Back during my research scientist days, using HeLa cells for my experiments was as commonplace as a carpenter reaching for his hammer at a construction site. What makes these cells so handy is their robustness: they are easy to maintain in the lab where they divide indefinitely in petri dishes. Henrietta Lacks and the Story … Continue reading The Mother of Modern Medicine: Henrietta Lacks’ Portrait Unveiled at National Portrait Gallery
Author: Todd Dubnicoff
A scalable, clinic-friendly recipe for converting skin cells to muscle cells
Way back in 1987, about two decades before Shinya Yamanaka would go on to identify four proteins that can reprogram skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), Harold Weintraub’s lab identified the first “master control” protein, MyoD, which can directly convert a skin cell into a muscle cell. Though MyoD opened up new approaches … Continue reading A scalable, clinic-friendly recipe for converting skin cells to muscle cells
Stem Cell Roundup: better model of schizophrenia, fasting boosts stem cells, and why does our hair gray.
Stem cell photo of the week: Recreating brain cell interactions for studying schizophrenia Our pick for the stem cell image of the week is from the laboratory of Rusty Gage at the Salk Institute. The team generated multiple types of nerve cells from stem cells to more closely represent the interactions that occur in the … Continue reading Stem Cell Roundup: better model of schizophrenia, fasting boosts stem cells, and why does our hair gray.
Livers skip stem cells, build missing structures from scratch via direct cell identity conversion
Stem cells…eh, who needs them anyway?! That’s what you might be thinking after today, at least for some forms of liver disease. That’s because a team of researchers from UCSF and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center just published results in Nature showing liver cells can directly change identity, or transdifferentiate, in order to build, from … Continue reading Livers skip stem cells, build missing structures from scratch via direct cell identity conversion
Stem Cell Roundup: The brain & obesity; iPSCs & sex chromosomes; modeling mental illness
Stem Cell Image of the Week: Obesity-in-a-dish reveals mutations and abnormal function in nerve cells Our stem cell image of the week looks like the work of a pre-historic cave dweller who got their hands on some DayGlo paint. But, in fact, it’s a fluorescence microscopy image of stem cell-derived brain cells from the lab … Continue reading Stem Cell Roundup: The brain & obesity; iPSCs & sex chromosomes; modeling mental illness
Straight to brain: A better approach to ALS cell therapies?
Getting the go ahead to begin a clinical trial by no means marks an end to a research team’s laboratory studies. A clinical trial is merely one experiment and is designed to answer a specific set of questions about a specific course of treatment. There will inevitably be more questions to pursue back in the … Continue reading Straight to brain: A better approach to ALS cell therapies?
Gladstone researchers tame toxic protein that carries increased Alzheimer’s risk
With a clinical trial failure rate of 99% over the past 15 years or so, the path to a cure for Alzheimer’s disease is riddled with disappointment. In many cases, candidate therapies looked very promising in pre-clinical animal studies, only to flop when tested in people. Now, a CIRM-funded Nature Medicine study by researchers at … Continue reading Gladstone researchers tame toxic protein that carries increased Alzheimer’s risk
UC Davis researchers make stem cell-derived mini-brains that contain blood vessels
Growing neurons on a flat petri dish is a great way to study the inner workings of nerve signals in the brain. But I think it's safe to argue that a two-dimensional lawn of cells doesn’t capture all the complexity of our intricate, cauliflower-shaped brains. Then again, cracking open the skulls of living patients is … Continue reading UC Davis researchers make stem cell-derived mini-brains that contain blood vessels
East Coast Company to Sell Research Products Derived from CIRM’s Stem Cell Bank
With patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in hand, any lab scientist can follow recipes that convert these embryonic-like stem cells into specific cell types for studying human disease in a petri dish. iPSCs derived from a small skin sample from a Alzheimer’s patient, for instance, can be specialized into neurons – the kind of … Continue reading East Coast Company to Sell Research Products Derived from CIRM’s Stem Cell Bank
Stem Cell Roundup: hESCs turn 20, tracking cancer stem cells, new ALS gene ID’d
Stem Cell Image of the Week This week’s stunning stem cell image is brought to you by researchers in the Brivanlou Lab at Rockefeller University. What looks like the center of a sunflower is actual a ball of neural rosettes derived from human embryonic stem cells (ESCs). Neural rosettes are structures that contain neural stem … Continue reading Stem Cell Roundup: hESCs turn 20, tracking cancer stem cells, new ALS gene ID’d
The Stem Cellar 