Featured series 
Tag: Stem Cells
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Health
Broken hearts found to mend themselves
Stem cells apparently try to mend hearts damaged by heart attacks or high blood pressure. But they do not refresh hearts run down by aging. Evidence for this heartening and disheartening news comes from experiments with mice done at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
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Health
Major progress toward cell reprogramming; researchers approach key goal of biologists
Two Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers and scientists at Whitehead Institute and Japan’s Kyoto University have independently taken major steps toward discovering ways to reprogram cells in order to direct their development – a key goal in developmental biology and regenerative medicine.
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Health
Major progress toward cell reprogramming
Two Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers and scientists at Whitehead Institute and Japan’s Kyoto University have independently taken major steps toward discovering ways to reprogram cells in order to direct their development – a key goal in developmental biology and regenerative medicine. Additionally, the group led by Kevin Eggan, an HSCI principal faculty member…
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Health
Researchers develop ALS mouse stem cell line
A team of Harvard researchers has used embryonic stem cells, derived from mice carrying a human gene known to cause a form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), to create an in vitro model of the always-fatal neurodegenerative disease.
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Nation & World
Stem cells, through a religious lens
Representatives of three of the world’s major religions tangled over the beginnings of human life, the disposal of surplus embryos from in vitro fertilization clinics, and the conduct of embryonic stem cell research Wednesday (March 14) at Harvard Divinity School. Panelists at the event, representing Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, each briefly presented their faith’s teachings…
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Health
Study questions ‘cancer stem cell’ hypothesis in breast cancer growth
A Dana-Farber Cancer Institute study challenges the hypothesis that “cancer stem cells” — a small number of self-renewing cells within a tumor — are responsible for breast cancer progression and recurrence, and that wiping out these cells alone could cure the disease.
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Health
Stem cell research sheds light on organ regeneration
The rules governing mammalian organ repair and regeneration are so widely varied as to suggest at first glance that there are no rules: Blood has such an enormous regenerative capacity that you can literally give it away by the pint and be none the worse for wear; rip a hole in your skin and new…
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Health
New findings may increase longevity of stem cells
Identifying the mechanisms that control cell life span is one of the more important questions facing stem cell researchers, indeed, all researchers attempting to understand normal and abnormal cell and organ development. So the recent discovery by a Harvard Stem Cell Institute team that a family of well-known transcription factors plays a major role in…
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Campus & Community
Authors fight misinformation on stem cell science
California’s Proposition 71, which committed the state to raising $3 billion for stem cell research, was a public policy ‘atom bomb that shifted the embryonic stem cell research debate from ‘whether to ‘how, the author of a book on the issue said Monday (Dec. 11). Michael Bellomo, author of ‘The Stem Cell Divide: The Facts,…
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Campus & Community
Research reveals how stem cells build a heart
Master cells that give rise to the three main cell types in a human heart have been discovered by Harvard Stem Cell Institute scientists working independently at two Harvard-affiliated hospitals. Together they found that a single progenitor stem cell differentiates into cells that cause a heart to beat, that make up its internal surface, and…
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Health
HSCI/MGH researchers identify gene product involved in stem cell aging and death
A multi-institutional team of Harvard researchers may have advanced our understanding of physiological aging with a new study in which they greatly reduced the impact of aging on blood stem cells. A report on their findings appears in the latest edition of the journal Nature along with similar but independent findings from research teams at…
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Health
Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers granted approval
After more than two years of intensive ethical and scientific review, Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers at Harvard and Children’s Hospital Boston have been cleared to begin experiments using Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) to create disease-specific stem cell lines in an effort to develop treatments for a wide range of now-incurable conditions afflicting…
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Health
Bone-marrow-derived stem cells can reverse genetic kidney disease
The discovery that bone-marrow derived stem cells can regenerate damaged renal cells in an animal model of Alport syndrome provides a potential new strategy for managing this inherited kidney disease and offers the first example of how stem cells may be useful in repairing basement membrane matrix defects and restoring organ function. Led by researchers…
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Campus & Community
Stem cell researchers collaborate across continents
In order to advance its mission of promoting stem cell research across the scientific community, five junior Harvard stem cell researchers last week (March 9-11) hosted five of their University of Cambridge (UK) counterparts for three days of research presentations and discussions about possible collaborations. The goal of the meeting, explained Faculty of Arts and…
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Campus & Community
Complete breast is grown from single stem cell
A complete, functioning breast has been grown from a single stem cell, by researchers in Australia. It was done in a mouse, but experts believe it won’t be long before it happens in humans. “Until now, no one has been able to take one cell and make it do everything involved in a fully-functioning, milk-producing…
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Campus & Community
