Featured series 
Tag: Stem Cell
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Nation & World
Veteran biotech executive to run new center aimed at boosting cell and gene therapies
Landmark Bio, a new center for advanced cell manufacturing, announced that former Orchard Therapeutics, Amgen, and Genzyme executive Ran Zheng will take over as chief executive. Landmark Bio is a partnership of Boston-area universities, hospitals, and private industry led by Harvard and MIT.
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Nation & World
Improving cell therapy for diabetes
A team of researchers led by Harvard University scientists has improved the laboratory process of converting stem cells into insulin-producing beta cells from 30 percent to 80 percent.
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Nation & World
Understanding how the intestine replaces and repairs itself
When working stem cells within the intestine are depleted, some types of mature cells can transform themselves into stem cells, replenishing the population.
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Nation & World
Updating embryo research guidelines
Scientists and ethicists gathered at Harvard Law School to discuss the ethics of human embryo experimentation and whether a two-week developmental time limit on their use is appropriate any longer.
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Nation & World
The knotty problem of bringing regenerative medicine to market
Leaders from the scientific and business world gathered at Harvard Business School on Oct. 6 to examine regenerative medicine’s scientific and commercial promise.
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Nation & World
Neurons reprogrammed in animals
Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers have shown that the networks of communication among reprogrammed neurons and their neighbors in the brains of living animals can also be changed, or “rewired.”
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Nation & World
Quality control
A Harvard research team led by Kevin Kit Parker, a Harvard Stem Cell Institute principal faculty member, has identified a set of 64 crucial parameters by which to judge stem cell-derived cardiac myocytes, making it possible for scientists and pharmaceutical companies to quantitatively judge and compare the value of stem cells.
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Nation & World
Lessening liver damage
Harvard stem cell scientists studying the effect of nitric oxide on liver growth and regeneration appear to have serendipitously discovered a markedly improved treatment for liver damage caused by acetaminophen toxicity.
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Nation & World
Developing cancer drugs
Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers have identified in the most aggressive forms of cancer a gene known to regulate embryonic stem cell self-renewal, beginning a creative search for a drug that can block its activity.
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Nation & World
Big boost in drug discovery
Using a new, stem cell-based, drug-screening technology that could reinvent and greatly reduce the cost of developing pharmaceuticals, researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute have found a compound that is more effective in protecting the neurons killed in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis than are two drugs that failed in human clinical trials.
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Nation & World
‘Stem cell tourism’ growing trend
A Harvard panel examined the problem of clinics around the world that provide stem cell treatments for intractable conditions. Although there is no medical evidence of the treatments’ effectiveness, such clinics have drawn thousands of patients from many countries.
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Nation & World
Pausing to celebrate
More than 100 faculty, students, and staff from the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology turned out for a barbecue to celebrate the full-professor promotions of Kevin Eggan, Konrad Hochedlinger, and Amy Wagers.
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Nation & World
Personalized medicine closer to reality
A consortium of scientists at 20 institutions, led by a principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, has used stem cells to take a major step toward developing personalized medicine to treat Parkinson’s disease.
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Nation & World
Big advance against cystic fibrosis
Harvard stem cell researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have taken a critical step toward discovering in the relatively near future a drug to control cystic fibrosis, a fatal lung disease that claims about 500 lives each year, with 1,000 new cases diagnosed annually.
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Nation & World
Stimulating Cells – Doug Melton – Harvard Thinks Big
Doug Melton Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University and co-Director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute
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Nation & World
Age-related effects of MS may prove reversible
In a new study, Harvard stem cell researchers and scientists at the University of Cambridge have found that the age-related degeneration in conditions such as multiple sclerosis (MS) may be reversible.
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Nation & World
Relief for stem cell transplant patients
In a study that seems to pivot on a paradox, scientists at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have used an immune system stimulant as an immune system suppressor to treat a common, often debilitating side effect of donor stem cell transplantation in cancer patients. The effect, in some cases, was profound.
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Nation & World
Stem cell lessons
Five years after first gaining institutional permission to attempt to produce stem cell lines via somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), two Harvard researchers and a former Harvard postdoctoral fellow have closed the loop with a flurry of new studies and a commentary in several leading journals.
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Nation & World
Better blood
An innovative experimental treatment for boosting the effectiveness of blood stem-cell transplants with umbilical cord blood has a favorable safety profile in long-term animal studies, according to Harvard Stem Cell Institute scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Children’s Hospital Boston.
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Nation & World
Kidney close-up
Scientists at Harvard have created breathtaking three-dimensional images of an entire organ, moving a step closer to understanding the complex development of the kidney.
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Nation & World
Doing the neuron tango
A group of Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology has discovered that excitatory neurons control the positioning of inhibitory neurons in the brain in a process critically important for generating balanced circuitry and proper cortical response.
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Nation & World
Two studies prove value of iPS cells
A team of Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers, in collaboration with scientists at Columbia University, have demonstrated that many iPS cells (stem cells created by reprogramming adult cells) are the equal of human embryonic stem cells in creating human motor neurons, the cells destroyed in a number of neurological diseases, including Parkinson’s.
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Nation & World
Adult kidney stem cells found in fish
It has long been a given that adult humans — and mammals in general — lack the capacity to grow new nephrons, the kidney’s delicate blood filtering tubules, which has meant that dialysis, and ultimately kidney transplantation, is the only option for the more than 450,000 Americans who have kidney failure.
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Nation & World
Partial reversal of aging achieved in mice
Harvard scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute say they have for the first time partially reversed age-related degeneration in mice, resulting in new growth of the brain and testes, improved fertility, and the return of a lost cognitive function.
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Nation & World
Rare find
Researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine have found that by mimicking a rare genetic disorder in a dish they can rewind the internal clock of a mature cell and drive it back into an adult stem-cell stage.
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Nation & World
‘Another set of fingers’
An interdisciplinary group of leading Harvard geneticists and stem cell researchers has found a new genetic aspect of cell reprogramming that may ultimately help in the fine-tuning of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) into specific cell types.
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Nation & World
Importance of stem cell research
A temporary restraining order that blocked federal funding for certain kinds of stem cell research was viewed by many as a blow to cutting-edge science. In response, President Drew Faust said, “We hope that the temporary injunction will soon be lifted and that Congress will take the steps necessary to ensure that stem cell scientists…
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Nation & World
Stem Cell Experiment Reverses Aging In Rare Disease
The team at Children’s Hospital Boston and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute were working with a new type of cell called induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells, which closely resemble embryonic stem cells but are made from ordinary skin cells…
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Nation & World
Stem cells: Mending a broken heart?
Dr. Kenneth Chien speaks about a cardiac stem cell discovery that may be the first step on the path to regenerating healthy heart muscle.
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Nation & World
Safer stem cells for therapy
When stem cell researchers in Japan and the United States announced in 2007 that they had developed long-sought methods to return fully developed adult human cells to an embryonic-like state, the world of stem cell research was turned upside down.