Biomedical researchers have long sought ways to repair spinal cord damage with the holy grail of the pursuit being the reconstitution of lost function. In the mid 1990’s with the successful culture of human embryonic stem cells, and about a decade later induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), the field was energized with a potential new approach to replace the lost neurons and glia cells and restoring neural connections.  In the decades since that discovery some progress has been made,...

Collectively, retinal degenerative disorders are a major cause of blindness worldwide. For example, one of the most common disorders is age related macular degeneration, which alone affects nearly 200 million globally.  In humans, and other mammals, the loss of the retinal cells is an irreversible process. However, in some non-mammalian vertebrates like frogs and fish, retinal neurons can regenerate. This process is dependent upon Müller glia, which can re-enter the cell cycle and reprogram...

Since the 1930’s research using human fetal tissue has been used in numerous scientific and medical advances that have saved millions of lives, including the development of vaccines and treatments for diseases. Despite its substantial contribution to medicine and science, significant public debate and misinformation persists surrounding the ethical use of human fetal tissue in biomedical research.  The ISSCR, led by its Public Policy Committee, have been tireless champions and advocates for...

This November marks the 25th anniversary of the successful isolation and culture of human embryonic stem cells by Jamie Thompson.  This breakthrough was a turning point in biomedical research. This discovery provided scientists with a limitless source of human cells to understand human biology and model disease. The discovery also provided a novel pathway to develop tissues and cells that could potentially be used to provide curative diseases like diabetes and Parkinson’s, among others. To...

Human stem cell technology has led to remarkable insights into human biology in health and disease. However, for the results and outputs from this research to be accurate, meaningful, and durable, it is important that the field have agreed upon standards that ensure reproducibility and reliability of the data. The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) has developed a set of recommendations, including reporting criteria, for scientists in basic research laboratories. These...

The use of organoids as an experimental system is rapidly advancing in pace and complexity. Derived from pluripotent or tissue stem cells, organoids are three-dimensional, in vitro, structures intended to model functional or developmental aspects of in vivo organs. They are also being used to model complex physiological systems in organ-on-chip devices and in assembloids, the combination of organoids from different tissues. Organoids are especially useful to model and understand aspects of...

While teeth have evolved over millions of years, scientists are still working to understand how teeth develop, a process formally known as Odontogenesis. Our guests today have developed a new model of mouse tooth development using long-term expandable 3D tooth organoids from postnatal mouse molars and incisors. This novel mouse model provides a valuable tool to study mouse tooth dental epithelial stem cells, dental epithelial-mesenchymal interactions, and differentiation processes, while...

Human pluripotent stem cells have an unlimited capacity to self-renew in culture. This feature, along with their ability to become any cell type in the adult body, makes them a unique tool to study human biology in health and disease. Unfortunately, human pluripotent stem cells have a propensity to acquire genetic abnormalities in culture that may limit their scientific and clinical use. Among the most prevalent genomic changes found in pluripotent stem cells are various forms of...

The PiWi family of genes may have a diminutive sounding name, but they have a large role in the function of the germline and germline stem cells. Initially discovered in Drosophila, these highly conserved RNA-binding proteins have well-established roles in the regulation of spermatogenesis and germ stem cell maintenance, in addition to silencing transposable elements. However, PiWi function outside of the germline is relatively unexplored. New findings from the Lin laboratory show that...

This episode is sponsored by Bio-Techne. While advances in stem cell science have led to an increasing number of stem cell-based therapies entering clinical trials, the field is still relatively immature. Thus, these first-in-human trials are using pioneering approaches unique unto themselves, leaving scientists, physicians, and regulators to assess the best approaches for a specific therapy and/or disease.  In this episode of the podcast, Martin Pera is joined by physician-scientists Roger...

This episode is sponsored by Bio-Techne. Computational approaches have become integral to understanding biological processes, in part because of a need to come to grips with the enormous amounts of high dimensional data that we generate using our current tools for cellular analysis. This is especially relevant for stem cell and developmental biology where development, disease modeling, regulatory networks, and lineage formation all lend themselves to the combination of experimental and...

This episode of The Stem Cell Report will explore the scientific applications, advances, and challenges of interspecies chimeras – organisms consisting of cells from at least two different species. The development of interspecies chimeras, most recently advanced by the discovery of pluripotent stem cells and enhancements in genetic editing, have led to greater understanding of fundamental developmental and biological concepts, insight into evolution, and even the development of potential...

In this episode of The Stem Cell Report, sponsored by Bio-Techne, we will explore the modeling of complex human neuropsychiatric diseases such as autism, bipolar disorder, and others using stem cell-based, three-dimensional culture models of the brain and its development. Martin Pera will be joined by Drs. Carol Marchetto and Rusty Gage, experts in the normal and pathological development of the brain. Carol Marchetto is an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University...

