Today we bring you a guest blog from Athena Mari Asklipiadis. She's the founder of Mixed Marrow, which is an organization dedicated to finding bone marrow and blood cell donors to patients of multiethnic descent. Athena helped produce a 2016 documentary film called Mixed Match that encourages mixed race and minority donors to register as adult donors. Due to … Continue reading Mixed Matches: How Your Heritage Can Save a Life
Bone marrow transplant
Curing the Incurable through Definitive Medicine
“Curing the Incurable”. That was the theme for the first annual Center for Definitive and Curative Medicine (CDCM) Symposium held last week at Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California. The CDCM is a joint initiative amongst Stanford Healthcare, Stanford Children’s Health and the Stanford School of Medicine. Its mission is to foster an environment that … Continue reading Curing the Incurable through Definitive Medicine
A single protein can boost blood stem cell regeneration
Today, CIRM-funded scientists from the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center reported in Nature Medicine that hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) - blood stem cells that generate the cell in your blood and immune system - get a helping hand after injury from cells in the bone marrow called bone progenitor cells. By secreting a protein called dickkopf-1 … Continue reading A single protein can boost blood stem cell regeneration
Deleting a single gene can boost blood stem cell regeneration
A serious side effect that cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy experience is myelosuppression. That’s a big word for a process that involves the decreased production of the body’s immune cells from hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) or blood stem cells in the bone marrow. Without these important cells that make up the immune system, patients are at … Continue reading Deleting a single gene can boost blood stem cell regeneration
Gene Therapy Beats Half-Matched Stem Cell Transplant in Side-by-Side Comparison to Treat ‘Bubble Baby’ Disease
If you are born with Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID), your childhood is anything but normal. You don’t get to play with other kids, or be held by your parents. You can’t even breathe the same air. And, without treatment, you probably won’t live past your first year. This is the reality of SCID, also called … Continue reading Gene Therapy Beats Half-Matched Stem Cell Transplant in Side-by-Side Comparison to Treat ‘Bubble Baby’ Disease
Getting the right tools for the right job
Imagine a device that sits outside the body and works like a form of dialysis for a damaged liver, filtering out the toxins and giving the liver a chance to regenerate, and the patient a chance to avoid the need for a transplant. Or imagine a method of enhancing the number of stem cells we … Continue reading Getting the right tools for the right job
In living color: new imaging technique tracks traveling stem cells
Before blood stem cells can mature, before they can grow and multiply into the red blood cells that feed our organs, or the white blood cells that protect us from pathogens, they must go on a journey. This journey, which takes place in the developing embryo, moves blood stem cells from their place of origin … Continue reading In living color: new imaging technique tracks traveling stem cells
No Fear of Rejection? Partial Stem Cell Transplant Reverses Sickle Cell Disease—even without Immunosuppressant Drugs
For those who suffer from the blood disorder sickle cell disease, there is really only one cure: a full bone marrow transplant followed by a lifetime of anti-rejection, immune-suppressing drugs. But now, researchers from the National Institutes of Health are testing an attractive alternative for the sickest patients. Sickle cell disease gets its name from … Continue reading No Fear of Rejection? Partial Stem Cell Transplant Reverses Sickle Cell Disease—even without Immunosuppressant Drugs
The Stem Cellar 