Today’s post announces the winner of the 2020 The Screamers Science Hype Award. Since this is the inaugural year for The Screamers, I’m just going to give out one main award: Overall Worst Science Hype. Science Hype Award to FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn Remarkably, the winner of the overall The Screamers Award for Science Hype for 2020 is now former (as of today) FDA Commissioner Stephen…

When my wife and I were expecting our first daughter way back in the nineties, we received a paper pamphlet about cord blood banking. Back then, I was a graduate student at UC San Diego School of Medicine working toward my Ph.D. in Molecular Pathology and my wife was in medical school at the time so we thought а fair amount about cord blood banking. However, it was fairly new at the time and…

I’m playing catch-up on some reading given how busy I’ve been and this includes a groundbreaking NEJM pub on CRISPR for Sickle Cell and Thalassemia. Victoria Gray and her kids. She was the first trial participant to receive an experimental CRISPR intervention for sickle cell disease and is doing great so far after getting the transplant of gene-edited cells. Photo by Victoria Gray. CRISPR for…

Sometimes on The Niche or while teaching students as a professor here at UC Davis School of Medicine, I’ve been asked: What is a teratoma? Not all tumors are created equal and some like teratomas are particularly unusual. Human stem cell derived teratoma. Knoepfler lab research image. Glands are evident in the middle of this H&E stained image. Other tissue types surround the glands. Exactly what…

In any given field of biomedical science like stem cell research and regenerative medicine, it’s very useful if you can accurately predict the future. It seems, though, that predictions are far more difficult within the more exciting and rapidly-changing fields. The field of stem cells and regenerative medicine fits that bill. Past stem cell research predictions Of course there’s no such thing as…

The paper of the week reports using base-editing, a kind of gene-editing, to reverse mutations associated with rapid aging syndromes, generally called progeria, but there are a lot of other interesting pubs to recommend for reading this week. I go over it all in this post. Base-editing improves aortic morphology in a mouse model of aging where overall aging is improved as well. “Representative…

Is a head transplant actually going to be an option for extending life or changing what it means to be human? What about brain transplants? Head transplant background Given the extreme nature of the idea of taking one person’s head and putting it on another’s body, why does this area attract so much attention? Sergio Canavero, perhaps the leading advocate of head transplant research, giving a…

A new paper today in Stem Cells Translational Medicine on a small COVID-19 Phase 1/2a trial using an umbilical cord stem cell product reports a surprising degree of possible efficacy. What’s the scoop here and could there be some hype in the media about this new study such as one of the authors describing the cells as “smart bomb technology in the lung”? Study of umbilical cord stem cell…

What a year 2020 was, but there was still plenty of great science, which continues now in 2021 including published research like today’s recommended pieces and there’s one thread on MSCs today. The Niche new look, more features, and a Medical Advisory Board for 2021 Before we get to the recommended reads, note that 2021 will brings some changes to The Niche. Some of the new developments are…

The-Niche-stem-cell-predictions-2020 Each year I metaphorically try to look into a crystal ball for stem cell predictions for the coming year and I did so for 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic threw a monkey wrench into my predictions. It actually kind of blew some up. It also raised some interesting questions and dilemmas. For instance, do many kinds of non-cellular research for COVID-19 count as…

Imagine receiving a smidgeon of thymus gland along with a donated heart or kidney, to fool the immune system into accepting the transplant. Authors of a new study argue that might be possible, based on their new proof-of-principle experiments. The team from the Epithelial Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine lab at the Francis Crick Institute and University College London published their…

The stem cell paper of the week is a fun one about how capsaicin and nociceptors reportedly mobilize blood stem cells.  However, since the authors only show this in mice, could it also happen in humans? They argue it’s likely happening in people too. Note that nociceptors are special structures in our bodies that sense pain, not just from spicy food but also from other sources. Where to even…

Sometimes patients or my students ask me, “What are the best stem cells?” what information are they looking for? I think they often are looking for the most powerful stem cells so perhaps they should be asking, “What are totipotent stem cells?” Other times it seems what patients specifically want to know is what might be the best stem cells for their particular condition. The answer to that is,…

I’ve been closely following the arena of stem cells for COVID-19 since the pandemic broke including the efforts of Mesoblast. Mesoblast unlikely to meet primary endpoints in Phase III COVID trial Mesoblast CEO Silvio Itescu. Now, the firm got bad news as its DSMB reported that they are unlikely to meet the primary endpoint for their Phase III trial of their stem cell product for COVID-19 based on…

Approval of Prop 14 California last month to renew CIRM was one of the biggest state election developments of 2020. Yet it didn’t get much news coverage somehow. The exception is David Jensen over at California Stem Cell Report, who has been a great source of information about the various news surrounding Prop 14 and CIRM so check that out. CIRM is having a public meeting today about its future.…

What to read when there are almost an endless number of stem cell and regenerative medicine pubs? Here are some suggestions including what I would say is a very unusual Nature paper on making egg cells from stem cells. If this could be done safely with human cells all the way to functional eggs, would you consider stem cell-related fertility treatments to be “Regenerative Medicine”? “Expression…

We often talk about stem cells but there are some pretty basic, important questions that often go unanswered like ‘where do stem cells come from?’ It’s a more complicated and interesting question than you might think, and some of the answers point to novel ways in which stem cells may be used to treat human diseases. Note that if you are looking for information in a language other than English,…

Today’s The Niche recommended weekly reads post includes both primary papers and also a few media pieces. I’m especially interested in the first piece on making more complex embryo-like structures from ES cells. This is a long way from just making embryoid bodies or EBs. At the end of the post I discuss an article that highlighted what seems to be a super-pricey new fee-scheme for open access…

I’ve been asked many times over the years if stem cell injections at for-profit clinics can help brain function, but recently the more common query is whether brain supplements such as Prevagen actually work. I’m skeptical of both unproven stem cell injections and supplements that are supposed to somehow help the brain. Marketing of brain supplements like Prevagen If you ever turned on your TV in…

This week we have some interesting new reading including both on the stem cell basic and translational fronts as well as on COVID-19 vaccines. COVID-19 vaccine considerations From Derek Lowe at In The Pipeline on COVID-19 vaccine expectations at Science Translational Medicine, Get Ready for False Side Effects. You can read my views on possible side effects of RNA-based COVID-19 vaccines, which I…