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.

Europe approves first 2nd generation stem cell therapy. While blood stem cells in bone marrow have been used to treat patients with certain blood cancers for more than 40 years, it has been a long wait for other uses of stem cells to gain official nods from regulatory bodies. The first came in 2012 when Canada approved Prochymal a stem cell therapy for kids who have a severe immune reaction after bone marrow transplant for cancer. That therapy helps the patients regulate their immune response and can be life saving.

Now the European Medicines Agency has approved a therapy for repairing eyes with damaged corneas—the first of a new generation of stem cell therapies that replace or repair specific tissues. The therapy uses a type of stem cell found in the eye called a limbal stem cell. An Italian team pioneered the procedure that has successfully restored vision to scores of patients whose eyes were damaged by chemicals or burns. An official with the EMA noted the significance of this approval in an agency press release.

“This recommendation represents a major step forward in delivering new and innovative medicines to patients.”

The BBC broke the news with a brief story, and MSN followed up with a bit more detail. (And no, this did not happen “this week” but it did happen after we went dark for the holidays.) CIRM also funds work with limbal stem cells.

Second type of stem cells shows benefit for ALS patients. Over the past couple years we have been writing about positive early trial results from Neuralstem for its therapy using a nerve stem cell for treating patients with ALS, also called Lou Gehrig’s disease. This week the company Brainstorm reported data showing improvement in most of the patients treated with a type of stem cell found in bone marrow and fat, mesenchymal stem cells.

The Neuralstem trials used donor stem cells and the Brainstorm trial uses a patient’s own cells, hence the drug name NeuOwn. But they have be revved up in the lab so that they secrete large quantities of what are called neurotrophic factors, chemicals that seem to protect nerves from damage by the disease and potentially foster healing of already damaged nerves.

Eleven of 12 patients experienced a decrease in the rate of progression of this normally very aggressive disease. The Israeli company completed its early trials in Israel but began a second stage trial at Massachusetts General Hospital in April. Reuters ran a story about the announcement.

New intestine engineered from stem cells. CIRM-grantee Tracy Grikscheit has previously reported growing tissues that look like intestinal cells and that have all the right cellular dog tags of our guts. Today the university announced she has shown she can grow tissues that actually function like our guts. They can absorb life-sustaining nutrients.

Because her work focuses on the devastating condition that results when a baby is born with insufficient intestine, it was not surprising this morning to find a good story about her work on the web site MotherBoard. The site quotes her on the latest advance:

“What’s important about this study is it’s not just taking pictures of the cells and saying ok, they’re in the proper location. We’re actually also looking at the function, so we’re showing that not only are the cells present that would for example absorb the sugar in your breakfast, but they actually are doing that job of absorbing sugar.”

Grikscheit works at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and you can read about her CIRM-funded work to build new intestine here.

Luck’s role in stem cell mutations key to cancer. Most of the popular talk about risk and cancer centers on inheriting bad genes and being exposed to nasty chemicals in our daily lives. But a new study says the biggest risk is more akin to a roulette wheel.

A study published in Science by a team at Johns Hopkins looked at 31 types of tissue in our bodies and found that random mutations that occur while our tissue-specific stem cells divide correlates better with cancer risk than what we inherit or environmental risks combined. The Scientist produced one of the more thoughtful pieces of the many on the research that appeared in the media this week.

A personal story about getting into stem cell research. I enjoy hearing about how people get into this fascinating field and the media team at the University of Southern California has provided a good example. They profile recent recruit, Michael Bonaguidi who explains how he made the switch from physical to biological science:

“Growing up on Legos and Lincoln Logs, I was very fascinated with building things. As I took more biology courses and was exposed to other facets of science — from chemistry to physics — I became more interested not in the outside but within. And that’s what got me into bioengineering versus structural engineering.”

Described as shaping brains instead of cities he is looking for the types of cells that can rebuild the brain after injury or stroke. HealthCanal picked up the university’s feature.