To celebrate the ISSCR’s 20th anniversary, Martin Pera is joined by three members of the ISSCR Board of Directors; Fiona Doetsch (Biozentrum at the University of Basel, Switzerland), Clerk of the ISSCR, Takanori Takebe (Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, USA/Tokyo Medical and Dental University and Yokohama City University, Japan) is a Director, and Leonard Zon (Boston Children’s Hospital, USA) is an Ex Officio member, past president, and founder of the ISSCR. In addition to...

In this episode of The Stem Cell Report, Martin Pera is joined by three experts on the eye, its development, and disease processes.  Dr. Mark Humayun is the Director of the Institute for Biomedical Therapeutics and Co-Director of the Roski Eye Institute at the University of Southern California.  Dr. Anand Swaroop is a Senior Investigator in the Neurobiology, Neurodegeneration and Repair Laboratory at the National Eye Institute, and Dr. Masayo Takahashi is a pioneer in iPS-based approaches to...

In this episode of The Stem Cell Report, Martin Pera is joined by Douglas Melton, a pioneer in the use of stem cell-based transplants to treat Type 1 diabetes, and Nayara Leite, a former postdoc in the Melton laboratory who now works for Vertex Pharmaceuticals, one of the companies currently testing stem cell-derived transplants for diabetes in clinical trials. Drs. Melton and Leite will talk about the concepts and issues around stem cell-based treatments for diabetes and their new paper that...

In this episode of the Stem Cell Report, Martin Pera is joined by a team of scientists from the Neural Stem Cell Institute in Rensselaer, NY, USA.  Drs. Elizabeth Fisher, Xiuli Zhao, and Institute Director Sally Temple talk about their new paper on neural stem and progenitor cell function in the aging adult brain. They use live time-lapse imaging with computer-based image analysis to assess young and aged neural stem and progenitor cells in 3D brain structures to assess the mechanism...

In this episode, Drs. Shimpei Gotoh, Takahiro Suezawa, and Carla Kim join the podcast to talk about using stem and progenitor cells to understand the adult lung and model disease processes impacting lung function. Their research and discoveries provide insight into lung homeostasis, the potential for regeneration, and understanding diseases like pulmonary fibrosis and cancer. Drs. Gotoh and Suezawa are two of the authors of the recent paper ”Disease modeling of pulmonary fibrosis using human...

In this episode, Drs. Fiona Watt and Alice Vickers join the podcast to talk about uncovering the relationship between genetic variants and cellular behavior. They recently developed a platform to quantify iPSC differentiation propensity to investigate the genetic contribution to phenotypic variability. Drs. Vickers and Watt are authors of the recent paper,  "Plating human iPSC lines on micropatterned substrates relevels role for ITGBI nsSNV in endoderm formation” in Stem Cell Reports. ...

In this episode Drs. Charles Murry and Kenta Nakamura join the podcast to talk about “cardiac remuscularization therapy,” and the general approach of transplanting human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes to restore cardiac function after injury. Guests Charles Murry, MD, PhD, University of Washington and Sana Biotechnology Kenta Nakamura, MD, University of Washington and VA Puget Sound Healthcare System  Host Martin Pera, PhD – Editor-in-Chief, Stem Cell Reports and The Jackson...

In this episode Drs. Peter Loskill and Christine Mummery join the podcast to talk about the intersection of stem cells, microphysiological systems and organs-on-a-chip technology in understanding disease, screening drugs and personalized medicine. Drs. Loskill and Mummery are guest editors of a special issue on this topic appearing now in Stem Cell Reports.  Guests Peter Loskill, PhD W3-Professor for Organ-on-Chip Research at the Eberhard Karls University Tübingen and the Natural and Medical...

In this episode, sponsored by Bio-Techne, Drs. Hans Clevers and Kai Kretschmar join the podcast to talk broadly about the role of adult stem cells in tissue maintenance and repair. Specifically, they will focus on the expression and function of Troy and stem cells in the development and homeostasis of the epidermis, the outermost layer of the skin, that functions as a protective mechanical and biological barrier against injuries, pathogens and the loss of heat and water. Guests Hans Clevers,...

In this episode, sponsored by bit.bio,  Drs. Marius Wernig and Yi Han Ng join the podcast to talk about the directed differentiation of pluripotent stem cells into dopaminergic neurons. Their approach, which is based on the expression of specific transcription factors to drive cell fate directly to a specific neuronal identity, has been demonstrated to robust generalate functional dopaminergic neurons of midbrain character. Guests Marius Wernig, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Pathology at...