Cultured mini-organs reveal the weapons of aggressive bacteria

The study opens the door to using cultured human mini-organs to investigate a wide range of other serious infections

16-Jun-2025 - Thanks to lab-grown miniature intestines, researchers at the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) in Würzburg in collaboration with Uppsala University in Sweden have successfully mapped how aggressive Shigella bacteria infect the human gut. The study, published in the ...

How aging changes the blood system

A few stem cells, or “clones”, outcompete their neighbours and gradually take over blood production

23-May-2025 - The reservoir of blood stem cells shrinks with age. It becomes increasingly dominated by stem cells that produce immune cells associated with chronic inflammation. Almost all of the 60-year-olds studied show this change. Researchers from the Centre for Genomic Regulation and the Institute for ...

Miniature hearts that save a lot of time and money

Multicellular human cardiac organoids with an immune system for drug research

07-May-2025 - The development of novel therapeutics offer great hope for the fight against widespread diseases such as cancer, but they can impair the cardiovascular system, so development often fails early on. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Toxicology and Experimental Medicine ITEM and Hannover ...

Better insights into the hepatitis D virus

Hannover researchers develop stem cell-based infection model

28-Apr-2025 - Hepatitis D virus (HDV) infects the liver and causes severe inflammation. According to WHO estimates, 12 million people worldwide are infected with HDV. Currently, there are only a few treatment options. A team of researchers from TWINCORE, the Centre for Experimental and Clinical Infection ...

Nursery of the Blood: How Stem Cells Calm the Body’s Immune Response

The researchers uncovered an unexpected finding

28-Mar-2025 - Our blood consists of many cell types that develop through different stages from a precursor type – the blood stem cell. An international research team led by Universitätsmedizin Frankfurt and Goethe University has now investigated the developmental pathways of blood cells in humans. The results ...

Building better brain organoids: A new framework for researchers

“Brain organoids are set to transform our understanding of human development, evolution and disease, and to provide insights we would otherwise not be able to gain”

17-Mar-2025 - Brain organoids, three-dimensional models of the brain, are a boon to neuroscience, making it possible to study the development, evolution and disease of the brain in a model that is based on human stem cells. Now, a consensus paper published in Nature by leading researchers in the brain organoid ...

Donating blood saves lives – but what long-term effects does this practice have on our bodies?

Frequent blood donations promote the regeneration of blood cells through genetic adaptation

13-Mar-2025 - Researchers from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), the HI-STEM stem cell institute and the German Red Cross Blood Donor Service, among others, have now discovered that frequent blood donations cause genetic adaptations in blood stem cells that promote the regeneration of blood ...

Bioreactor Allows Automated Long-Term Culturing of Stem Cells

06-Jan-2025 - Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) are considered as a promising tool in medicine, with the potential to unlock treatments for many health conditions such as neurodegenerative diseases and disorders. However, producing large amounts of hiPSCs remains a challenge. Researchers from the ...

A Journey back in time to the origin of stem cells

Proteins that regulate animal stem cells are much older than animals themselves

20-Nov-2024 - A new study published in Nature Communications reveals that critical proteins involved in animal stem cell regulation are much older than previously thought, predating the origin of animals that likely evolved more than 700 million years ago. The international research team included scientists ...

Markers in iPSC quality control – a new approach to enhance standardization

“Machine learning is an attractive tool to streamline processes”

12-Nov-2024 - Human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have a great potential for scientific and medical applications. They are used in research laboratories to model human diseases, helping to uncover underlying mechanisms and developing new therapies. Additionally, they are being tested in clinical ...