Phases of the therapy development pipelineI’ve been spending time recently updating CIRM’s website to reflect all the new awards that came out of last month’s Disease Team funding. About a year ago, when I first posted sections to the website showing our projects that are headed toward disease therapies I could see the entire list … Continue reading Where are our projects on the path to the clinic? Find out

High school student Brandon Hernandez discusses his summer research at the Creativity Awards meetingOne of the things that’s fun about working at CIRM is knowing that we are making a real difference in people’s lives. We got to see evidence of that yesterday when a group of 63 high school students and their mentors from … Continue reading High school students gain experience, get excited about stem cell research

Ulrich Mueller, Ph.D., is a professor and director of the Dorris Neuroscience Center at the Scripps Research Institute.Scientists at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla have found a previously unknown type of stem cell in the brain. This one forms the nerves that make up the outer layers of the brain – those layers called … Continue reading Newly discovered brain stem cell could aid in therapies for Alzheimer’s, autism

When we produced our first Huntington’s disease (HD) video two years ago, I was really taken in by the close bonds between those living with the disease and the stem cell researchers looking for a treatment. The feelings of mutual respect, admiration, and friendship were very palpable. They spoke of each other as if they … Continue reading Video: Stem Cell Research Funding = Hope for Huntington’s Patient Advocates

The Los Angeles area’s largest National Public Radio station, KPCC, aired a great piece this morning on a group of local teens who gave up a summer at the beach for a summer of 40-hour weeks in stem cell labs at the Broad Center at the University of Southern California. They also did a print … Continue reading High school students find summer excitement in stem cell labs

Back in 1994, a Canadian researcher named John Dick made a cancer discovery that kicked off what has been an 18 year debate. He found that for people with a certain kind of leukemia—called acute myelogenous leukemia—a small group of slow-dividing cells seem to be the source of all the other cancer cells. If a … Continue reading The heart of cancer: Cancer stem cells shown to exist in three tumors

Each month CIRM President Alan Trounson gives his perspective on recently published papers he thinks will be valuable in moving the field of stem cell research forward. This month’s report, along with an archive of past reports, is available on the CIRM website.Of the six papers I discuss in this month’s full report, I just … Continue reading Guest blogger Alan Trounson — July’s stem cell research highlights

Stem cell-derived heart muscle cells The first task of developing a stem cell-based therapy is coaxing the stem cells to turn into the desired cell type – neurons for brain diseases, pancreatic cells for diabetes, or, in the case of some recent work by a group of CIRM grantees, heart muscle cells for heart disease. A … Continue reading Needle in a haystack search turns up compound that might mend broken hearts

How do you say “what are stem cells ” in Portuguese? How about Turkish or even Hindi and Vietnamese? I had no idea either, at least not until I turned to Prof. Paul Knoepfler’s stem cell blog. As regular readers of this blog know Prof. Knoepfler is a stem cell researcher at the UC Davis … Continue reading Translations bring stem cell information to the world

Huntington's disease advocates speaking to the Governing BoardYesterday’s governing board meeting should have been a happy one. The agency awarded $150 million dollars to fantastic teams of researchers whose work could result in therapies for some of the worst diseases – Huntington’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, melanoma and heart disease, to name a few.But that … Continue reading Patient advocates speak in support of disease teams, new therapies