by Amy Adams on August 9, 2011 at 1:12PM | 0 comments
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.
by Amy Adams on April 26, 2011 at 1:47PM | 0 comments
CIRM grantees at the Scripps Research Institute, University of California, San Diego and Sanford-Burnham Research Institute have taken an intriguing step toward producing neural progenitor cells for research or therapies. The team, led by Sheng Ding who has recently moved to the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, started with mouse skin cells and converted them directly to an early stage of neural cell. The work was published in the April 26 online issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
by Amy Adams on April 11, 2011 at 1:07PM | 0 comments
(Comment: it appears that we already blogged about this study back in February. It's interesting work, though, so this second blog entry gets to remain.)
by Amy Adams on March 4, 2011 at 1:38PM | 0 comments
Much has been written over the past few days about a spate of new papers by CIRM grantees showing significant differences between reprogrammed iPS cells and embryonic stem cells (see the San Diego Union Tribune, Discover, Technology Review) and CIRM grantee Paul Knoepfler
by Amy Adams on March 3, 2011 at 10:30AM | 0 comments
CIRM's Senior Officer to the Standards Working Group, Geoff Lomax, is blogging this week from Calgary where his attending the Canadian Stem Cell Network's meeting "Stem Cell Controversies".
by Amy Adams on June 3, 2010 at 2:26PM | 0 comments
Many people in the stem cell community and at CIRM have been concerned about the growing trend of stem cell tourism -- people going overseas to receive unproven "stem cell" therapies. The term Stem Cells is in quotes here because in general these clinics are less than open about what, exactly, the therapy entails. One tourism destination in Costa Rica owned by an Arizona entrepreneur was just shut down by the country's Health Ministry. According to a story in Reuters the treatments cost between $5,000 and $30,000.
by Amy Adams on February 17, 2010 at 8:43PM | 0 comments
Two recent papers by CIRM grantees highlight the importance of understanding basic stem cell biology while developing new cures. Both have to do with chemical modifications to the DNA â called epigenetics.
One of the two papers shows that an epigenetic change in DNA, called methylation, changes dramatically as human embryonic stem cells mature into specific cell types; the other shows that even subtle DNA methylation differences alter the way a cell behaves.
