Stay tuned for a Stem Cell Awareness Day event near you. October 5 will bring stem cell lectures, tours and symposia to nearly 40 locations around the world. So far, there are events in six countries, five U.S. states and at least 25 locations in California, and more are being added every day. You can … Continue reading Stem Cell Awareness Day October 5, 2011

Last week CIRM grantees at University of California Berkeley published a follow-up to some of my favorite stem cell research. I'm speaking personally here as a runner who is getting older and would like to turn my race recovery back to what it was in my youth. Irina Conboy started investigating the slow response of … Continue reading Rolling back the clock on muscle disease, aging

The North County Times in had a nice story today about the effect of CIRM funding in the San Diego area. Bradley Fikes wrote:In San Diego County, one of the country's top three centers of biomedicine, researchers say CIRM has greatly boosted stem cell science's profile and magnitude. That commitment is producing advances that will … Continue reading San Diego stem cell community gets a boost from CIRM

Last week the company Sangamo Biosciences announced good results from their HIV/AIDS trial in which they genetically altered patients' own T-cells. CIRM is following this trial closely, since it's the precursor to one being developed by a team of CIRM-funded researchers led by John Zaia at City of Hope that includes Sangamo. According to Discover … Continue reading Progress in stem cell therapy for HIV/AIDS

Tuesday was a very proud day here at CIRM headquarters. We were able to announce the enrollment of the first patient in a clinical trial funded, in part, by the agency. It was also a bit of a somber day as Paul Knoepfler pointed out in his blog yesterday. It meant the patient had recently … Continue reading More stem cell firsts — spinal cord injury and blindness

Today is a landmark day for CIRM: We announced that the first patient had been enrolled in a clinical trial based on stem cell agency funding. You can read our press release here.The patient was part of Menlo Park-based Geron's phase I trial for spinal cord injury, which was awarded $25 million from CIRM in … Continue reading First patient enrolls in a clinical trial funded by CIRM

Last week CIRM held our almost-yearly grantee meeting, which brought together our grantees from across California plus some international collaborators and world-renowned stem cell leaders who gave some riveting talks. CIRM grantee Paul Knoepfler from UC Davis was blogging from the meeting. He had this to say:Earlier I threw out there the idea that many … Continue reading Meeting of California’s stem cell minds

The new UCSF stem cell building has made the news again. The September 19 issue of The New Yorker, architecture critic Paul Goldberger features UCSF’s Ray and Dagmar Dolby Regeneration Medicine as one of three new science buildings in the United States “crafted with the specific intention of fostering interaction and connections, as a means … Continue reading UCSF stem cell building: generating therapies and making news

Tom Vasich at the University of California Irvine did a Q&A with CIRM grantee Frank LaFerla in advance of the September 30 Southern California Alzheimer’s Disease Research Conference. La Ferla and his colleagues have been working on stem cell-based therapies for Alzheimer's disease. In a question about the public health impact of Alzheimer's disease LaFerla … Continue reading Alzheimer’s leader discusses stem cell progress

Northern White Rhinoceros; Photo credit: San Diego ZooWhat are those rhinos doing in a stem cell blog? Researchers at Scripps Research Institute have converted skin cells from those rhinos (or their San Diego zoo-mates) into reprogrammed stem cells. The team also created stem cells out of skin samples from a primate called a drill.Both projects … Continue reading Stem cells from rhino skin