NEWS and OPINIONS

Cell and Gene Therapy: Current Challenges and the Benefits of Automation
By Anna MacDonald and Sarah Whelan - Technology Networks Cell and gene therapy is a field of personalized medicine, driving the innovation of medicine and revolutionizing the way we treat disease. Gene therapies use DNA or other genetic material to edit a patient's...

Trial of Stem Cell-derived Therapy for Parkinson’s to Open in Sweden
by Margarida Maia, PhD - Parkinson's News Today A request to launch a first Phase 1/2 clinical trial of a stem cell-based therapy in people with Parkinson’s disease has been approved by the Swedish Medical Products Agency. The therapy, called STEM-PD, consists of stem...

A stress test for blood stem cells
by Nature Italy By studying how hematopoietic stem cells respond to age and damage, Raffaella di Micco aims to anticipate the long-term effects of some gene therapies. This is a scene from my daily routine in my lab in Milan where we study hematopoietic stem cells,...

Ground-breaking stem cell procedure restores patient’s mobility and joy for life
By The Ottawa Hospital - The Globe and Mail Treatment developed at The Ottawa Hospital can halt MS progression and potentially reverse symptoms When Geneviève Bétournay developed blurry vision and pain in her hips 12 years ago, she was shocked to be diagnosed with...

Researchers use CRISPR-edited T cells to treat seriously ill children with resistant leukaemia
By Medical News Life Sciences Researchers at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH) and UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (UCL GOS ICH) have used CRISPR/Cas9 technology to engineer donor T cells to try to treat seriously ill children with...

Stem Cell Study Shows How Neurons from PTSD Patients React to Stress
By Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News A study by scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center, the Yale School of Medicine, and the New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute (NYSCF) has...
Desperate covid long-haulers turn to costly, unproven treatments
By Frances Stead Sellers - The Washington Post For the burgeoning population of covid long-haulers, there is an abundance of new treatment options: Specially formulated nutraceuticals imported from India that promise to “get you life back from covid.” Pure oxygen...

Cancer: ‘Single-step’ CRISPR treatment may provide lifelong protection
by By Beth JoJack - Medical News Today For the first time, researchers have used CRISPR gene-editing technology to substitute a gene in a patient’s immune cells to redirect those cells to fight cancer. Details of a small human clinical trial using this approach are...

MIT researchers reveal DNA ‘Paste’ tech behind latest gene editing startup
By Lei Lei Wu - EndpointsNews MIT scientists have developed a tool that they say can insert large gene sequences where they want in the genome. In a paper published Thursday in Nature Biotechnology, MIT fellows Omar Abudayyeh, Jonathan Gootenberg and colleagues detail...

Greater genetic diversity is needed in human pluripotent stem cell models
By Sulagna Ghosh, Ralda Nehme & Lindy E. Barrett Nature Communications While there are a growing number of human pluripotent stem cell repositories, genetic diversity remains limited in most collections and studies. Here, we discuss the importance of incorporating...

Northern White Rhino Primordial Germ Cells Successfully Created
By Max Delbrook Center A big step toward producing rhino gametes To save the northern white rhinoceros from extinction, the BioRescue team is racing to create lab-grown egg and sperm cells of the critically endangered subspecies. The team has now reported a milestone...

Thousands of phages found to have CRISPR gene editing system
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, Los Angeles, working with a colleague from Vilnius University, has found evidence of thousands of phages with DNA strands that should allow them to...