Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
by Terry Devitt University Communications With more than 100 billion neurons and billions of other specialized cells, the human brain is a marvel of nature. It is the organ that makes people unique. Now, writing in the journal Cell Stem Cell (July 1, 2010), a team of scientists from the UW–Madison has identified a single …
Intriguingly, the new study suggests the presence or absence of the genes used to reprogram skin cells to become the blank slate pluripotent cells makes no difference in terms of their capacity to differentiate.
The long struggle to move the most versatile stem cells from the laboratory to the clinic got another boost with an $8.8 million contract award to the Waisman Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A team of scientists from the School of Medicine and Public Health has successfully grown multiple types of retina cells from two types of stem cells — suggesting a future in which damaged retinas could be repaired by cells grown from the patient's own skin.
WiCell Research Institute and Waisman Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility offer new stem cell banks to support translational research through clinical applications The WiCell™ Research Institute and the Waisman Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility (WCBF) announced today the release of the first current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) feeder-independent pluripotent stem cell banks available for sale and distribution to …
When neurons started dying in Clive Svendsen's lab dishes, he couldn't have been more pleased.
"The novelty is that this is a combined cell and gene therapy approach," Suzuki explains, noting that the bone marrow stem cells on their own had a modest effect, possibly by releasing their own protective factors. "But only when we engineered the cells to release GDNF did we see a significant improvement. The cells turned out to be quite an important component. It's this combination of cells and drug delivery that seems to be so effective."
Some of Madison’s most precious assets are deep-frozen in vials at University Research Park. The National Stem Cell Bank, the country’s only official repository of human embryonic stem cells, is housed at the WiCell Research Institute, a nonprofit organization affiliated with UW-Madison.
Two years after the National Institutes of Health created the National Stem Cell Bank, managers say the bank is starting to fulfill its mission: gathering the cells in one place, controlling their quality and shipping them to scientists at low cost.
With the help of a $7.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers will explore the potential of stem cells and natural growth factors to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
