#stem cells

Stem cell therapy has kept two patients free of symptoms for 15 years. Two patients with a potentially fatal autoimmune condition have been treated with stem cells and have been living symptom-free for 15 years, a spectacular success that paves the way for wider clinical trials. The two patients – a man and a woman – suffered from neuromyelitis optica, a condition in which the immune system…

Decision Time

Like a timed gate that allows early birds one way and steers latecomers elsewhere, a gene regulator helps guide choices developing cells must make. Researchers studied structures grown from human stem cells that resemble the core embryonic body region , observing how some of the earliest body-building decisions are made. They found that within the mesoderm – one of the embryo’s early cell layers – the duration of activity of a regulator called TBX6 helps steer cell fate: too little favours neural identity, intermediate activity allows diversification, and prolonged activity biases cells toward somitic fate, producing precursors of vertebrae, skeletal muscle and more. When TBX6 was experimentally silenced (right), neural tissue (yellow) expanded while somitic tissue (pink) and intermediate mesoderm (giving rise to kidneys and other urogenital structures; blue) fell back compared to normal (left). They further identified factors that help lock in somitic identity, helping paint a picture of spine and kidney development that could help explain how disorders arise.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Image from work by John-Poul Ng-Blichfeldt and colleagues

Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in bioRxiv, April 2026 (not peer reviewed)

Common Checkpoint

The defining features of stem cells is their potential to develop into multiple cell types and their ability to self-renew. This self-renewal capacity ensures the maintenance of stem cell reservoirs in the body and, if scientists can harness it effectively, in the laboratory too. When maintaining stem cell cultures in the lab, scientists typically use different concoctions of factors specific to the different types of stem cells. But recent research has identified a common checkpoint protein – the regulatory kinase GSK3 – that, when inhibited, maintains self-renewal capacity in multiple stem cell types across multiple species. Indeed, GSK3 inhibition allowed the mouse epiblasts and embryonic stem cells, pictured (green and red), to be cultured together and yet maintain their individual identities – hitherto impossible. In addition to improving stem cell culture techniques, the discovery of the common GSK3 checkpoint could possibly be leveraged clinically to improve the health and healing of ageing tissues.

Written by Ruth Williams

Image by Duo Wang/Ying Lab/USC Stem Cell. Paper by Duo Wang and Xiukun Wang, and colleagues

Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC, Keck School of Medicine, USC, Los Angeles, CA; Epigenetics and RNA Biology Laboratory, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Durham, NC, USA

Image copyright held by the original authors

Published in Cell Research, April 2026