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Girl dies in stem cell trial for Batten’s disease

A girl enrolled in a stem-cell trial for a fatal disease has died. In January, the nine-year-old received a brain transplant of neural stem cells derived from fetal tissue. She was one of six children in the trial for Batten disease, in which children rarely live into their teens. An independent group monitoring the trial decided that the death was due to the disease not the experimental treatment and said the trial could continue.  Read more

Oocyte-assisted reprogramming versus somatic-cell nuclear transfer

I recently received the letter below objecting to my my use of the term oocyte-assisted reprogramming. I first heard the term myself when interviewing Shoukhrat Mitalipov about cloning monkey embryos. It seemed like a nice way to distinguish between two known ways of reprogramming a nucleus: putting it in an egg versus introducing pluripotency genes. However, oocyte-assisted reprogramming has also been used to refer to a method also known as altered nuclear transfer, which involved putting a nucleus into an egg such that no viable embryo results. I hope that it was clear from my article that Mitalipov et al did, in fact, clone monkey embryos by tranferring nuclei into enucleated oocytes. I did not mean to imply that Mitalipov was using altered-nuclear transfer.  Read more

Monkey stem cells cloned

Patient-specific stem-cell lines now seem more likely than before, thanks to the discovery that primates’ genomes can be reset to the primoridal state to sustain embryonic stem cells. Researchers at Oregon Health and Science University transferred the nuclei from cultured skin cells from an adult male monkey into 304 enucleated egg cells. They were able to coax 35 of these into blastocysts. They scooped out cells from 20 of the best blastocysts to make 2 stem cell lines carrying the same chromosomes as the male monkey (one line was genetically abnormal). The efficiency of eggs to blastocysts is much improved, but the overall efficiency is low. More work needs to be done.  Read more

Hwang and virgin birth

It seems my inbox has been filled with news stories of the announcement that the biggest stem-cell fraudster actually did achieve an historic first, but not the one he claimed. Here’s the announcement that we made in June when the news was announced at a conference in Australia. https://https://blogs.nature.com/reports/theniche/2007/06/hwangs_clone_was_really_a_part_2.html  … Read more