Stem cell issues discussed at Barker
The second in a series of gatherings described by Michael Sandel as “conversations that transcend the areas that we normally populate” was a far cry from the first such conversation, conducted a month earlier. The “Between Two Cultures” series, co-sponsored by the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) and the Humanities Center, is intended to foster…
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Campus & Community
Advances in stem cell biology presented at symposium
Stem cell science is revolutionizing the field of cancer biology, changing the understanding of the structure of some tumors, and potentially shifting the treatment emphasis from eliminating all tumor cells to the destruction of specialized cancer stem cells believed responsible for tumor growth. These findings were among several presented Dec. 2 at the Harvard Club…
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Campus & Community
Ethics of stem cell research front and center
A top Bush bioethics adviser kicked off a new series of discussions about the ethics of stem cell and other scientific research on Thursday (Oct. 20), tangling with Harvard faculty members over the meaning of life and of family, and over the limits that society ought to impose on itself. The discussion, at times brutally…
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Health
High blood glucose levels in early pregnancy may deprive embryo of oxygen
Research appearing in the October 2005 issue of the American Journal of Physiology: Endocrinology and Metabolism suggests that high blood glucose levels early in pregnancy deprive the embryo of oxygen, interfering with its development. “Until recently, it was not understood how diabetic pregnancy could cause birth defects. My laboratory wanted to explore this research because…
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Campus & Community
Adult cells transformed into stem cells
Harvard researchers fused adult skin cells with embryonic stem cells in such a way that the genes of the embryonic cells reset the genetic clock of the adult cells, turning them back to their embryonic form. Such adult-cum-embryo cells, taken from people with juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other genetic diseases, could reveal how such…
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Science & Tech
Harvard, MGH researchers track egg cell production to marrow
In a series of experiments on sterile female mice, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers were able to restore egg production by transplanting bone marrow from fertile mice. The researchers believe that egg stem cells in the donor bone marrow established themselves in the sterile mice and began producing egg cells. The results are published in…
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Health
DNA-scanning technology finds possible sites of cancer genes in chromosomes of lung cancer cell
In a study in the July 1, 2005 issue of the journal Cancer Research, the researchers used single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array technology to identify regions of chromosomes where genes were either left out or multiplied over and over – mistakes that are often associated with cancer. In this effort, SNP arrays have been used…
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Health
Fetal-cell transplants reverse Parkinson’s in two patients
The two patients were part of a small exploratory study in Halifax. In the study, the cells were bathed in the trophic factor GDNF before being implanted into the striatum, the target of dopamine-producing cells. One patient also had cells implanted into the substantia nigra, the origin of the dopamine neurons involved in Parkinson’s. The…
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Health
Insulin prods development of type 1 diabetes
Joslin Diabetes Center researchers Diane Mathis’s and Christophe Benoist’s finding that the lymph node draining the pancreas was intrinsic to the autoimmune response in mice made David Hafler, HMS professor of neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, wonder if something similar was happening in people. In the May 12, 2005 Nature, he and his colleagues…
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Campus & Community
Stem cell research debate continues
Stem cell research is a complicated subject, not only scientifically but ethically as well. This past Friday (April 15) a debate at Harvard Law School promised to shed light on both aspects of this urgent issue, but probably ended up raising as many questions as it answered. The event, “Law and Ethics in a Brave…
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Campus & Community
Decoding the babel of brain cells
If brain cell messages could be separated from the “noise” of other brain activity and clearly understood, researchers would be closer to repairing damage caused by a number of nervous system diseases paralyzing injuries and combat wounds. Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have actually done this with mice. They…
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Campus & Community
Blood system forms in the placenta
Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) report a surprising finding about embryonic development: The blood system begins to form not only in the embryo itself, but also in the placenta, the organ that nurtures the baby in utero. Experiments in mice revealed that the placenta harbors a large supply of…
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Health
Researchers discover why we go gray
People turn gray, Harvard scientists found, when certain adult stem cells gradually die off. The stem cells provide a continuous supply of other, pigment-producing cells that give your hair its natural color. These same types of pigment cells, called melanocytes, can become cancerous in melanoma, the lethal form of skin cancer that killed about 8,000…
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Health
Stem cell science
“Stem-cell transplants are already performed every day in Harvard-affiliated hospitals — and around the world,” says Harvard Stem Cell Initiative codirector David Scadden, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. So-called bone-marrow transplants, which transfer tens of thousands of cells of many different…
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Health
Sperm cells made in lab can fertilize eggs
Scientists injected laboratory-created sperm into eggs, and the resulting embryos grew to the point where they would normally be implanted into a womb. The experiment was done with mouse stem cells, but mice, genetically speaking, are so close to men, few scientists doubt that the same experiment can be done in humans. The breakthrough, made…