Last week I attended and spoke at a stem cell meeting at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). It was entitled, “Bioengineering and Stem Cell Research”. It was a great meeting with many interesting talks. Below I write about some of the talks and themes of the meeting. Still to come later this week I will do a second post entirely focused on the exciting RPE work of Sally Temple, who spoke at the meeting. One of the major themes of this meeting was, as Mark Noble put it during …Read More
Mike West
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
Stem cell biotech BioTime announced the news today that its subsidiary Cell Cure Neurosciences (Cell Cure) has filed an IND with the FDA for an embryonic stem (ES) cell-based therapy for Dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The product to be tested is OpRegen, which the company indicates is “the first IND for an ES cell-based therapy developed in Israel.” Cell Cure in its PR on this IND also listed three other key bullet points: “IND filed for Phase I/IIa dose escalation trial in patients …Read More
When you want to both know the real history of the pluripotent stem cell-based biotech industry and perspectives on its future, there are only a handful of people to turn to and one of them is definitely Dr. Michael West, CEO of BioTime. I’m doing a several part series of blog posts on a lengthy phone interview and conversation that I had with West. Today in Part 2 we are focused on clinical development of human ES cells and what happened with Geron. You …Read More
By Jeanne Loring. On Wednesday afternoon at the ISSCR meeting in Boston, Jamie Thomson gave a talk about the history of human pluripotent stem cells. There were probably only a dozen people in the audience of around 3,000 who were working on human ES cells around the same time that Jamie and Joseph Itskovitz-Eldor were collaborating on the first derivation of human ES cells, which was published in 1998. I found myself laughing (quietly- honest!) at Jamie’s recollections- Mike West approaching him to offer …Read More