New Brunswick, NJ, USA – A team of Rutgers scientists, including Leonard Y. Lee and Shaohua Li, have taken an important step toward the goal of making diseased hearts heal themselves – a new model that would reduce the need for bypass surgery, heart transplants or artificial pumping devices.
Lund, Sweden – NK cells, or natural killer cells, play an important role in the body's defences against cancer and various infections. Now, in a joint project, researchers at Lund University in Sweden, the University of Oxford and Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm have mapped how the different steps of the maturation process of these supercells from blood producing stem cells in the bone marrow are regulated: knowledge which is crucial for the development of new immunotherapies against cancer.
Amsterdam, NL – IOS Press, an international publisher providing content for scientific, technical and medical communities, is proud to announce the relaunch and revitalization of StemBook, an online open access forum and discussion platform for the stem cell research community. It features a collection of content covering a range of topics related to stem cell biology written by top researchers in the field. The stembook.org site is being refreshed with new content that will be expanded and updated regularly. Enhanced functionality will also be introduced soon.
Osaka, Japan – Takeda and the New York Academy of Sciences announced two winners of the Innovators in Science Award for their commitment to and excellence in regenerative medicine.
Stockholm, Sweden – The neurodegenerative disease ALS causes motor neuron death and paralysis. However, long before the cells die, they lose contact with the muscles as their axons atrophy. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have now devised a new method that radically improves the ability to study axons and thus to better understand the pathological development of ALS.
East Lansing, MI, USA – Mammalian embryos are unlike those of any other organism as they must grow within the mother’s body. While other animal embryos grow outside the mother, their embryonic cells can get right to work accepting assignments, such as head, tail or vital organ. By contrast, mammalian embryos must first choose between forming the placenta or creating the baby.
Seattle, WA, USA – Advances in rapid screening of leukemia cells for drug susceptibility and resistance are bringing scientists closer to patient-tailored treatment for acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Research on the drug responses of leukemia stem cells may reveal why some attempts to treat are not successful or why initially promising treatment results are not sustained.
La Jolla, CA, USA – Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are the very definition of being full of potential, given that they can become any type of cell in the body. Once they start down any particular path toward a type of tissue, they lose their unlimited potential. Scientists have been trying to understand why and how this happens in order to create regenerative therapies that can, for example, coax a person’s own cells to replace damaged or diseased organs.
New York, NY, USA – The human intestine may provide up to 10 percent of blood cells in circulation from its own reservoir of blood-forming stem cells, a surprising new study from researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons has found
Washington, DC, USA – Researchers have developed a way to grow human platelets in the laboratory from stem cells derived from fat tissue. The achievement, reported today in the journal Blood, suggests manufactured platelets could eventually reduce the reliance on donated platelets to help patients with cancer and other disorders.
