Ami Thakrar working in the lab. She submitted this photo to our #CIRMStemCellLab Instagram feed.The Santa Barbara Independent has a piece today on the high school students who interned at the University of California, Santa Barbara this summer. Some of those students were part of our Creativity award program, which supported high school interns in stem cell … Continue reading UCSB high school intern: “great way for high school students to get exposed to a life in research”

Ami Thakrar working in the lab. She submitted this photo to our #CIRMStemCellLab Instagram feed.The Santa Barbara Independent has a piece today on the high school students who interned at the University of California, Santa Barbara this summer. Some of those students were part of our Creativity award program, which supported high school interns in stem cell … Continue reading UCSB high school intern: "great way for high school students to get exposed to a life in research"

People with Down syndrome have an extra copy of chromosome 21.Our grantees at Stanford have found that a gene they first identified while studying the origin of some cancers may also play a role in Down syndrome.This gene, called Usp16, appears to accelerate how quickly stem cells are used up throughout the body, including in … Continue reading Gene that controls stem cells tied to Down syndrome

The American Society for Hematology (ASH) was founded in 1958, just a year before the first bone marrow transplants (BMT), which were really the first stem cell transplants. Those five transplants, performed by a French oncologist on Yugoslavian nuclear workers exposed to an overdose of radiation, failed. But shortly after that hematologists started the long … Continue reading ASH, scientific society that fostered early stem cell transplants, publishes white paper on how to accelerate regenerative medicine

Mesenchymal stem cells | Image by Libertas AcademicaGetting a potential therapy into a clinical trial is a tremendously complex process involving years, sometimes decades, of research, a lot of money and a huge amount of organization. Just how much work is involved is really not appreciated by most people.Dr. Vicki Wheelock, Terry Tempkin and their … Continue reading Patience is the key to reaching milestones: progress on the road to treating Huntington’s disease

Pluripotent stem cells. Tissue specific stem cells. Stem cells to treat disease. Stem cells to understand diseases. Personalized stem cells. Stem cell transplants. Bone marrow transplants.It's all a bit confusing, especially for people without a lot of biology background to help them out.TedEd recently posted this video by Craig Kohn that reviews the basics of … Continue reading TedEd video gives the basics of what stem cells are and how they can help with disease therapies

This morning’s Science Times section of the New York Times has a well written piece that tries to balance the hopes and aspirations of patients in need of therapy today and the questionable practices of many stem cell clinics, particularly those operating in other countries. The “stem cell tourism” associated with those clinics prompted a … Continue reading Stem cell “clinical trials” without published data are not clinical trials, the New York Times weighs in

HIV-infected cell: photo by AJC1Up until recently the notion of talking about finding a cure for HIV would have been ridiculed. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that an HIV diagnosis was considered a death sentence. Now we have powerful medications that can keep the virus in check, but even those just manage the … Continue reading Thinking the unthinkable, and saying it out loud: curing HIV

Glioma image by Mikhail Kalinin, Wikimedia CommonsKaren Aboody faced the same problem as many scientists developing stem cell-based therapies for various diseases: How to know where the cells go after she transplants them into a patient.Aboody, who is an associate professor at City of Hope in Los Angeles, has a CIRM disease team award to … Continue reading Improved way of tracking stem cells after transplantation