Canadian scientists have found a new way to prompt haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) from the bone marrow of mice to multiply, in order to provide a large quantity of HSCs from a small sample of bone marrow. They hope that this technique, if it also works in...
A man who had his sperm frozen whilst undergoing treatment for leukaemia as a teenager, has, at 38, become the father of a healthy baby girl. Christopher Biblis from Charlotte, North Carolina, was 16 when he underwent radiotherapy treatment which would have left him sterile had his...
One of the most innovative developments to arise from the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, and the International HapMap Project in 2005 has been the exploration of how and why changes in DNA can predispose individuals to disease. A popular method for identifying causative...
New work in stem cell research has challenged the long-standing belief that women are born with all the eggs they will ever need. The results were published in the journal Nature Stem Cell, although the study was received with caution. The scientists at Shanghai Jiao Tong University...
A pioneering stem cell transplant has enabled patients with Type One diabetes to go without insulin injections for up to four years. Researchers from Northwestern University in the US and the Regional Blood Centre in Brazil treated a total of 23 patients and found that the majority...
A study by an international research team, published a study this week in The New England Journal of Medicine, identifies for the first time a genetic variant that leads to an increased chance of stroke. Stroke is the third leading cause of death in the US and...
A link has been found between progressive hearing loss and a microRNA gene - the first time this type of gene has been implicated in any inherited disorder. The findings are the result of convergent research by scientists from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England, and...
Clinicians from the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London and Moorfields eye hospital have predicted that an experimental new therapy for treating Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of blindness in the developed world, may become routinely available within the next six to seven years...
Comment
What has happened to the review of the Polkinghorne Guidelines on research using fetal tissue?
by Professor Naomi Pfeffer
In England and Wales in 2007, almost 200,000 women elected to terminate a pregnancy. Yet my research into fetal stem cells carried out under the ESRC Stem Cell Initiative, found obtaining fetal tissue for research, including stem cell research, surprisingly difficult (1). To some extent the quasi-official regulations that govern...