News and Opinions

By Bill Schutt - Big Think The crabs' blue blood contains an ancient immune defense mechanism that has helped save countless human lives. The story of the Atlantic horseshoe crab’s first turn toward medical relevance occurred in 1956. That’s when Woods Hole...

By Demaris Mills, Integrated DNA Technologies - Technology Networks Only 10 years ago, Nobel prize-winning work introduced CRISPR, or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, as a new and powerful genome editing tool. Since then, many exciting...

The treatment was thought up by two Brown University undergraduates a decade ago. By Laurie McGinley - The Washington Post The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday overcame doubts from agency scientists and approved a fiercely debated drug for ALS, a move that...

By UC San Diego Today In animal models, researchers found that intensive physical therapy in tandem with implanted neural stem cells increased tissue growth, repair, and functionality more than those treatments alone In recent years, researchers have made measurable...

By University of Oxford - Genengnews.com Scientists at Mount Sinai say they have published one of the first studies to demonstrate the importance of reactive oxygen species in maintaining stem cell function and preventing inflammation during wound repair. The team...

CBS Sunday Morning Emily Whitehead has a secret weapon: "My T-cells, part of my immune system, were trained to fight and kill my cancer." She was only six when she became the first child ever to receive genetically-modified T cells. The experimental treatment cured...

Brilliant and inspiring article! Stem cell treatment for spina bifida! For the first time in the world, #UCDavisHealth successfully cured #paralysis and predicted associated neurological defects spina bifida for babies in utero during fetal surgery. Kudos to fetal...

By University of Pennsylvania - Sci Tech Daily Overactive populations of osteoclasts may result in a variety of disorders such as osteoporosis, arthritis, and cancer. A new function for a protein that regulates osteoclasts—the cells that break down bone—has been...

A girl with a rare disorder can now breathe more easily after receiving transfusions of a liquid that her sister's umbilical cord stem cells were grown in By Clare Wilson - New Scientist A girl who was critically ill with heart failure is doing well after receiving an...

Image caption: Chinese scientists whose study of the axolotl’s ability to regenerate cells after injury was published in Science journal say their findings have the potential to help improve the regenerative capability of mammalian and human brains in the future....

There are more cancer survivors in the U.S. than ever before, thanks to advances in cancer research. By Kaitlin Sullivan - NBC News Significant strides in cancer treatments, diagnostic tools and prevention strategies continue to drive down cancer death rates,...

The technique had largely been limited to editing patients’ cells in the lab. New research shows promise for treating diseases more directly. By Emily Mullin - Wired A decade ago, biologists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier published a landmark paper...

A mutation in the small protein SHMOOSE is associated with Alzheimer’s risk and highlights a possible target for treatment. By Beth Newcomb - USC Leonard Davis A mutation in a newly discovered small protein is connected to a significant increase in the risk for...

By Susan Buckles - Mayo Clinic May is ALS Awareness Month, a time to reflect on the role of regenerative medicine research in advancing understanding and treatment of  amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig's disease. This neurodegenerative disorder causes...

Researchers in the Netherlands found that a therapy that uses a patient's own immune cells slowed the progression of metastatic melanoma. By Kaitlin Sullivan - NBC News European researchers announced Saturday that a new treatment for advanced melanoma was more...

By Nick Lavars - News Atlas As the hardest tissue in the human body, enamel is not an easy material for engineers to mimic, but doing so could mean big things in materials science and regenerative medicine. Researchers are now reporting a breakthrough in this area, by...

Jennifer Doudna challenges governments, universities and investors to seize the moment and radically expand gene editing revolution In a life-changing collaboration with the French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier, we figured out how the chemistry of this process...

Australian blood stem cell research could help change the future of stem cell medicine. by Imma Perfetto - Cosmos Magazine Two new pieces of research out of the University of NSW in Sydney have shone new light on how the precursors to blood stem cells occur in animals...

Hanae Armitage - Stanford Medicine If you ask me, there's nothing quite so weird and wonderful as a cuttlefish. Or a squid. Or an octopus. Basically, the whole cephalopod gang. Maybe it's their gangly, elegant appendages, or their sleek, streamlined bodies gliding...

The therapy, typically used to treat blood cancer, has so far induced remission in six patients in Germany. By Kaitlin Sullivan - Health.com An immunotherapy used to treat blood cancer also shows promise as a treatment for lupus, new research shows. The news comes...