By Jeanne Loring Last Tuesday I visited the FDA headquarters in Maryland, for a meeting called Public Meeting on Patient-Focused Drug Development for Huntington’s and Parkinson’s Diseases. The FDA holds about 6 meetings on different diseases each year, inviting patients and advocates to speak while a panel of FDA directors listens. The FDA representatives at this meeting included Billy Dunn and Eric Bastings, (Director, and Deputy Director, respectively, Division of Neurology Products [DNP], Office of New Drugs), Susanne Goldstein (Medical officer, DNP), and Theresa …Read More
Huntington’s Disease stem cells
With more than 4,142 votes cast, the readers of this blog have chosen the top 12 finalists for the Stem Cell Person of the Year Award for 2014 from the 27 nominees. You can see the final vote tallies at left. The votes came from more than 50 countries with some interesting geographic patterns (I may do a post on that as a follow up). I’ve pasted the brief bios of the twelve finalists below at the end of this post. Now comes the …Read More
In two days the voting will end to pick the top 12 finalists for Stem Cell Person of the Year 2014 Award. You can vote here. From the finalists I will have the tough decision of picking the winner. Check out who’s in the top 12 now and who the top few vote getters are. Will someone surge ahead in the last two days? The nominees have a great mix of backgrounds from all parts of the stem cell world both in terms of their missions and geographic …Read More
With one week left to vote to pick the top 12 finalists for the Stem Cell Person of the Year 2014 Award, we have more than 2,800 votes in so far. From the top 12 vote-getters, I will choose the winner. This is the third year of this award. I self-fund this award out of my own pocket with the winner receiving $2,000. Voting closes at midnight on October 22nd. You can vote once per day here and see the evolving results. We have …Read More
Nominations have closed and we have more than two dozen nominations for Stem Cell Person of the Year 2014. It’s an exciting, diverse group including some news faces as well as nominees from years past as well. Happy Stem Cell Day! You can now vote for your choice for the top finalists in the poll below. One vote per IP address is allowed per day. Voting will end on October 22 at midnight. The winner of the voting may not be the overall winner of the …Read More
Congratulations to Dr. Elena Cattaneo, the winner of the 2013 Stem Cell Person of the Year Award. Her lab studies neural stem cells, particularly as they relate to developing new therapies for Huntington’s Disease. Cattaneo is Director and Co-Founder of the Unistem, the Centre for Stem Cell Research at the University of Milano, Italy. She is also the Director of the Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology and Pharmacology of Neurodegenerative Diseases in the Department of Pharmacological Sciences. Beyond her great achievements in stem cell science, …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
This is the first post in a series focusing on stem cell advances related to specific diseases. Today we discuss Huntington’s Disease and a paper that came out yesterday in the journal Neuron that provides some significant insight into the mechanisms behind the disease. It is entitled: Huntingtin Is Required for Mitotic Spindle Orientation and Mammalian Neurogenesis Huntington’s Disease (HD) is a genetic disorder characterized by progressive neurological problems caused by neurodegeneration. The cause of HD was discovered to be mutations in a gene …Read More