Guest blogger Geoff LomaxSenior Officer to the Standards Working Group I was chatting, over a nice bottle of wine, with some long-time friends of mine at the Breakthrough Institute. They advocate federal funding to advance clean energy technology in the U.S. They were curious about the ongoing litigation over NIH funding for human embryonic stem … Continue reading From Sputnik to Stem Cells

It seems like the stem cell news cycle alternates between stories of incremental hope (take the heart disease model for drug discovery out of Stanford today) and stories decrying the woeful lack of cures out of CIRM. I think the popular imagination went from the word “cure” when Proposition 71 passed in 2004 to an … Continue reading Where are the cures?

Today the University of California, San Francisco is unveiling their brand new CIRM-funded stem cell building. It’s not the largest of the 12 new buildings CIRM has funded throughout the state, but it sure is pretty with its labs perched along the Parnassus campus hillside. Like all of the new buildings, CIRM’s investment in this … Continue reading New UCSF stem cell building — a beautiful setting for discovering new therapies

It appears we weren't the only people to notice last week's convergence of reprogrammed iPS cell news -- first they are made better, then they are suggested to be worthless. USA Today ran a story summing up several years' worth of such news. (For those not up-to-speed on iPS cells, you can watch this video … Continue reading The confusing (and ongoing) story of iPS vs. embryonic stem cells

The New York Times health blog has a story today adding yet another reason for regular exercise: It’s good for stem cells in your bone marrow. When I run, I’m not generally thinking about my bone marrow, I admit. But there are times when I’m thinking about fat (or rather, how much of it I … Continue reading Exercising for the health of my stem cells

Two pieces of news came out today about reprogrammed iPS cells — one showing a new way of making them and the other suggesting that they may not be all they’re cracked up to be. First, the new technique. A team at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla figured out a way of removing … Continue reading iPS developments – faster creation, but questions raised

Scripps Research scientists have created mature heart muscle cells directly from skin cells.Eventually, directly reprogramming one type of adult cell into another is going to be old news. For now, the entire field is new enough that each time scientists pluck one adult cell type and coerce it to become another, it’s exciting.The most recent … Continue reading Skin cells become beating heart cells in a lab dish

Duane Roth, my colleague on the CIRM governing board where he serves as one of the vice-chairs, has just published an article, with the title, “The Third Seat at the Table: An Insider’s Perspective on Patient Representatives,” in the Hasting’s Center Report. The Center, an independent, nonpartisan, and nonprofit bioethics research institute, publishes its report … Continue reading CIRM Innovation: The Patient Advocate Role — Guest blogger Jeff Sheehy

Under the direction of Dr. Gary Steinberg, an advance long considered impossible is moving forward today: Stanford announced yesterday that it will participate in Geron's human clinical safety trials for a novel treatment for spinal cord injury. These are safety trials to be sure and not efficacy trials, more tests will need to be run, … Continue reading Clinical Trial of Hope at Stanford — guest blogger Roman Reed

The end result of stem cell research — the cures, that is — would never come to be if it weren’t for all the people working behind the scenes to support the science and the grant-making. In this post I want to acknowledge a big step CIRM recently took in making the administration that much … Continue reading CIRM gets with times, goes electronic