News

Cambridge stem cell scientists have developed a new zebrafish model to study the origins of Fanconi anemia, a paediatric disease that causes fatal bone marrow failure and predisposes children to cancer.Using this model, the researchers showed the symptoms of this disease to be linked to genetic changes that disrupt blood stem cells in developing em…

Three CSCI Affiliate Investigators have this week been elected to prestigious societies, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal Society.Affiliates Richard Gilberston and Christine Watson have been elected Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences, while Affiliate Anne Ferguson-Smith has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.Fellows …

The Wellcome Trust – MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute marked a major milestone this month with the topping out of its new purpose-built home on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus.Construction of the 18,000sqm, £94million facility is due to be completed in late 2018, when all 29 research groups that make up the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute will move …

Cambridge stem cell scientists have revealed a new mechanism controlling the formation of insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells. These beta cells are the same cells that are damaged and lost in people living with diabetes. With this new understanding, researchers now have the opportunity to improve the production of functional beta cells in the l…

Cambridge stem cell scientist Dr Florian T. Merkle has been announced as a 2017 Young Investigator (C.J. Herrick) Award winner by the American Association on Anatomists. The Young Investigator awards recognise outstanding investigators in the early stages of their careers who have made important contributions to the field of biomedical science. Flo…

Scientists at the Wellcome Trust – MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute are part of a team who have succeeded in growing miniature functional models of the lining of the womb (uterus) in culture. These organoids (lab-grown clusters of cells mimicking the womb lining) could provide new insights into the early stages of pregnancy and conditions such as …

Today marks the launch of a series of podcasts put together by CSCI student Mariana Alves (Silva group) talking to CSCI group leaders and discovering more about their research.#cscipodcastsMariana has been interviewing a selection of our CSCI Principal Investigators and the first podcast, released today, stars Professor Roger Barker.The series will…

Affiliate PI Peter Rugg-Gunn’s group at the Babraham Institute has mapped the changes in the three-dimensional shape of DNA that occur as human stem cells specialise towards becoming developing neural cells, the cells that make up the nervous system. These changes in DNA shape rewire the circuitry that connects genes with their control switches, wh…

CSCI researchers and their collaborators at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have developed a new analysis tool that was able to show, for the first time, which genes were expressed by individual cells in different genetic versions of a benign blood cancer.Single cell RNA sequencing can define cell types by revealing differences in the proteins …

CSCI (Vallier lab) and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute  scientists along with their collaborators at the University of Cambridge have created a new technique that simplifies the production of human brain and muscle cells - allowing millions of functional cells to be generated in just a few days. The results published in Stem Cell Reportsopen the do…

Researchers from Peter Rugg-Gunn’s lab (Cambridge Stem Cell Institute Affiliate PI, Babraham Institute)  and colleagues at the Karolinska Institute have identified a set of molecular ‘flags’ that are present on the surface of human embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stem cells are cells that have the potential to differentiate into any cell in the bod…

Scientists in Dr Brian Hendrich’s group at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute,  together with colleagues from the Departments of Biochemistry, Chemistry  and the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology have determined the first 3D structures of intact mammalian genomes from individual cells, showing how the DNA from all the chromosomes intricately fold…

Given the unique nature of our MRC Physical Biology of Stem Cells PhD studentships, we asked two of our current PhD students about their Physical Biology of Stem Cells journey, to give us an insight into how these studentships work in context.  Fiona Hamey (who began her studentship with us in 2014), and Sam Watcham (who started in October 2016) ta…

Affiliate PI Peter Rugg-Gunn's Lab at the Babraham Institute and researchers at the Paris Diderot University, Institut Curie report today in Cell Stem Cellthat a second long RNA molecule, XACT, which exists in humans but not in mice, accumulates with XIST on active X-chromosomes in human embryos. The two RNAs do not overlap; instead XACT and XIST o…

Intellectual Property (IP) from Boston, MA, and Cambridge, UK, have combined to advance commercial development of safe, plentiful, non-donor-dependent plateletsPlatelet BioGenesis, a biotech startup developing a method for producing life-saving platelets without the need for human donations, has acquired exclusive worldwide licenses to intellectual…