Jonathan Thomas is Chair of the CIRM Governing BoardPhotos courtesy Steve Cohn Photography Last Friday, I and a number of my colleagues from the stem cell agency had the privilege of attending a wonderful event at USC honoring a summer internship program for local high school students in the USC Stem Cell labs. A number … Continue reading Celebrating Creativity – a new generation of scientists shines

People with Down's syndrome have an additional copy of chromosome 21. Image from U.S. Department of Energy Human Genome ProgramSpoiler alert: The research reported here is not funded by CIRM and is far, far from being ready to test in people. But for those of us who clearly remember a day when reprogrammed stem cells … Continue reading Scientists inactivate extra chromosome in stem cells from people with Down’s syndrome

Bradley Fikes at the San Diego Union Tribune wrote a blog entry yesterday about a talk in which CIRM grantee Larry Goldstein argued that California should fund its own science and technology research. Goldstein is director of UCSD's stem cell program, and has CIRM grants to develop stem cell therapies for ALS and Alzheimer's disease.Fikes … Continue reading Larry Goldstein: San Diego an example of research collaboration

Email is an amazing tool. It is fast, it is simple, you can send it from virtually anywhere and it can be used for so many different ways of communicating. But as good as email is, sometimes it’s just no substitute for an old fashioned face-to-face get-together. That’s why on July 15th we held a … Continue reading The mafia is wrong – for us it’s not business, it’s personal

Guest blogger Natalie DeWitt is special projects officer at CIRM and has helped develop CIRM's alpha clinics concept. Brainstorming session at the alpha clinics workshop in November 2012This week Nature Medicine published a news story about the Alpha Stem Cell Clinics initiative, raising some interesting questions about how such a clinical network would differ from … Continue reading Stem cell alpha clinics support clinical trials, bring more options to patients

Stanford researcher, Heike Dalrup-LinkStanford scientists have made it easier to peer inside our bodies to see what transplanted stem cells are up to. In a study published online yesterday in the journal, Radiology, they describe how they enlisted a drug normally used to treat anemia, ferumoxytol, to tag stem cells inside a living body. Ferumoxytol … Continue reading Pumping iron: new way of tracking transplanted stem cells uses anemia drug

Here are some stem cell stories that caught our eye this past week. Some are groundbreaking science, others are of personal interest to us, and still others are just fun. Stem cells form inner ear structures. It was fun reading about work by a team from my alma mater, Indiana University that makes major strides … Continue reading Stem cell Stories that caught our eye: spare parts for ears, hope for stroke and dubious therapy in Italy

Serving on the Board of an organization is not exactly glamorous. It often involves a lot of in-depth reading and long, sometimes really long, meetings in windowless rooms at hotels near an airport. Serving on the Board of the stem cell agency can be particularly challenging because of the complex nature of the work we … Continue reading Letter from the heart – thoughts from an autism advocate on leaving the stem cell agency

Planaria like this one can regrow new body partsAt California's stem cell agency we are focused on finding new cures for disease, but sometimes the path to cures is paved with research in animals, like, for example, flatworms.No, seriously. One way of understanding how tissues regenerate is by studying animals whose tissues regenerate naturally. Like … Continue reading The path to stem cell cures paved with… flatworms?

Since Shinya Yamanaka won the Nobel prize last year for reprogramming adult cells to an embryonic-like state--so-called iPS cells--it's been hard to keep up with the pace of new research using these cells. For those looking for a summary, The Gladstone Institutes has recently posted a nice, accessible explanation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells … Continue reading iPS cell roundup: testing drugs, studying disease, developing therapies