When I was the editor of a national magazine for physicians, I told my writers to do any story they found on prostate issues, with our overwhelming male audience then, I knew those stories would get high readership scores. My readers back then would have loved today’s news out of UCLA. The team there, led … Continue reading Protein Linked to Normal Prostate Stem Cells and to Cancer

A good report about bone marrow transplantation in progress comes from the National Hockey League, of all places. Mandi Schwartz, a Yale women’s hockey player, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and is being treated at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. In the name of full disclosure, that’s the center that cured my mother’s lymphoma, … Continue reading Knocking out leukemia stem cells

Two interesting reports today discuss the relationship between basic research and the kind of translational research that is the most visible sign of progress toward cures. In his blog, the director of the bay area biotech collaborative QB3 Regis Kelly writes about public speakers at the Translational Medicine Alliance speaking out against basic research. He … Continue reading Basic research and the search for cures

The clock is ticking on the 14 CIRM Disease Team projects issued last October, which are working under a four-year deadline to hit the clinic. The $20 million acute myeloid leukemia project headed up by Irv Weissman of Stanford University just reported some promising progress. Weissman and his team are developing a chemotherapy drug that … Continue reading Hope for CIRM leukemia disease team

CIRM grantees at University of California, San Francisco, have published a Cell Stem Cell paper explaining why blood-forming stem cells accumulate cancer-causing mutations with age. Basically, they found that inactivity is genetically risky for the cells.The blood-forming stem cells exist in the bone marrow where they divide periodically to form new cells of the blood … Continue reading Resting stem cells are cancer-prone

A team led by Irving Weissman at Stanford University School of Medicine has found the cancer-initiating stem cells in melanoma. Weissman has CIRM Comprehensive and Disease Team Awards relating to his cancer stem cell work.According to a Stanford press release:The finding is significant because the existence of such a cell in the aggressive skin cancer … Continue reading Cancer stem cells at the heart of melanoma

Looks like the FDA agrees with our choice of grantees. They’ve approved a clinical trial based on work led by Karen Aboody (shown in photo) at City of Hope using neural stem cells to target and kill high-grade gliomas. She’s the leader of a CIRM disease team that we funded to develop a second generation … Continue reading Stem cells deliver anti-cancer therapy to treat glioma

Two recent papers by CIRM grantees highlight the importance of understanding basic stem cell biology while developing new cures. Both have to do with chemical modifications to the DNA – called epigenetics. One of the two papers shows that an epigenetic change in DNA, called methylation, changes dramatically as human embryonic stem cells mature into … Continue reading Small DNA changes, life or death consequences

Radiation can effectively destroy brain tumor cells – but at a cost. While killing the tumor cells the treatment also damages normal cells in portions of the brain involved in learning and memory, leaving people with varying levels of impairment. New work by researchers at the University of California, Irvine suggests that human embryonic stem … Continue reading Embryonic stem cells repair radiation damage in mice

Researchers at UC, Los Angeles discovered a series of mutations that can convert normal blood stem cells into cancer stem cells. It is believed that many types of cancer result from cancer stem cells created by such mutations. In this case the first mutation converted normal stem cells and then caused over expression of an … Continue reading Mutation Revealed to Convert Blood Stem Cells to Cancer Stem Cells