Tag Archives: stem cell

Apr 20 2012

ladies, here’s something you may not know about yourself

Being the kind of person I am, I can’t describe the joy of setting off on a journey with absolutely everything I need. Nothing forgotten, nothing to grab along the way.  Oh the peace of mind.

Ladies, we know that you come into this world equally well prepared.  That is, for your journey towards motherhood.  Or do you? We’ve all been aware that you’re born with all the eggs you’ll ever have, but is that true?  Researchers in the lab of Dr. Jonathan Tilly at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston challenge that notion by reporting their discovery of human egg-producing stem cells in Nature Medicine this past February. Continue reading →

Feb 16 2012

get to work on repairing that aforementioned broken heart

Image Courtesy SDSU

Valentine’s Day has finally come and gone.  Did you perhaps live one of the horror stories that we’ve all heard before?  Horrible date?  Bad break up?  Suffering from the broken heart malady that I mentioned in just my last post?  <Yeah, I know I’ll quit with the cheesy broken heart metaphors after this week.>

While a broken heart may be a real ailment, cardiac disease and heart attacks are a much more serious business.  Luckily, some recent work is out there to give us hope.

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Jan 20 2012

stem cell transplants can reverse effects of traumatic brain injury

I cannot tell you how obsessed I was with Looney Tunes back in the day. I mean, I had a replica Taz basketball jersey from the Space Jam movie. It was serious. I wonder now, though, how I never questioned the massive injuries that were always going on. Looking back, I wonder if the Warner critters may have realized the potential utility of stem cell treatments way ahead of their time.

The usefulness of stem cells in helping to heal serious brain damage is now even better understood, after a paper published in December in the Journal of Neurotrauma. A group in Dr. Ping Wu’s lab at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, TX, has not only reported that stem cell transplants can help to repair brain injury, but also have discovered some underlying reasons why.

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Jan 10 2012

stem cells breathe new life into old mice

Image from Kotaku.com

The ailments of old age are certainly not unfamiliar to any of us, nor are they fondly anticipated, evidenced by the centuries-old hunt for the fabled fountain of youth.

Fortunately, the hunt may soon be over, as scientists at the University of Pittsburgh have recently published some very interesting work in Nature Communications.  A team led by senior authors Johnny Huard, Ph.D., and Laura Niedernhofer, M.D., Ph.D, have discovered that they were able to reverse premature aging in a mouse model with an injection of healthy young stem cells. Continue reading →