Flickr image: Rick eh?The news cycle for the past day has been filled with articles about work in Spain in which the researchers reprogrammed adult cells in a living mouse to become like embryonic stem cells, and in some cases, even more primitive cells.A few of the articles covering the work captured what the researchers … Continue reading Creating embryonic-like stem cells in living mice a path to therapies? Not so fast

People with Down syndrome have an extra copy of chromosome 21.Our grantees at Stanford have found that a gene they first identified while studying the origin of some cancers may also play a role in Down syndrome.This gene, called Usp16, appears to accelerate how quickly stem cells are used up throughout the body, including in … Continue reading Gene that controls stem cells tied to Down syndrome

We did a little fall cleaning over on the CIRM website, moving a few items around with the goal of making our content as intuitive as possible to navigate. All the content you know and love is still there, but some of it might be in a new place.Here's what prompted the reorg.When we first … Continue reading CIRM website gets a fall cleaning: same content, different organization

The American Society for Hematology (ASH) was founded in 1958, just a year before the first bone marrow transplants (BMT), which were really the first stem cell transplants. Those five transplants, performed by a French oncologist on Yugoslavian nuclear workers exposed to an overdose of radiation, failed. But shortly after that hematologists started the long … Continue reading ASH, scientific society that fostered early stem cell transplants, publishes white paper on how to accelerate regenerative medicine

Mesenchymal stem cells | Image by Libertas AcademicaGetting a potential therapy into a clinical trial is a tremendously complex process involving years, sometimes decades, of research, a lot of money and a huge amount of organization. Just how much work is involved is really not appreciated by most people.Dr. Vicki Wheelock, Terry Tempkin and their … Continue reading Patience is the key to reaching milestones: progress on the road to treating Huntington’s disease

Pluripotent stem cells. Tissue specific stem cells. Stem cells to treat disease. Stem cells to understand diseases. Personalized stem cells. Stem cell transplants. Bone marrow transplants.It's all a bit confusing, especially for people without a lot of biology background to help them out.TedEd recently posted this video by Craig Kohn that reviews the basics of … Continue reading TedEd video gives the basics of what stem cells are and how they can help with disease therapies

This morning’s Science Times section of the New York Times has a well written piece that tries to balance the hopes and aspirations of patients in need of therapy today and the questionable practices of many stem cell clinics, particularly those operating in other countries. The “stem cell tourism” associated with those clinics prompted a … Continue reading Stem cell “clinical trials” without published data are not clinical trials, the New York Times weighs in

HIV-infected cell: photo by AJC1Up until recently the notion of talking about finding a cure for HIV would have been ridiculed. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that an HIV diagnosis was considered a death sentence. Now we have powerful medications that can keep the virus in check, but even those just manage the … Continue reading Thinking the unthinkable, and saying it out loud: curing HIV

Molecular debris in the brain can cause inflammation. Above, a tangle of proteins common in the brains of Alzheimer's Disease patients. Photo via Wikimedia CommonsIt’s been quite a week for Alzheimer’s Disease. Earlier this week, we posted about research into how tau proteins build up in neurons. Now a group of Stanford researchers have demonstrated … Continue reading Defective garbage disposal cells in brain may explain Alzheimer’s toll

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. The ethics of brain clumps in a dish. Late last week and through the weekend headlines around the world proclaimed that scientists had created little human … Continue reading Stem cell stories that caught our eye: ethics of little brains, heart repair, and tracking transplanted cells