The CIRM blog must be fed! (Photo: Stage and Cinema: bit.ly/1eO9ckE) Believe me when I say I don’t believe in the supernatural. But every morning when the CIRM communications team does a quick check-in about our social media plans for the day, we hear a ghostly voice from our laptops. A few years back it … Continue reading We’ve created a monster and we feel fine: the CIRM blog reaches 1000 posts

cell division - happening right now somewhere in your body Cell division is an amazing biological process that’s very easy to take for granted during the day-in, day-out work of biomedical research. Keeping your dividing cells healthy in their petri dishes becomes just a necessary task, a means to an end, in order to multiply … Continue reading UCSD study of cell division in blood stem cells reveals potential new path to fight leukemia

Peyton Manning (courtesy Jeffrey Beall/Wikimedia Commons/Flickr) Here in San Francisco, 49ers fans are still stinging from their football team’s defeat up in Seattle last Sunday. But there’s no denying reality: the stage has been set for Super Bowl XLVIII between the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks. One of the popular stories during the two-week … Continue reading NFL Quarterback’s Super Bowl Bid Doesn’t Validate his Unproven Stem Cell Treatment

Last summer, I blogged here about our friend Chris Furbee’s 18 year journey to complete an autobiographical documentary film about the impact of Huntington’s disease on him and his family. When I wrote about it in July, Chris was still nearing the finish line but I’m incredibly happy to report that the film, Huntington’s Dance, … Continue reading Huntington’s Disease Advocate’s Film Huntington’s Dance Premieres at SlamDance Fest this Weekend

Chemical modification of genetic material (RNA, shown here) helps keep stem cells in their "ground state", study finds The year is a mere 14 days old and yet my colleagues have already blogged here about very positive news regarding CIRM-funded stem cell-based clinical trial projects for treating heart disease and sickle cell anemia. At times … Continue reading To be or not to be a stem cell: Sanford-Burnham lab finds new mechanism

Killer T-cells attacking a foreign cell (Juan Gaertner/Shutterstock) After years of research, now with the right prodding, scientists can transform human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) into virtually any cell type in the body. That’s what makes hESCs such an appealing cell source to repair all sorts of diseases and injuries like heart failure, Parkinson’s disease, … Continue reading Putting the brakes on immune rejection may help accelerate embryonic stem cell-based therapies

“Revolutionizing medicine” is a phrase you often hear when scientists and advocates describe the promise of stem cells to treat many incurable diseases. But to truly fulfill that promise, the field of stem cell biology itself relies on revolutions in technologies that help scientists get a deeper understanding of stem cells. One such technology is … Continue reading Single Cell Genomics and Stem Cells: Revolutions within Revolutions

We are rolling out our 2011 Annual Report stories throughout March. Many of these stories feature multimedia material such as a video that we are releasing today alongside a story about diabetes research. The full report will be posted online and available for download later this month. Todd Dubnicoff is CIRM’s videographer and video editor. … Continue reading 2011 Annual Report: Toward a stem cell therapy for #diabetes