November 5-8, 2017, Mont-Tremblant, Quebec. The ski resort town of Mont-Tremblant was awash in rain when many of us arrived on Sunday, but the warm and welcoming Fairmont Hotel made up for Nature’s inhospitality. By all measures, the parts we could control were very successful. The 6th annual Till & McCulloch Meetings (TMM), hosted by the Stem Cell Network and CCRM, have come to an end, but thanks to Twitter, blogs, some articles (National Post…

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  Dr. Bruce Verchere presenting at the Till & McCulloch Meetings Another interesting talk, on the first morning of the Canadian Till & McCulloch Meetings, was from Dr. Bruce Verchere who spoke about possible routes to prevent graft rejection in the case of human β-cell and islet cell transplants for diabetes through engineering the β-cells. As previously described, Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is an autoimmune attack on insulin producing β-cells in the pancreas. Cellular therapy…

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Dr. Matthias Lütolf at TMM 2017 This year’s Till & McCulloch Meetings began with a rainy day on the beautiful mountainside in Mont-Tremblant, Quebec. The morning talks started off with Dr. Matthias Lütolf. His lab at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, (EPFL) works on strategies to improve culture and growth of stem cells in lab settings. One of these strategies involves developing organoids. Organoids are basically mini-organs that the stem cells self-organize into after…

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Samantha is a PhD Candidate studying neural stem cell biology in Dr. Derek van der Kooy’s lab at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on neural stem cell hierarchies in the developing mammalian brain, and activation of quiescent stem cells in the adult brain. She is also an avid science communicator on social media and can be found @SamanthaZY on Twitter and @Science.Sam on Instagram sharing the science we all love in new ways…

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Grade 9 students Aidan and Caitlin spend the day at CCRM, with a detour to the University of Toronto and Derek van der Kooy’s lab Did you notice surprisingly young-looking employees at your workplace this week? If you’re suffering from that getting old syndrome where that kid at the cash looks 12, but is actually a 27-year-old mother of two, then you may be relieved to know that your eyes weren’t playing tricks on you.…

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Ann Perry is senior communications officer at Medicine by Design at the University of Toronto. She previously held strategic communications roles in the Ontario government and not-for-profit sector, and was an editorial writer, reporter and editor at the Toronto Star. You can follow Medicine by Design on Twitter @MbD_UofT. This article first appeared on Medicine by Design’s site and is reprinted here with permission.   Mukul Tewary (right) discusses his research at the 2016 Till…

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Before Jake Gyllenhaal starred in the 2001 comedy Bubble Boy, there was a 1976 version starring John Travolta called The Boy In The Plastic Bubble. Both movies were inspired by the lives of David Vetter, who had severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), and Ted DeVita, who suffered from severe aplastic amenia. Because of their compromised immune systems that needed to be protected from infections, both were required to live in completely sterile environments. David Vetter spent…

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Dr. Maryam Mirzakhani, courtesy Stanford News Service At 2:20 am, I gave up my quest to try to sleep and decided to work on my post. When I opened my laptop, a picture of sweet Y, a really supportive former labmate and truly kind friend, was smiling at me. I had forgotten to close my Facebook page and a friend had shared Y’s smiling picture as an announcement of her passing away.  Trembling in total…

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In what feels like back-to-back news, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved two gene therapies for cancer. The actual announcements happened seven weeks apart, but for patients, manufacturers, investors and shareholders, it’s like Christmas – over and over again. As you probably know, Novartis’ Kymriah was approved at the end of August to treat pediatric patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). On Wednesday (October 18), Kite’s Yescarta was given the green light…

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Shreya Shukla is a Development Scientist at CCRM. Her scientific interests lie at the intersection of T cell immunotherapy, gene editing and stem cell bioengineering. Shreya obtained her BSc in Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and PhD from Dr. Peter Zandstra’s laboratory at University of Toronto (UofT) focusing on the scalable generation of progenitor T cells from pluripotent stem cells and hematopoietic stem cells. Her interests in science communication and education inspired her…

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