Scope is an award-winning medical blog produced by a team of writers at Stanford University School of Medicine.
The body’s immune cells constantly work to achieve the right balance between being shoot-first, ask-questions-later enforcers that efficiently wipe out all diseased and infected cells (but risk hitting innocent, healthy cells and causing autoimmune disorders), and being easy-going, small town sheriffs that let healthy cells happily get on with their lives (but risk being over-matched …Read More
In recent years, scientists in the laboratory of Stanford’s Irving Weissman, MD, discovered that cancer cells cover themselves in copies of the CD47 “don’t eat me” protein to protect themselves from being engulfed and devoured by immune cells called macrophages (shown at right). But it was never clear how cancer cells increased the production of CD47. …Read More
The question sounds more like sociology than biology: What would happen if you could take a cell gone bad — a cancer cell — bring it back to its infancy, before it turned to the dark side, and let it grow up again? Would it become cancerous again? What if you raised it in a …Read More
Four years ago, Irv Weissman, MD, and his lab at Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine published a paper showing that, in mice, blocking a cell surface protein called CD47 might be useful in treating nearly every kind of human cancer. In response, hundreds of people wrote in to find out if …Read More
In the history of science and medicine, the breakthrough discoveries get a lot of deserved attention, but often overlooked are the invention of the tools that made those discoveries possible. Galileo discovered moons around other planets, but it was the invention of the telescope that made his observation possible. Leeuwenhoek discovered microbes only after he …Read More
It has been a momentous month for Stanford researcher Maria Grazia Roncarolo, MD. Following decades of research in Roncarolo’s lab and the clinic, pharmaceutical company Glaxo SmithKline has applied for final approval by European Medicines Agency (EMA) of a treatment she developed to cure a deadly childhood immune disorder. If approved by the EMA, which …Read More
Academic institutions are in a much better position than pharmaceutical companies to make the best decisions about which therapies deserve further development. That was the underlying message from a pair of Stanford researchers at a panel on stem cell science at last weekend’s Association of Health Care Journalism 2015 conference. “There’s an inherent flaw in …Read More
At the Childx conference last week there was a great deal of optimism that stem cell and genetic therapies are about to have a huge impact on many childhood diseases. “It’s not just science fiction anymore,” Matthew Porteus, MD, PhD, told the audience. “We can correct mutations that cause childhood disease.” The session was hosted by …Read More
A new era of stem cell science began 25 years ago. At that time, Stanford researcher Irving Weissman, MD, and his colleagues announced in Science that they had purified hematopoietic stem cells from a mouse. This was the first “adult” (tissue specific) stem cell isolated in purified form from any species. In order to isolate the stem …Read More
Last week, Science published a research report from Stanford scientists on the discovery of a single gene in a primitive marine organism that determines whether that organism recognizes wayward cells as being part of themselves or foreign. What’s interesting scientifically is that this is a very primitive immune system, and if we understand exactly how it …Read More
