According to a Nature article, the Japanese health ministry is expected to soon decide on a reprogrammed stem cell therapy for damaged corneas. Led by Kohji Nishida at Osaka University, this team plans to treat the corneas with a sheet of tissue made from iPSCs. If all goes according to plan, the first leg of this study will commence by early July. The full Nature report on this can be found below: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00860-0

The FDA has stepped up its enforcement on unapproved therapies in many stem cell clinics across the United States. With false promises made on untested products, many clinics have worked under FDA loopholes in order to provide these unsafe treatments to desperate patients. In the coming year, clinics have been ordered to halt operations, and new regulations are moving down the pipeline to stop these illegal therapies. More on the story can be found below: https://www.nytimes.

A partnership between Dan Kauffman, MD, PhD, at the Sanford Consortium of Regenerative Medicine, local biotech Fate Pharmaceuticals, and investigators at the University of Minnesota have found a scalable way to produce Natural Killer (NK) cells for clinical use. In February of this year at UCSD’s Moore’s Cancer Center, the group treated patient Derek Ruff with their clinical trial phase I product FT500. This allogenic, or “off the shelf” immunotherapy was recently approved in