Archive by category | International Society for Stem Cell Research

ISSCR 2008: It’s “Shinyamania”

I cornered Harvard’s George Daley shortly after this afternoon’s opening symposium at the International Society for Stem Cell Research meeting in Philadelphia, and asked him for some stats and trends at the meeting. He’s the current president of ISSCR. There are 24,000 2,400 pre-registered attendees, he told me. That’s only 24 2.4 times the size of the last meeting I attended. As for trends: “There’s certainly a bit of Shinya-mania,” Daley said. He was referring to the focus on induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), adult human cells reprogrammed to a stem cell-like state thanks to a couple of transcription factors by a Japanese group led by Shinya Yamanaka.  Read more

ISSCR 2008: Making Beta Cells (and cutting out the middleman)

Harvard’s Doug Melton, in a plenary talk this afternoon to open the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) meeting in Philadelphia, actually didn’t talk about stem cells at all. Rather he discussed new results showing direct differentiation of pancreatic tissue into the elusive and important Beta cells, skipping stem cells altogether.  Read more

Embryonic stem cells made without destroying embryos

Bob Lanza, scientific head of ACT, says he’s generated three embryonic stem cell lines without destroying embryos – which would be proof of the concept he announced in principle he announced in 2006. The data hasn’t been released yet, but Lanza made the statement at the stem cell conference in Australia. Read more in Nature’s blog entry from that conference.  Read more

ISSCR – Hwang really did have a ‘first’

The disgraced South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang, found out for publishing fraudulent research, actually did achieve an important first, according to scientists at the meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research – just not the one he claimed.  Read more

International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR)

Join Monya Baker, news editor for Nature Reports Stem Cells, at the interntional conference of stem cell research going on this week in Cairns, Australia. Check her diary meeting reports on the Nature stem cells blog – The Niche.  Read more