We at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine have a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. We get to work with some extraordinary colleagues, we get to know some remarkable patient advocates who are pioneers in volunteering for stem cell and gene therapies, and we have a front row seat in a movement that is changing the face of medicine.
We also get to work with some brilliant scientists and help support their research. As if we needed any reminders of how important that funding is, we thought we would share this video with you. It’s from the talented post docs and researchers at the University of California San Diego. It’s a delightful parody of the Cyndi Lauper classic “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”. Only in this case it’s “Nerds Just Wanna Have Funds.”
It’s traditional this time of year to send messages of gratitude to friends and family and colleagues. And we certainly have much to be thankful for.
Thanks to the voters of California, who passed Proposition 14, we have a bright, and busy, future. We have $5.5 billion to continue our mission of accelerating stem cell treatments to patients with unmet medical needs.
That means the pipeline of promising projects that we have supported from an early stage can now apply to us to help take that work out of the lab and into people.
It means research areas, particularly early-stage work, where we had to reduce our funding as we ran out of money can now look forward to increased support.
It means we can do more to bring this research, and it’s potential benefits, to communities that in the past were overlooked.
We have so many people to thank for all this. The scientists who do the work and championed our cause at the ballot box. The voters of California who once again showed their support for and faith in science. And the patients and patient advocates, the reason we were created and the reason we come to work every day.
As Dr. Maria Millan, our President & CEO, said in a letter to our team; “We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.” Here’s to the opportunities made possible by CIRM and for its continuation made possible by Prop 14!”
And none of this would be possible without the support of all of you. And for that we are truly Thankful.
From everyone at CIRM, we wish you a happy, peaceful and safe Thanksgiving.
Biomedical technician Louis Pinedo feeds stem cells their special diet. Photo by Cedars-Sinai.
With Thanksgiving and Black Friday approaching in the next couple of days,we wanted to give thanks to all the scientists hard at workduring this holiday weekend. Science does not sleep–the groundbreaking research and experiments that are being conducted do not take days off. There are tasks in the laboratory that need to be done daily otherwise months, even years, of important work can be lost in an instant.
Below is a story fromCedars-SinaiMedical Center that talks about one of these scientists, Louis Pinedo, that will be working during this holiday weekend.
Stem Cells Don’t Take the Day Off on Thanksgiving
Inside a Cedars-Sinai Laboratory, Where a Scientist Will be Busy Feeding Stem Cells During the Holiday
While most of us are stuffing ourselves with turkey and pumpkin pie at home on Thanksgiving Day, the staff at one Cedars-Sinai laboratory will be on the job, feeding stem cells.
“Stem cells do not observe national holidays,” says Loren Ornelas-Menendez, the manager of a lab that converts samples of adult skin and blood cells into stem cells—the amazing “factories” our bodies use to make our cells. These special cells help medical scientists learn how diseases develop and how they might be cured.
Stem cells are living creatures that must be hand-fed a special formula each day, monitored for defects and maintained at just the right temperature. And that means the cell lab is staffed every day, 52 weeks a year.
These cells are so needy that Ornelas-Menendez jokes: “Many people have dogs. We have stem cells.”
Millions of living stem cells are stored in the David and Janet Polak Foundation Stem Cell Core Laboratory at the Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute. Derived from hundreds of healthy donors and patients, they represent a catalogue of human ills, including diabetes, breast cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and Crohn’s disease.
Cedars-Sinai scientists rely on stem cells for many tasks: to make important discoveries about how our brains develop; to grow tiny versions of human tissues for research; and to create experimental treatments for blindness and neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) that they are testing in clinical trials.
The lab’s main collection consists of induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, which mimic the all-powerful stem cells we all had as embryos. These ingenious cells, which Cedars-Sinai scientists genetically engineer from adult cells, can make any type of cell in the body—each one matching the DNA of the donor. Other types of stem cells in the lab make only one or two kinds of cells, such as brain or intestinal cells.
Handy and versatile as they are, stem cells are high-maintenance. A few types, such as those that make connective tissue cells for wound healing, can be fed as infrequently as every few days. But iPSCs require a daily meal to stay alive, plus daily culling to weed out cells that have started to turn into cells of the gut, brain, breast or other unwanted tissues.
So each day, lab staff suit up and remove trays of stem cells from incubators that are set at a cozy 98.6 degrees. Peering through microscopes, they carefully remove the “bad” cells to ensure the purity of the iPSCs they will provide to researchers at Cedars-Sinai and around the world.
While the cells get sorted, a special feeding formula is defrosting in a dozen bottles spread around a lab bench. The formula incudes sodium, glucose, vitamins and proteins. Using pipettes, employees squeeze the liquid into food wells inside little compartments that contain the iPSCs. Afterward, they return the cells to their incubators.
The lab’s 10 employees are on a rotating schedule that ensures the lab is staffed on weekends and holidays, not just weekdays. On Thanksgiving Day this year, biomedical technician Louis Pinedo expects to make a 100-mile round trip from his home in Oxnard, California, to spend several hours at work, filling nearly 600 feeding wells. On both Christmas and New Year’s Day, two employees are expected to staff the lab.
All this ceaseless effort helps make Cedars-Sinai one of the world’s top providers of iPSCs, renowned for consistency and quality. Among the lab’s many clients are major universities and the global Answer ALS project, which is using the cells in its search for a cure for this devastating disease.
That’s why the lab’s director, Dhruv Sareen, PhD, suggests that before you sit down to your Thanksgiving feast, why not lift a glass to these hard-working lab employees?
“One day the cells they tend could lead to treatments for diseases that have plagued humankind for centuries,” he says. “And that’s something to be truly thankful for.”
The Stem Cellar 