CIRM grantees at Stanford University have removed some of the risk of therapies based on human embryonic stem cells or reprogrammed adult cells, known as iPS cells. Both of these cells types are known as pluripotent, which means that the cells can go on to form all the mature cells of the human body. The … Continue reading Weeding out the tumor-forming cells from potential stem cell therapies

UC Davis interns Rex Reyes, Jaskaran Dhillon, Thomas Gepts and Kalani Ratnasiri Last week CIRM gathered together the Creativity Award interns to learn about their summer projects. These high school students came from UC Davis, UC San Francisco, UC Santa Barbara and Stanford to congregate at the Children's Hospital Oakland, home of CIRM board member … Continue reading High school students get stem cell experience in California labs

Every once in a while CIRM grantee Paul Knoepfler at UC Davis posts an update on his blog about what he considers to be the big ticket question in research using reprogrammed adult cells, known as iPS cells. This time, he's posted five questions for the upcoming year.Will any new methods for creating iPS cells … Continue reading Top questions in iPS cell research

One perplexing question in regenerative medicine is why the human heart muscle cells are unable to divide and multiply their numbers. If they could, maybe they'd be able to produce new heart cells to replace those lost after a heart attack. Newts and salamanders can do it, why can't we? CIRM grantees at the University … Continue reading Heart cells divide again?

A group of Parkinson's disease patients and family members have hit on a new twist to athletic fundraisers. Forget the local charity 10K race — they are hiking 19,000 foot Mt. Kilamanjaro in Tanzania to raise money for The Scripps Research Institute's Center for Regenerative Medicine, headed by CIRM grantee Jeanne Loring. Loring has CIRM … Continue reading Mountain climbing raises money for stem cell research, Parkinson’s disease

A few weeks ago, my colleague used this space to discuss the second and third papers showing teams had turned skin cells directly into neurons, noting that this replication of research results is essential to verifying the initial breakthrough while refining and improving it. She noted that only after much replication and refinement would she … Continue reading A fifth group turns skin to neurons, creating a model for Alzheimer’s disease

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health announced this morning that Mahendra Rao will become the first director of the new NIH Intramural Center for Regenerative Medicine (NIH-CRM). It will be good for CIRM to have someone in this new role who is very knowledgable about us and has been an active supporter … Continue reading NIH names friend of CIRM as head of its new stem cell center

Smarts, education and hard work will get you far, but the big leaps in science take something more -- creativity. That's the thinking behind an innovative CIRM-funded summer program that encourages the most creative high school students to spend time working in a stem cell lab. The CIRM Creativity Awards recipients are meeting in Oakland … Continue reading High school students get creative in California stem cell labs

Recent research from the University of Iowa suggests that people with cystic fibrosis have fewer of the stem cells that would normally repair the airway. In most people, glands in the airway secrete bacteria-killing factors to help fight infection. These glands are also home to airway stem cells that rebuild the glands and keep them … Continue reading Lung airway stem cells awry in cystic fibrosis

Stem cell science is set to get a boost from an unlikely source: outer space. It turns out that techniques devised to help telescopes peer through the blur of the earth's atmosphere could help scientists peak more deeply into tissues. If the technique, called adaptive optics or AO, works it might prove useful for scientists … Continue reading Tracking stem cells using tricks learned in outer space