News & Commentaries

San Francisco, CA, USA – Currently, the only therapy for metabolic liver disease is an organ transplant. Tracy Grikscheit, MD, an attending physician and regenerative medicine scientist at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, hopes to change that reality. She has been awarded nearly $1.3 million by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) to study stem cell therapy for liver failure.

New Brunswick, NJ, USA – Rutgers scientists have created a tiny, biodegradable scaffold to transplant stem cells and deliver drugs, which may help treat Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, aging brain degeneration, spinal cord injuries and traumatic brain injuries.

Baltimore, MD, USA – Since Carnegie Institution’s Barbara McClintock received her Nobel Prize on her discovery of jumping genes in 1983, we have learned that almost half of our DNA is made up of jumping genes – called transposons. Given their ability of jumping around the genome in developing sperm and egg cells, their invasion triggers DNA damage and mutations.

Stanford, CA, USA – Researchers can design the perfect molecule to edit a gene, treat cancer or guide the development of a stem cell, but none of that will matter in the end if they can’t get their molecule into the human cells they want to manipulate. The solution to that problem, described in a study published October 31 in Science Advances, could be minuscule nanostraws, tiny glass-like protrusions that poke equally tiny holes in cell walls to deliver their cargo.