Insight into Seeing

 

Researchers have found a "glimmer of hope" for those with vision impairment. HSCI Principal Faculty member Zhigang He in collaboration with Harvard's Joshua Sanes conducted side by side comparisons of different types of neurons in the eye to find out why some survive after trauma while others do not. The researchers found "alpha" cells, a neuron type that generally makes up 5% of the neurons in the optic nerve, are not only more likely to survive but also regenerate after the optic nerve is severed.  Read the full story here.

Brain Tumor Busters
 

Brain tumors be gone! - or at least slowed down thanks to Khalid Shah, an HSCI Principal Faculty member at Massachusetts General Hospital. Shah and his team created a stem cell therapy targeting breast cancer cells that migrate to the brain and grow into tumors there.  Shah's research team engineered neural stem cells to seek out these brain tumors and prevent them from growing larger. Read the full story here.

Expert Panel

 

Doug Melton and David Scadden, HSCI co-founders, together with Ole Isacson, HSCI Principal Faculty, took to the main stage at the World Medical Innovation Forum, a workshop featuring world leaders in the medical research and industry fields, to talk about regenerative biology's most exciting, and perhaps most valuable, innovations - the human stem cell. The trio discussed challenges they faced at the beginning of their research, how stem cells helped them overcome those hurdles, and challenges stem cell science will face in the future. 

Research Updates

Neuro Diseases Program

HSCI will partner with the ALS Association, Massachusetts General Hospital Neurological Clinical Research Institute, and GlaxoSmithKline to test an FDA-approved, anti-epileptic drug in ALS patients.

Media Mentions4/20
HSCI's Xiaoliang Sunney Xie receives the Albany Medical Center Prize in Biomedicine and Biomedical research. Read The Washington Post article here

 

 4/23

 HSCI Executive Committee member George Q. Daley provides additional commentary on the ethical and moral implications of using gene-editing techniques on human embryos. Read the second New York Times article here

 

4/30

The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation awards Jeff Macklis, HSCI Executive Committee member, an Allen Distinguished Investigators grant. Read the story here.

Learn what HSCI is doing for Kidney Disease (PDF)