Yearly Archives: 2018

A Conversation With Peter Zandstra,A PhD, FRSC(E) Peter Zandstra is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, the Chief Technology Officer of ExCellThera, and the Chief Scientific Officer of the Center for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine (CCRM). He is a renowned stem cell scientist and has recently joined the University of British Columbia to lead the School of Biomedical Engineering and as the Director of the Michael Smith Laboratories. BCREGMEDa s Trainee Steering Committee sat down with Dr. Zandstra to discuss his scientific career, his vision for the new school of biomedical engineering and the future of regenerative medicine in BC. What follows [...]

An interdisciplinary team made of neuroscientists, neurologists, and neurosurgeons, led by Dr. Mark Tuzynski at the University of California - San Diego (UCSD, San Diego, CA), reported this past February in Nature Medicine the successful grafting of human spinal cord-derived neural progenitor cells (NPCs) into the spinal cord of rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) with high level (i.e., cervical) injuries. The grafts not only survived for at least 9 months post-injury, and but also developed large numbers of axons that traveled over long distances within the injured spinal cord and were also penetrated by host axons. Fig. 1 from original article [...]

"3D bioprinting" sounds like something you would see in a science fiction movie, perhaps in "The Fifth Element" where the main character's body is fully printed in a giant bioreactor - bones, muscles and all -  or else in "Starship Troopers" where, more modestly, the technology is shown repairing a wound. Yet, 3D bioprinting (which is exactly what it sounds like - the printing of tissues or organs, by analogy to the more conventional 3D printing using plastic or glass or metal), is, since 10 years or so, an existing technology that, although somewhat experimental still, holds a vast potential to revolutionize [...]

Article reproducedA here from theA UBC Centre for Blood Research.A There is an urgent need for curative therapies to treat kidney failure. In 2015, over 21,000 patients in Canada received dialysis to treat kidney failure. Another 2,500 patients received a kidney transplant and 215 died on the waiting list. As part of an ongoing collaboration, the laboratories of Dr. Kelly M. McNagny (UBC, CBR PI) and Dr. Benjamin S. Freedman (University of Washington) have demonstrated that human kidney organoids grown in a culture dish can accurately model kidney development and disease. This work, recently published in the journal Stem Cells (pictured),A [...]