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

Molecular debris in the brain can cause inflammation. Above, a tangle of proteins common in the brains of Alzheimer's Disease patients. Photo via Wikimedia CommonsIt’s been quite a week for Alzheimer’s Disease. Earlier this week, we posted about research into how tau proteins build up in neurons. Now a group of Stanford researchers have demonstrated … Continue reading Defective garbage disposal cells in brain may explain Alzheimer’s toll

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. The ethics of brain clumps in a dish. Late last week and through the weekend headlines around the world proclaimed that scientists had created little human … Continue reading Stem cell stories that caught our eye: ethics of little brains, heart repair, and tracking transplanted cells

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

Just as good insulation is critical for getting electricity through the cord that powers your computer (or tablet battery) so you can read this blog post, it’s also critical for neurons transmitting electrical signals down their long axons. That insulation is a fatty substance called myelin that forms a tube or sheath around the length … Continue reading Engineered stem cells become myelin super-producers

We write a lot about scientists testing various types of stem cells as a way of repairing hearts damaged by heart attack (here's one recent post). But the heart is more than just a bunch of muscle tissue, which is what stem cell scientists are usually trying to replace.With that in mind, CIRM grantees at … Continue reading Synthetic patch helps speed heart repair in mice

Geoff Lomax is CIRM's Senior Officer to the Standards Working Group CIRM is creating a stem cell bank designed to make high-quality patient stem cell lines available to scientists who need them (here's more about that banking initiative). Before embarking on this initiative, CIRM’s Medical and Ethical Standards Working Group, along with other funding organizations, … Continue reading Informing patients about tissue donation for stem cell banking

Alzheimer's patients often have neurofibrillary tangles caused by build-up of tau proteins. Image via Wikimedia CommonsOne difficulty in finding new therapies for neurological disease is that scientists can't peer inside a living neuron and watch how its DNA and proteins work--or fail to work. Researchers at Gladstone Institutes recently used stem cell techniques to overcame … Continue reading Understanding Alzheimer’s by watching errant neuron proteins in real-time