Right Turn: Bench to bedside goes interactive
. This is an anniversary celebration of sorts. One year ago (almost to the day), EuroStemCell and OptiStem released the graphic story From Hope to Hype and I recall being amazed: not just at the beauty and integrity of the finished product, but at the immense creativity of the project as a whole. Explaining stem…Read more
3D patterning of blood vessels: Creating a fertile landscape for engineered tissues
Nepalese terraces. Photo: strudelt via Flickr . Picture traveling back in time to an era before cell phones (*shudder*). Before radios. Before germ theory. In fact, try taking yourself back to when written language was first being developed around 6000 BC. It’s hard to imagine. And yet while these societies may have lacked our freeways…Read more
Right Turn: Everybody loves infographics (right?)!
. Inspired by the first Right Turn featuring a regenerative medicine infographic, Signals Blog is holding a contest to seek the best original (i.e. not previously published) stem cell or regenerative medicine infographics out there! We’re keeping the subject matter broad to see how creative you are. We’re looking for the following: Scientific accuracy Skill…Read more
To the stars and beyond: Assessing the impact of the $100 Genome
We live in a time of extraordinary medical advances. So far in 2013, we’ve seen the successful transplantation of a bioengineered kidney into rats, an infant reportedly cured of HIV using anti-retroviral drugs that are currently on the market, and discovered a protein that has the potential to ‘reverse aging’ in the heart. These ‘small…Read more
Using stem cells to cure… extinction?
In last week’s Right Turn, we talked about how stem cells are responsible for the colours and patterns of bird feathers—and birds, as the graphic on the right demonstrates, are basically just tiny dinosaurs. Given that there is much promise in stem cell research (and also a great deal of hype), it makes one wonder:…Read more
Right Turn: Feathers as an example of stem cell complexity
Pea Hen Feather. Credit: Bill Gracey The arrival of summer’s songbirds to much of Canada over the past month makes this a fitting time to talk about feathers. Coincidentally, a paper was released in Science in late April that revealed how stem cells function to create an incredible array of colours and patterns in bird…Read more
Right Turn: Parents breathe sigh of relief after windpipe surgery success
. It was big news this week when doctors at Children’s Hospital of Illinois performed the first successful pediatric transplant in the U.S. of a regenerated trachea using a synthetic scaffold. The Canadian father and Korean mother of two-year-old Hannah Genevieve Warren are delighted that their daughter, born without a windpipe, now has one grown…Read more
At the forefront of biomaterial research
. The work by Joe Landolina and Suneris Inc., highlighted by Stacey Johnson in her recent post, helps bring to the forefront the industry’s motivation to utilize “smart biomaterials”. The Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine has been researching smart biomaterials that could be used to treat soldiers injured in the field. Photo: Flickr Commons…Read more
The importance of unequal division in stem cells
. Stem cells must strike a balance between different types of divisional outcomes in order to provide the correct numbers and types of cells for the lifetime of an organism. At each cell division, a stem cell either makes two replicates of itself to expand the population (a self-renewal division), makes two highly proliferating cells…Read more
Rush to publish and the repercussions of carelessness in science
Co-authored with Dr. Zubin Master, Assistant Professor at the Alden March Bioethics Institute, Albany Medical College and Research Associate at the University of Alberta’s Health Law and Science Policy Group. In the current discussion about the now controversial SCNT human cloning paper by Shoukhrat Mitalipov et al., much has already been said of the reported errors that resulted…Read more