Archive by category | Stem cells/cloning

Chimeric monkeys provide new disease model

Chimeric monkeys provide new disease model

Chimeric mice are one of the most important tools in biological research. By studying composite animals with tissues from distinct genetic lineages, scientists have gained important insights into the molecular mechanisms disease. This powerful biomedical research tool has largely been restricted to rodents and farm animals that are distantly related from humans, and, thus, might not best approximate human disease. Now, however, rhesus monkeys have joined the chimera club—an advance that researchers hope will help bridge the gap between mice and humans. “It is not enough to jump from mouse right to human in transplanting tissues,” says Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a  … Read more

American scientist arrested in stem-cell clinic sting

American scientist arrested in stem-cell clinic sting

Cross-posted from the Nature News Blog An American university scientist was arrested on 27 December, accused of supplying stem cells for use in unapproved therapies. The US Department of Justice says Vincent Dammai, a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston, supplied the stem cells without the approval of his university or of the US Food and Drug Administration. Two other men, Francisco Morales of Brownsville, Texas, and Alberto Ramon, of Del Rio, Texas, were also arrested this week as part of the case. A fourth man, Lawrence Stowe of Dallas, Texas, has been charged and  … Read more

Geron abandons stem cell research

Geron abandons stem cell research

Crossposted from Nature’s news blog A company that pioneered embryonic stem cell research is walking out on the field it helped to create. Geron, based in Menlo Park, California, announced yesterday that it would kill off its stem cell program — and its landmark clinical trial of a treatment for spinal cord injuries — so that it can focus on cancer therapies. For supporters of the technology, Geron’s exit is a blow. “This is very unfortunate for the field,” says Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology, the only other embryonic stem cell company with regulatory approval to  … Read more

Mississippi votes against embryos’ human rights, but national debate continues

Mississippi votes against embryos’ human rights, but national debate continues

Yesterday, Mississippi voters headed to the polls to weigh in on a highly controversial ballot initiative that would give embryos in that state ‘personhood’ status, and wreak havoc on reproductive therapy and research in the process. Despite the fact that the constitutional amendment, known as Initiative 26, was supported by Republican and Democrat candidates for Mississippi Governor as well as the state’s Attorney General Jim Hood, it ultimately failed as 58% of the voters rejected it. The ballot initiative came out of an ongoing nation-wide campaign launched by Personhood USA, a Colorado-based Christian non-profit. Many doctors in Mississippi are letting  … Read more

First stem cells created from cloned human embryos — but they’re triploid

First stem cells created from cloned human embryos — but they’re triploid

Researchers in New York have succeeded where the disgraced South Korean Hwang Woo-suk failed. They have successfully derived the world’s first stem cells from a cloned human embryo. But, notably, the new stem cells are not suitable for therapeutic use because they contain three sets of chromosomes, instead of the regular two. In work published today in Nature, a team led by Dieter Egli at the New York Stem Cell Foundation took skin cells from healthy and diabetic volunteers and inserted the cells’ nuclei into unfertilized human eggs. Within a few days cloned embryos developed allowing researchers to pluck out  … Read more

First embryonic stem cell trial approved outside the US

An embryonic field seems to be developing rapidly. Just two months after Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) launched the second and third trials involving human embryonic stem cell (ESC) derived products in an operating room at the University of California–Los Angeles, the Santa Monica-based biotech announced today that it had gained approval from the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency to conduct the first ESC cell trial outside the US.  Read more

NEWS FEATURE: Taking tissue engineering to heart — a look at the first US trial of tissue-engineered blood vessels

NEWS FEATURE: Taking tissue engineering to heart — a look at the first US trial of tissue-engineered blood vessels

More than a decade after Japanese scientists implanted the first bioengineered blood vessel into a child with a congenital heart defect, the experimental treatment has finally made its way into clinical testing in the US. Elie Dolgin asks what took so long and what lessons have been learned along the way.  Read more

Mutations in mitochondrial DNA provide another strike against induced stem cells

In 2007, after the University of Wisconsin’s James Thomson first created induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from human skin tissue, he told the New York Times that “by any means we test them they are the same as embryonic stem cells.” But over the past year or so, researchers have begun to realize that isn’t the case.  Read more

US judge rules decisively for federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research

US judge rules decisively for federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research

Crossposted from Nature’s news blog on behalf of Meredith Wadman In a victory for supporters of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research, a US district judge ruled today that government funding of the research is legal, despite an existing law that prohibits US funding of research in which an embryo is destroyed. The 38-page summary judgment by Royce Lamberth (right), the chief judge of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, may not be the final word in the case of Sherley et al. v. Sebelius, the lawsuit that ground US stem cell research to a halt for  … Read more