If you’ve stumbled upon this blog thinking you will be reading about the attractive and talented cast of the popular 2016 TV show on NBC, I suspect you will be very disappointed. While there is video for you below, you will not see any rippling muscles and you don’t need to have any tissues handy (although patient Jocelyne Cormier could leave you feeling verklempt.) Please stick around to watch CCRM’s corporate video. We put a…

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Most people will tell you they hate networking. No matter how much we might dread awkward chit chat, networking and relationship building are key contributors to success, regardless of industry or job title. Because commercializing regenerative medicine (RM) technologies depends on collaboration across diverse sectors, relationship building is critical. With this in mind, RMConnectTO was developed as a concept that we jokingly code named the “Big, Fun, Event.” Hosted by CCRM and held on September…

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Do you recognize the name Timothy Caulfield? How about if I tell you that he took on Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop empire in his popular 2015 book Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? Caulfield is a professor of health law and science policy at the University of Alberta who has made it his mission to educate the public about legal and ethical issues in medical research and, in his second book, he expands his…

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A schematic of the micro-TENNS technology. A long hollow tube composed of a biomaterial is filled with neurons at one end, which extend long processes through the tube. The construct is transplanted into the brain where it can interface with host neurons to repair long-distance pathways. Image modified from Struzyna et al., Neural Regeneration Research 2015. The brain is one of the most complex and delicate organs of the body, with very little capacity to…

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Dr. James Till surrounded by bronze figures of Ernest McCulloch and James Till. By sculptor Ruth Abernethy In some circles, James Till needs no introduction. Along with Ernest McCulloch (deceased), Dr. Till advanced medical research across the globe with the discovery of blood stem cells[1][2] at Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital, now the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Today, outside the MaRS Discovery District in downtown Toronto, during a grand opening event for CCRM, a statue of…

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Intestinal organoid or mini gut (Credit: Meritxell Huch, originally from the paper titled The Renaissance of Developmental Biology. PLoS Biol 13(5): e1002149. By way of WikiCommons.) The potential of lab-grown mini organs goes beyond learning how to manufacture replacement body parts to undo disease; it could allow researchers to glimpse, for the first time, the swaths of microorganisms that live inside us and shape our health. A deeply entrenched belief that microbes are universally bad…

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You probably know what crowdfunding means and perhaps you’ve even spent your hard-earned dollars to help a project hit an important milestone or a product raise the necessary funds to go into production. Crowdfunding isn’t new and it’s even worked for financing the clinical translation of stem cell therapies, as Nick Dragojlovic shared in a blog on Signals back in 2014. He’s been endorsing the concept since at least 2013. But did you know there…

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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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A fundamental (and obvious) truth about knowledge translation (KT) is that if you want your work to have impact, it needs to be engaging. A viral video reaches thousands or millions of people; a boring, complex, badly produced video reaches a handful of people (your family, closest friends and some colleagues. Maybe a curious ex.) Knowledge translation usually involves synthesizing and sharing data; the challenge is in making that sexy. Fortunately, data dissemination has undergone…

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By Sara Nolte Over two years ago, an article published in Science took the Internet and media by storm. The paper, “Variation in cancer risk among tissues can be explained by the number of stem cell divisions,” better known as “The ‘Bad Luck’ Cancer Study,” used mathematical modeling to demonstrate that most cancers were a result of chance mutations, rather than inherited genetics or environmental factors. It was presented by many media outlets in a…

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