Archive by category | Regenerative medicine

Meetings this week to help embryonic stem cells’ head for the clinic

This Thursday and Friday, the FDA deliberates on how to decide that cells derived from embryonic stem cells are ready to be tested in humans. On Saturday and Sunday, patient advocates and stem-cell researchers meet in San Francisco to talk about how to accelerate discoveries and therapies.  Read more

Therapeutic cloning helps mice with Parkinson’s

It’s worth noting that the exciting paper in Nature Medicine is grabbing headlines not so much for the advance in Parkinson’s disease but because it is the first time that cells derived from cloned embryonic stem cells have been used to ameliorate disease. In the Nature Medicine paper from Sloan-Kettering’s Viviane Tabar and Lorenz Studer and others, researchers report that cells survived much better and mice’s symptoms improved if they were transplanted with genetically matched neurons.  Read more

Oregon scientist reports first ES cells from cloned primate embryos

Monkey embryonic stem cells have, for the first time, been created through nuclear transfer. All attempts to make human embryonic stem cells through nuclear transfer so far have failed, but Jamie Thomson got the recipe for human embryonic stem cells by first doing so in monkeys, so researchers will likely be going to Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health Sciences for advice. Mitalipov made his announcement Monday at the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Carins, Australia.

Hwang’s “clone” was really a parthenote, Daley reports

The human embryonic stem cells Hwang made came from a parthenote, or an activated, unfertilized egg. George Daley, a stem cell scientist from Children’s Hospital, Boston, announced this fact to an absolutely packed crowd in an exhibit hall at the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Cairns, Australia. That Hwang’s line came from a parthenote had been suspected, but this line of evidence hadn’t been presented before.

Insights to regeneration from the sea squirt– an interview

“Our study describes a remarkable regeneration phenomenon in a vertebrate ancestor, Botryllus schlosseri. In this animal, the entire body is regenerated from blood vessels. The novelty of our study is the finding that the regeneration occurs over multiple generations of individuals. The animals are initially abnormal, but gradually regain normal patterns, eventually converging (within several generations) into a completely normal animal. This is a novel regenerative/developmental pathway for a whole organism which to our knowledge has not been described before.”