Whose life is it anyway? Building patient needs and goals into stem cell clinical trials

by Lisa Willemse

In a traditional view of medical research, advances tend to be measured against the overarching goal of cure. Noble as this might be, research is rarely such a black and white affair -- if we have learned anything, it’s that there are innumerable shades of grey.

Even the goal itself can be questioned, especially when achieving it could be 50 years into the future.

17-year-old high school student makes a cancer stem cell breakthrough

When we report on breakthroughs in stem cell research, we typically link to well-funded studies published in peer-reviewed journals by world-renowned scientists. This time, it’s a little different.

Angela Zhang, a high school senior from Cupertino, California, was awarded a $100,000 scholarship for her submission to the 2011 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology: A “gold and iron oxide-based nanoparticle” designed to seek out and destroy tumour-causing cancer stem cells.

The apple of a bioengineer’s eye: mature photoreceptors

by Angela C.H. McDonald

Last spring, I wrote about the remarkable generation of self-organizing retinal tissue created from mouse embryonic stem cells. The study successfully created all major retinal components including photoreceptors, albeit at a low abundance. However, while multi-layered optic tissue did form, the alignment and organization of mature retinal cell types differed from that of the mouse eye in vivo.

The missing ingredient in this experiment was a physical, instructive cue to direct retinal cells into the complex structural pattern of the eye. 

A recent paper published in Biomaterials by another group of researchers described a biomaterials-based approach for creating organized photoreceptor cells from human embryonic stem cells.

Human embryonic stem cells were differentiated into retinal cells and seeded onto a specially designed scaffold positioned on top of a retinal pigment epithelial cell layer. This resulted in the organization of cells into a complex retinal architecture.

Tick, tock, clock – the clock is ticking for you

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