Topic
Field developing therapies and engineered tissues—stem cells, grafts, reprogrammed cells—to repair or replace damaged organs and tissue.
Stem cell entrepreneur Chuck Meeker predicts a series of FDA roundtables on his industry's therapies before the end of the year. The agency declined to say whether any are planned, so for now the forecast tells us more about what the industry hopes than about what the FDA intends.
Reality
Northwestern scientists grew supramolecular threads about 100 times more massive than any known protein, with lengths and charge segments set by design. Cultured neurons exposed to the threads grew and formed more synapses, an effect the team credits to that precision.
Reality
A Beijing team turned one woman's fat cells into pancreatic islets, and within two months she stopped needing insulin injections. Nearly three years of steady blood sugar is the longest result reported, in a single patient.
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Kwang-Hyun Cho's group decomposes logic models of gene regulation to enumerate every minimal transient intervention that reaches a target cell state. The evaluation reported so far runs inside those models.
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A University of Zurich team transplanted human neural stem cells a week after inducing strokes in mice, and reported new neurons, new blood vessels, a tighter blood-brain barrier and restored walking in the same animals.
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A subcutaneous myocyte graft gave mice muscle, bone and immune gains. The mice were also free to roam their cages, which is the one condition the intended patients do not share.
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Precise Bio says a single donor cornea yields a cell bank for more than 400 bioprinted implants, and the tissue is now in a Phase I safety trial. Eye banks plan around days; that math is different.
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Engineers transfected stem cells with two microRNAs, one for bone and one for vessels, then placed the resulting clusters one at a time. Lab and mouse work is reported; outcome figures are not.
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