So while the pro-cloners keep chanting “Cures Cures Cures” and billions of dollars in California go into the sink hole called the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, I must report on news like this —

On the iPSC breakthrough, “A group of researchers including Kyoto University Prof. Shinya Yamanaka that successfully developed induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, plans to create iPS cells from the cells of Japanese patients suffering from about 10 intractable and incurable diseases, including muscular dystrophy, it has been learned.

The researchers are set to apply to an in-house ethics committee for permission to begin the project and start work on research including developing new medicines using iPS cells as early as April.”

On umbilical cord blood stem cell therapies helping the aging brain, researchers at the USF found, umbilical cord blood cells, “may have a similar potential to reduce inflammation and to restore some of the lost capacity of stem/progenitor cells to proliferate and differentiate into neurons, said Dr. Bickford. The study found that the number of proliferative cells increased within 24 hours following the UCBC injections into the aged laboratory rats and that the increased cell proliferation continued for at least 15 days following a single treatment.”

On the market/investment side of stem cell therapies is up, which is good news in the wake of the bad news on Wall St. “”About 11,000 people have been treated in the U.S. with stem cell products in the last two years,” Robin Young, a financial analyst who follows the stem cell industry, told more than 250 institutional investors and Wall Street firm representatives at the summit in New York last month. “Virtually all of the therapeutic stem cells that are or will soon be commercialized are adult stem cells,” Young said.”

Author Profile

Jennifer Lahl, CBC Founder
Jennifer Lahl, CBC Founder
Jennifer Lahl, MA, BSN, RN, is founder and president of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. Lahl couples her 25 years of experience as a pediatric critical care nurse, a hospital administrator, and a senior-level nursing manager with a deep passion to speak for those who have no voice. Lahl’s writings have appeared in various publications including Cambridge University Press, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, and the American Journal of Bioethics. As a field expert, she is routinely interviewed on radio and television including ABC, CBS, PBS, and NPR. She is also called upon to speak alongside lawmakers and members of the scientific community, even being invited to speak to members of the European Parliament in Brussels to address issues of egg trafficking; she has three times addressed the United Nations during the Commission on the Status of Women on egg and womb trafficking.