Last week brought a paper by Stanford researchers that has been a long, long time coming. It shows that 12-14 years after the experimental treatment, women with metastatic breast cancer benefited from high dose chemotherapy followed by transplantation of their own blood-forming stem cells. The paper was published online July 15 in Biology of Blood … Continue reading Aggressive breast cancer treated with bone marrow stem cells
Disease Areas
Heart, heal theyself
A group of researchers from University College London made a splash this week with their work prodding heart muscle to repair itself. This is big news, given both the number of people who have heart attacks (more than 1 million per year in the US) and the number of stem cell scientists working to regenerate … Continue reading Heart, heal theyself
On stem cells, sports injuries and aging
A headline today grabbed my attention: Can your own stem cells heal your running injuries?The answer, in a word: Duh.That's the whole point of tissue-specific stem cells like the ones lurking in muscles. These are the body's reservoir for repairing and rebuilding tissues. In fact, several CIRM grantees are studying what makes muscle stem cells … Continue reading On stem cells, sports injuries and aging
Eradicate cancer stem cells, eradicate drug-resistant leukema
Markus Müschen/UCSFCIRM grantees at the University of California San Francisco have found the protein certain leukemia cells use to evade chemotherapy. A press release from UCSF says:Doctors who treat children with the most common form of childhood cancer – acute lymphoblastic leukemia – are often baffled at how bulk cancer cells die from chemotherapy whereas … Continue reading Eradicate cancer stem cells, eradicate drug-resistant leukema
Celebrating National Cancer Research Month with a cancer stem cell round-up
In celebration of National Cancer Research Month, our colleagues at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute have posted a series of blog entries about cancer research at their institute. The latest installment includes CIRM grantee Robert Wechsler-Reya, who moved to California from Duke University on a CIRM Research Leadership Award.According to their blog:Dr. Robert Wechsler-Reya, who directs … Continue reading Celebrating National Cancer Research Month with a cancer stem cell round-up
Genes at the heart of heart deformities found through stem cell studies
CIRM grantees at The Gladstone Institutes have, over the past few years, been hard at work learning about the origins of heart deformities by studying how stem cells mature into heart tissue.What they've learned is that small relatives of DNA, called micro-RNAs, help control when and how cells mature into heart tissue (blogged about here … Continue reading Genes at the heart of heart deformities found through stem cell studies
Guest blogger Alan Trounson – April’s stem cell highlights
Alan Trounson is President of CIRMSince I arrived at CIRM late in 2007 I have maintained a tradition of presenting some of the top science journal papers from the previous month or two at each of our Board meetings. Beginning last month, I decided this would be easier to digest in a written document than … Continue reading Guest blogger Alan Trounson – April’s stem cell highlights
Shifting the balance of stem cell renewal and cancer
There's an interesting story from CIRM grantees at Sanford-Burnham this week, showing a relationship between tissue-specific stem cells in the body and cancer. It all started with an observation in people with Down Syndrome: they are less likely than other people to develop cancers. This observation eventually led to the discovery that a gene called … Continue reading Shifting the balance of stem cell renewal and cancer
Skin cells to beating heart cells in just 11 days
(Comment: it appears that we already blogged about this study back in February. It's interesting work, though, so this second blog entry gets to remain.)CIRM grantee Sheng Ding at Scripps Research Institute has converted mouse skin cells into beating heart cells. If this sounds familiar, it's because Deepak Srivastava at the Gladstone Institute for Cardiovascular … Continue reading Skin cells to beating heart cells in just 11 days
iPS cells lead to drug discovery for heart disease, autism up next
We’ve long claimed that one ideal role for iPS cells is modeling disease and screening drugs. In fact, we’re so committed to that idea we produced a video about it with CIRM grantee Bruce Conklin at the Gladstone Institutes. Scientific American also has a story on disease model their March issue, available online. Well, a … Continue reading iPS cells lead to drug discovery for heart disease, autism up next
The Stem Cellar 