Contrary to a belief by many because of a false narrative often propagated by venture capitalists, the first biotech company was Cetus Corporation of Berkeley, CA, not Genentech of South San Francisco, CA. Cetus was co-founded by UC Berkeley faculty member, Dr. Donald Glaser, Ph.D., a Nobel Prize awardee. Amongst other accomplishments, Cetus developed Betaseron …
Continue reading “The Origins of the Biotechnology Industry – Cetus Corp. in Berkeley, California”
You can think of the USA as having five principle institutions to govern us: 1. The Presidency, 2. The House, 3. The Senate, 4. The Judiciary, and 5. The Free Press. Unfortunately, none of these are democratic institutions. The least democratic of the five is the Judiciary. Judges are nominated by the President, who is …
Continue reading “The USA – No Democracy Means Poor Health and Poor “Healthcare””
Physicians use bone marrow stem cells from a donor, transplanted into a recipient, to treat patients with certain cancers or blood disorders. The donors for these procedures, whose blood or bone marrow is used for the procedures, are typically young, to optimize the quality of the donor stem cells. Previous studies have found that error-corrected …
Headlines today are reading, “A study found a drug used to treat ovarian cancer doubled the lifespans of pancreatic cancer patients” (Guzman, 2020). Sounds great, right? A new drug study reports that a new drug called Lynparza from AstraZeneca, based in the UK, “nearly doubled the time patients lived without disease progression” (AstraZeneca website). Let’s …
Continue reading “Hyping a New Drug that Treats Pancreatic Cancer”
Beginning in the 1980s during the Reagan administration, the approval and regulation processes for therapeutics have been deregulated and evolved into an increasingly complex and poorly working system with rampant fraud. Irrespective of the many other failures of the system, the use of surrogate measures has been encouraged and found to be of questionable value …
The premise of using Executive Health Programs with their associated cardiovascular diagnostic tests is that the results may help reduce mortality from cardiovascular disease through earlier disease detection, more precise risk assessment, and therefore better treatment. As is often the case in medicine, physicians have beliefs about what works despite the evidence against their cherished, …
The study of dermal adipocytes in the skin is leading to a new understanding of skin phsyiology, how the skin maintains and heals itself, and in the development of new procedures and products for wound healing. Dr. Valerie Horsley, Ph.D., professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and Dermatology at Yale University has pioneered the work …
Continue reading “The Role of Fat Cells (Adipocytes) in Wound Healing”
Careful You May Be Stuck with the Cell’s Phenotype and Genotype for a Very Long Time Hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) are responsible for generating and maintaining the extremely diverse pool of blood cells, everything from red blood cells to T-cells, for our lifetime. HSPC transplantation, also known as bone marrow transplantation, remains the …
Continue reading “Transplanted Stem Cells Last A Long Time – Do They Make You Sick?”
Why Previously Injured Skin Heals Faster Than Normal Tissues in our body contain small niches of quiescent adult stem cells that can, upon demand, multiply and differentiate into myriad somatic cell types as required and dictated by environmental demands. In the skin, stem cells can divide and transform into cell types that produce, for example, …
Dr. James Allison’s Nobel Prize Winning Technology Delivered by Stem Cells Scientists at UCLA reported this week in Nature Biomedical Engineering that they had constructed a stem cell conjugated to a platelet that had been decorated with anti-PD-1 antibodies. James Allison, Ph.D. developed “checkpoint inhibitors” while a professor at Berkeley beginning in the 1990s, for which …
Continue reading “Check Point Inhibitors for Cancer Delivered by Haematopoietic Stem Cells”
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 