An article in Tuesday’s LA Times patiently explains that expensive bottles of skin cream sold in doctors’ offices and online do not actually contain stem cells. They don’t have much science either. Other companies are marketing services to store stem cells in menstrual blood. The uterine lining is highly regenerative, but the science is early.
In San Diego, four independent institutions are planning to build a common $115-million facility for stem cell science. Teri Somers covers it well, and some commentators are passionately against. The California Stem Cell Report has comments on this, plus a lively discussion on the meaning of “trivial” in terms of the contribution the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine claimed to have made and actually made to research leading to clinical trials. (The posts are on April 17 and April 15) Back in August, Nature Reports Stem Cells conducted a survey on how recipients of innovation grants intended to use them, noting that the Institute had been kept from disbursing most of the funds it had been awarded)
Keep reading for most posts that caught my eye
A blog entitled “WARF is evil” castigates the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, claiming the agency obstructs human embryonic stem cell research through the patents it has successfully defended against challenge. The blog has drawn a share of careful rebuttals.
On a related note, this month’s Nature Biotechnology (subscription required), has an article explaining the US patent office’s decision to uphold the WARF patents. It describes “new rules of engagement in the battle for dominance in stem cell IP”, patents are likely to be based on cells’ physical characteristics such as gene expression rather than function. In the same issue, you’ll see a profile on Dan Ravicher, the lawyer-activist that launched the attack on the WARF patents. (For the scientist side, see our commentary by Jeanne Loring )
An interesting grab-bag of items was posted recently by the Center for Genetics and Society, a non-profit that worries about research cloning’s potential to lead to reproductive cloning.
Another blog from the center complains that one of our recent commentaries called “What comes after iPS?”does not point out that no one has yet produced human embryonic stem cells through nuclear transfer and that doing so requires using human eggs and creating a blastocyst (presumably, most people reading Nature Reports Stem Cells would know this, but point taken). What the critique fails to mention is the main point of the commentary: that directly reprogrammed cells will transform not just regenerative medicine but also cell biology.
Finally, thanks to Hematopoiesis for naming Nature Reports Stem Cells FAQs number one. I worked really hard on those (and so did those kind experts I harassed for feedback). They are one-year old now, so I’ll be spending the next couple weeks rereading them and bringing them up to date.