Canada is home to some of the world’s top stem cell scientists: we’ve led the discoveries of stem cells in the brain, retina, blood, skin and several types of cancer stem cells, and continue to push science’s understanding of these promising cells each year. But there’s a dark side associated with all the hope surrounding stem cells as the treatment for so many diseases and conditions. Many private companies continue to co-opt these scientific discoveries…

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Stephanie Willerth presenting at the Till and McCulloch Meetings 2018 This year, the annual Till & McCulloch Meetings ended with a plenary session on the “next generation of regenerative medicine” to keep attendees thinking forward as they headed back home. While all of them were incredibly exciting, I was particularly struck by the futuristic techniques presented by Dr. Stephanie Willerth, who showed fantastic images and videos of her lab’s work 3D printing brain cells. Beyond…

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Mitchel Sivilotti, Chief Operations Officer at CCRM, leading a training session Michael May is President and CEO of CCRM. Peter Zandstra is the Chief Scientific Officer at CCRM and the Founding Director of UBC’s School of Biomedical Engineering. Zandstra and May co-founded CCRM, which launched in June 2011. This article also appears in Biotechnology Focus.  For those of us who have been following and working in the cell and gene therapy (CGT) field for a significant…

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A microfluidic exchanger Erika Siren lives in Vancouver, British Columbia where she is currently a Ph.D Candidate in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Chemistry. Under the supervision of Dr. Jayachandran Kizhakkedathu, Erika develops biomaterials that can be used to manipulate the immune system. Away from the bench, Erika has a keen interest in the challenges that face the commercialization, policy development and public perception of therapies in regenerative medicine. Connect with Erika on…

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It’s heartbreaking to watch this February 2018 video of Jonathan Pitre, the Canadian teen with epidermolysis bullosa (EB), who advocated for patients and fought so hard to be rid of his disease, and sadly died two months after the video below was published. He was the face of EB for many Canadians, and others around the world, who watched his struggle and prayed that a stem cell transplant would save his life. EB is back…

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Image courtesy of Pixaby Scientists have enlisted the gene editing tool CRISPR in a hunt for cancer causing mutations, releasing into the open valuable data that could help doctors better advise their patients. A new study lists almost 4,000 individual “misspellings,” or variants, in the “breast cancer gene” BRCA1 and how likely each one is to cause disease. The vast majority of variants—3,000 of them—are new to public databases containing genetic test results from people…

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Mukherjee, S. (2016). THE GENE: An Intimate History. New York, New York: Scribner. While it’s been years since I’ve been in school or academia, I can’t help but feel nostalgic this time of year, when fall marks the beginning of a new year (and the return of the pumpkin spice latte, mmm!). Many of you are hunkering down in your courses, starting new projects (or trying to put a fresh look on an old one),…

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The 10 percent rule usually works fairly well when estimating disease prevalence in Canada compared to the equivalent in the U.S. Our population is about 10 percent the size of the U.S. so it makes sense that we match up, to an equivalent degree, on health issues, with some exceptions. Now, it seems, we are living up to expectations when it comes to the number of unapproved stem cell clinics we have in Canada. Leigh…

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September is National Blood Cancer Awareness Month. “Few people know that many of today’s fundamental treatments for various cancers, like chemotherapy, began with blood cancer research,” explains Alicia Talarico, President, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Canada in a news release to draw attention to their 2018 awareness campaign: “Beating Cancer Is In Our Blood.” According to the news release, the campaign was conceived to bring blood cancers “out of obscurity.” That’s surprising, considering research on blood cancers…

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Yesterday I took a trip to Toronto Pearson International Airport. Sadly, that’s where my voyage ended. I wasn’t there to escape to somewhere hot and tropical or cold and cozy; my destination was Terminal 1 at the airport. Full stop. Pearson is the location of an exciting new science art installation called Artful Science that conveniently runs over Science Literacy Week. Until December 2018, you can view 16 stem cell images, five computational biology images…

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