene therapies maybe with the exception of some eye drops warning (more below). There’s realistic hope for an approved sickle cell disease soon. I also see some long-term positive news on hearing loss research. Hematopoietic stem cell transplant …
Weekly reads: reprogramming hearing loss, heart disease, eye drops, sickle cell Read More »
It’s a big challenge to get a cell therapy approved by the FDA and if you look at my list of FDA-approved stem cell therapies, it’s not as long as we might hope. FDA OK on cell therapy from Gamida Cell For this reason, it was excellent news to see that the FDA approved a …
Weekly reads: FDA nod on new cell therapy, gray hair, pong-playing cells Read More »
The biotech Sarepta has had a complicated go of it with the FDA sometimes related to their Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) gene therapy efforts. In late 2016 I wrote about how there was some controversy as the FDA approved the Sarepta drug eteplirsen (Exondys 51) also for DMD, going against an advisory panel that had …
Weekly reads: Sarepta, epigenomics, FDA on eyedrops Read More »
Remember Paolo Macchiarini, the famous-turned-infamous so-called “stem cell surgeon” who ended up in legal trouble and with trial participants who died? Before we get into this we have a new feature for our weekly reads, which is the stem cell and regenerative medicine tweet of the week. See that at the bottom of the post. …
Weekly reads: Macchiarini pub, cloned journal, Mammoth genome, tweet of the week Read More »
I wrote earlier this week about genome sequencing of famous dead celebrities, pointing out that the trend seems full of ethical complexities. Genome news More broadly, sequencing the genomes of non-celebrities from hundreds or thousands of years ago can be important research. A new NYT piece covers such work on the Swahili people. Such research …
Weekly reads: genome sequencing, chemical reprogramming 2.0 Read More »
It’s been almost seventeen years that I’ve been a professor here at UC Davis Medical School. It feels like home. I enjoy teaching our first-year medical students each year. Some end up doing research in my lab. Our school recently got a nice write-up over at STAT News by Usha Lee McFarling on the diversity …
Weekly reads: UC Davis Medical School diversity, CRISPR, Parkinson’s Read More »