“Latest Stem Cells News”

Sir John Gurdon

One of the most prestigious prizes in medicine is being awarded this year to scientists working on stem cells and leukemia — and to New York‘s mayor for his fight to cut tobacco use (…)

The Lasker Basic Medical Research Award goes to John Gurdon, 76, of Cambridge University and Shinya Yamanaka, 47, of Kyoto University and San Francisco‘s Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease. Their work has helped pave the way for the possibility of made-to-order stem cell treatments for individual patients

Gurdon began working with frog eggs in the 1950s and was the first to successfully clone a frog, in the 1960s. This led directly to the cloning of mammals in the 1990s.

Yamanaka’s ground-breaking announcement in 2006 that he had successfully reprogrammed a mouse skin cell to turn into stem cells holds promise for creating stem cells without destroying an embryo, up until now a major ethical and legal hurdle (…)

read more on http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-09-14-lasker-awards_N.htm

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Korean scientists are moving closer to cloning embryonic stem cells, the unprecedented breakthrough that their compatriot and disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk claimed to have achieved in 2004, only to have this disproved later.

Currently, a team at the Cha Medical Center is working on a project after getting state approval last year, while another team headed by professor Park Se-pill at Jeju National University is also set to begin research.
Park and his associates are awaiting final approval from the National Bioethics Committee.

“If the endorsement is made before June, we should be able to clone human embryonic stem cells sometime next year,” said Park, who extracted stem cells from human embryos, not cloned ones, in 2000.
“Our embryologists’ technology is leading on the global scene. Hence, I believe that Korean teams should be able to create cloned embryonic stem cells in the not-so-distant future,” he said.

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After the decision of the United States to remove the ban preventing stem cell researchers from using public funding for experiments, legislators in South Korea have been put under pressure by scientists who have been aspiring to do experiments on stem cells from cloned human embryos.

Up until a few weeks ago the National Bioethics Committee continued to postpone a decision on the matter, but now thanks to the American president, it is increasingly probable that at most, by the end of April, researchers of the Cha Medical Institute of Seoul will be able to resume experiments on stem cells generated by cloned human embryos.

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Cloning a Chow Chow will be easy and will also cost at least half of what it would cost to clone any other type of dog, announced a South Korean biotech company today while presenting new cloning technology.

But dog-owners – who pay 100,000 dollars or more to clone a pet – will still have to pay tens of thousands of dollars if they want to clone their beloved four-legged friends, and must be prepared for long waiting-lists, because most cloning at a commercial level involves dogs used for work, like police dogs used in airports.

The Rnl Bio company announced that it has developed a new cloning method for dogs that utilizes stem cells derived from fat tissue, which notably increase the possibilities for success in the operation. According to the company, the new technology may also contribute to studies for cures for genetic disorders in dogs, which resemble some human pathologies, like diabetes.

“If we completely develop this technology, cloning dogs will also be much easier than it is now. We can reduce the costs of cloning,” explained Ra Jeongchan, Rnl Bio CEO, located in Seoul.

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