Vancouver, British Columbia (photo from Pixaby) Canada’s strength in regenerative medicine (RM) and cell and gene therapies is a result of efforts that take place from sea to shining sea. Western Canada’s growing RM community significantly increases Canada’s competitiveness on the global playing field through its leading-edge research, advanced commercialization abilities, and excellent education and training programs. Prowess in research The region’s renowned researchers aim to answer the important questions that will define the future…

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Australian currency (photo from Flickr) Dr. Chih Wei Teng is Chief Operating Officer for CCRM Australia and wrote this blog with colleagues Alex Barrington and Dr. Emma Gallaher. CCRM Australia is an Australian not-for-profit organization supporting the development of foundational technologies to accelerate the commercialization of regenerative medicine products and therapies. CCRM Australia’s focus is to bridge the commercialization gap through a network of scientists, entrepreneurs, academic institutions and industry partners and address bottlenecks in…

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  The volunteer graduate students and organizing committee of Toronto’s StemCellTalks 2020 Growing organoids is a relatively new and exciting development in stem cell research. These micro organ-like cells are tiny, self-organized 3D tissue cultures that are derived from stem cells. Organoids are produced in large quantities in labs where researchers are able to replicate them to resemble organs such as the brain, kidney, lung, intestine, stomach and liver. Watch this video from the University…

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I am going to take a guess that the teen romance movie Five Feet Apart, starring Haley Lu Richardson and Cole Sprouse, introduced many people to cystic fibrosis (CF). Certainly that was the case for my teenage daughter. I learned about CF through television ads, “back in the day,” which explained that the disease is like drowning on the inside as mucus clogs the lungs of patients and makes breathing very difficult. Those ads made…

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Immunotherapies have been heralded as a revolutionary paradigm shift in how cancer is treated, thanks to the exceptional cancer-killing properties of checkpoint inhibitors and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. Today, approved therapies Yescarta and Kymriah, which use rewired T cells, have offered newfound hope for some patients with leukemia and lymphoma. In clinical trials, patients with these “liquid tumours” showed up to 94 percent remission rates after receiving CAR T therapies. This is especially…

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Sleeping Beauty painting by Victor Gabriel Gilbert, Wiki Commons We’ve spent a lot of time swooning over CAR T-cells and CRISPR here at Signals, but recently a potential up-and-coming leading lady in the gene and cancer therapy fields has caught our eye. Our interest was piqued by a recent press release from The Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) announcing the continuation of a formal partnership with PlasmidFactory to optimize their Sleeping Beauty system…

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After four years of attending Phacilitate Leaders World, I have noticed a few things: the organizers like to hang on to what is popular (like the networking yacht party and afternoon tea – head office is in London, England, after all), but they’re equally keen to innovate (they expanded the program and audience by partnering with the World Stem Cell Summit in 2018 and this year introduced Phacilitate:MATCH, which I’ll write more about later). The…

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Joshua Dierolf (www.joshuadierolf.com) is a PhD candidate at Western University studying the influence of metabolism on stem cell pluripotency and early development. It is hard to evade the incessant bombardment of social media pseudoscience. Like most things in life, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But how can the public separate fact from fiction? Moreover, why is it so hard to access helpful resources? Here I present our primary suspect:…

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In my role as Communications Specialist at CCRM, I often come across examples of science communication that would be considered best practice in the field. However, after finishing the best-selling book Bad Blood (Carreyrou, 2018), I was reminded that not all science communication is created equal. The Theranos Tale Bad Blood is a thorough overview of the rise and fall of a company called Theranos. Founded in 2003, Theranos was a Silicon Valley-based start-up that…

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Image credit: Isaac Smith, Unsplash With the start of a new year, and a new decade, it’s only natural to set a few professional goals for yourself. I don’t generally set New Year’s Resolutions, but I do have a few this year that include defending my Master of Science degree, and writing more regularly. If professional development in your science career is also a priority for you, then here’s a list of opportunities you can…

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