NEWS and OPINIONS

Going slow is better for fast cycling: Study reveals unique replication fork behavior in pluripotent stem cells
by National Institutes of Natural Sciences - Phys.org - Embryonic stem (ES) cells are pluripotent stem cells that can produce all cell types of an organism. ES cells proliferate rapidly and have been thought to experience high levels of intrinsic replication stress....

Diabetes took over her life, until a stem cell therapy freed her
By Carolyn Y. Johnson - The Washington Post - For years, Amanda Smith and her husband were jolted awake at night by a buzz-buzz-beep — an alarm warning that her blood sugar was too high or too low. She would reach for juice boxes stored in her nightstand or fiddle...

Brand New Publication: Nucleic Acid Therapeutics
By Mary Ann Liebert, Inc Publishers - This cover illustrates the original research report submitted by Anastasia Khvorova of the RNA Therapeutics Institute, University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. This gorgeous image depicts the observation that nuclear...

Understanding CAR-T cell therapy for cancer: A promising, less arduous cancer treatment
By Sara Youngblood Gregory - Mayo Clinic - For many scientists and doctors, immunotherapy that uses someone’s own immune system to target and attack cancer cells is the next and best frontier of cancer treatment. Over the last decade, immunotherapy-focused research...

Discoveries from human stem cell research in space that are relevant to advancing cellular therapies on Earth
By Fay Ghani, Abba C. Zubair - Nature - Stem cell research performed in space has provided fundamental insights into stem cell properties and behavior in microgravity including cell proliferation, differentiation, and regeneration capabilities. However, there is...

Zebrafish use surprising strategy to regrow spinal cord
by Julia Evangelou Strait - Washington University College of Medicine - Detailed blueprint of nerve cells’ dramatic changes could help identify ways to heal spinal cord damage. Zebrafish are members of a rarefied group of vertebrates capable of fully healing a severed...

New way to extend ‘shelf life’ of blood stem cells will improve gene therapy
By University of Cambridge - Researchers have discovered a way to extend the shelf life of blood stem cells outside the body for use in gene therapy, providing patients with better options and improving their outcomes. We were able to identify a key molecular...

Understanding the Risk of Second Cancers After CAR T-Cell Therapy
By The National Cancer Institute - In November 2023, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it was investigating more than 20 instances of second cancers—specifically, T-cell lymphomas—in people who had been treated with CAR T-cell therapies. In several...

Astrocytes Are a Key Player in the Awakeneing of Dormant Neural Stem Cells
By Technology Networks - Research offers new hope for treating neurodevelopmental disorders by activating dormant neural stem cells. Scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School and the Mechanobiology Institute (MBI) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have...
UofL cardiologist leading clinical trial for high potential new therapy for heart failure
By University of Louisville School of Medicine - A new stem cell therapy for heart failure is being tested in patients at the University of Louisville and UofL Health. The trial is the first in the U.S. to test umbilical cord-derived stem cells in patients for heart...

Next-generation CRISPR-based gene-editing therapies tested in clinical trials
By Natalie Healey - Nature Medicine Going from the laboratory to an approved therapy in 11 years is no mean feat. That is the story of the world’s first approved CRISPR–Cas9 therapy, greenlit by the US Food and Drug Administration in December 2023....

First Engineered T Cell Therapy for Solid Tumors Approved by the FDA
By Inside Precision Medicine - The immunotherapy afamitresgene autoleucel (afami-cel) for the treatment of adults with the rare soft tissue cancer called synovial sarcoma was granted accelerated approval late last week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)....