A few times a month I do a recommended reads kind of post on more than just stem cells, which people seem to appreciate as a condensed list of new science and medicine. Scientists might ask each other, “what’s in your to-read list?” rather than “what’s in your wallet?” Here are some of the things I’m hoping to get to in coming days or have already taken a look at that seem worth a read. If you want to see last week’s reads here …Read More
cancer stem cells
There’s nothing like stem cell good news and interesting publications to perk one up on a Monday. Enjoy. What recent papers have struck you as exciting? Novel stem cell-based cancer approaches (Part 1) It was exciting when Fate Therapeutics got the first induced pluripotent stem cell (IPSC) IND in the U.S. for their IPSC-derived natural killer cell (NK) product. Now in another milestone the first patient has received the investigational NK therapy at UC San Diego. From UCSD, “After 10 years in remission, Derek Ruff’s cancer …Read More
What are the hottest stem cell trends in the field today? Depends who you ask, right? One impartial way to look at stem cell trends is through the lens of publication citations and the focuses of top stem cell papers. In that perhaps somewhat skewed, but interesting approach, the words used in the titles of the 50 most cited research publications of 2016 with the phrases “stem cell(s)” in their titles should tell us something interesting. Fortunately publication citation platforms these days like ISI may …Read More
What does Google think (if Google does indeed think) are top 10 stem cell news stories right now? I took a screen shot below. Here are some thoughts on those stories. First, lung organoids are neat, but they have been grown before by several groups. Why is that the top story? I’d have to ask Google. Better PR? Still looks interesting and could have real impact for lung disease in the future. The second story is on the transplantation of allogeneic IPS cells into monkeys without …Read More
Dr. John Dick gave a great talk yesterday on cancer stem cells here at ISSCR 2016. Below I summarize his talk and as always with these meeting blogs, the post is not polished and is more of a stream of the speaker’s main points. He started out broadly with a nice introduction to this area of research. There’s a lot of controversy around cancer stem cells (CSC). How many tumors have CSCs? How different are cells within the same tumor? The normal hierarchical organization of …Read More
Many of this blog’s readers ask about my own lab’s research: what is the focus of the work in the Knoepfler Lab? You can go check out our lab website, but I thought it might be time again to blog about what we are all about as a lab and what we have been up to most recently. I am fortunate to have an exceptional team of researchers in my lab. Our mission is to advance knowledge toward two main goals: (1) the development …Read More
By Aaron Goldman Much like the winter weather we’ve been enduring on the east coast, cancer research is advancing at a rapid clip! For decades, researchers have considered pools of “cancer stem cells” (CSC) as the subsets within a tumor which both initiate progression and underpin the failure of therapy. Over the past 5 years, however, a number of published studies have expanded this concept by putting a greater emphasis on the inherent plasticity of cancer cells allowing for reversibility in the cell hierarchy …Read More
A new paper in Science by Bert Vogelstein suggests that a good part of cancer is attributable to bad luck. There are so many big questions about cancer. They resonate with me very strongly as a cancer researcher and a cancer survivor myself (more on my cancer story here). What really causes cancer? Why does it feel sometimes like we are struggling so much in the “War on Cancer”? What is the role of stem cells in cancer and are there “cancer stem cells“? …Read More
Many of this The Niche‘s readers ask about what my own lab’s research. What is the focus of the research of the Knoepfler Lab? You can go check out our lab website, but I thought it might be time to blog about what we are all about as a lab and what we have been up to most recently. I am fortunate to have an exceptional team of researchers in my lab. Our mission is to advance knowledge toward two main goals: (1) the …Read More
In about a month my new book, Stem Cells: An Insider’s Guide, should be available as an e-book from the publisher and from Amazon. It’s available for pre-order now at Amazon here. The “real” book (i.e. the one made of paper) should be available in September. The book costs $29. Any writers out there interested in doing a review please contact me. As I’ve said before, I wrote this book in part because I wanted to learn more about stem cells and had gone looking in …Read More