I’m going to date myself here but it’s been nearly 30 years since I first heard that 80’s tune, “The future’s so bright I have to wear shades”. Those catchy lyrics still ring true today, maybe not for bipartisan politics, but at least for the future of stem cell research.My rosy outlook is based not … Continue reading The stem cell future’s so bright, I have to wear shades

Geoff Lomax, CIRM's Senior Officer for Medical & Ethical Standards, is blogging from this week's 2013 Till & McCulloch Meeting in Alberta. The meetings are Canada’s premier stem cell research event and provide networking with leading stem cell scientists, clinicians, bioengineers and ethicists from Canada and around the world. Ubaka Ogboug is a policy researcher … Continue reading The Coolest Stem Cell Poster

Despite decades of scientific progress, cancer remains the second most common cause of death in the United States, accounting for a quarter of all deaths. On this blog, we’ve written many times about how our grantees are progressing toward cancer treatment, but we wanted to pull the best of those posts into one place. Here … Continue reading Best of the blog: Progress in cancer research

Here's a major stumbling block in developing therapies for human diseases -- it's hard to find a fix if you don't really know what's wrong. Take autism spectrum disorders. By now doctors are pretty good at identifying signs of the disease, but without access to brain cells researchers don't really know what's going wrong.That's the … Continue reading Autism syndrome modeled in lab dish points to future therapy

Our grantee Joe Wu of Stanford University just published a paper that goes a long way toward explaining just how laborious it is to develop therapies based on stem cells.It all sounds so easy. Find a stem cell in the body (or mature certain kind of cell from embryonic or iPS cells), then put that … Continue reading How best to deliver stem cells to the heart?

When you look at a person you can usually estimate an approximate age (excluding the pages of some celebrity magazines). But presented with just a cell, there are few visible indicators of age like grey hair or a sagging chin.Until yesterday. That's when a group of scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles announced … Continue reading New cellular clock reads iPS cells’ age as newborns

Staining of slow-cycling sweat gland cells (green) with the protein laminin (red) and the fluorescent stain DAPI (blue)Image by Yvonne LeungMaybe it's all the running I've been doing, but the word "sweat" caught my eye in this story. Sweat, like everything else it seems, needs it's stem cells.A group at the University of Southern California … Continue reading No sweat? Blame the sweat gland stem cells

Pluripotent stem cells, created from human skin or mouse ear tissue, are shown here becoming endoderm cell. The endoderm is one of the three primary germ layers that ultimately contribute to the development of vital organs (liver, pancreas, etc.). The yellow highlights the Sox17 protein, expressed during endoderm development. Cell nuclei are shown in magenta. … Continue reading Grooved surface increases the yeild of iPS cells

Here are some stem cell stories that caught our eye this past week. Some are groundbreaking science, others are of personal interest to us, and still others are just fun.Stem Cells for colitis. A team of British and Danish researcher found a population of intermediate stem cells that divide more readily than the adult stem … Continue reading Stem cell stories that caught our eye: colitis, ALS, diabetes and scaling up production of nerve cells

Jeff Sheey, HIV/AIDS patient advocate on our governing boardI don't mean to blow our own horn, but... OK, that's exactly what I mean to do. Go us!Two CIRM folks are on fellow blogger Paul Knoepfler's top 12 list of finalists for stem cell person of the year. This is Knoepfler's second year holding this contest, … Continue reading Two CIRM leaders on the top 12 list for stem cell person of the year