Blog Future

Blog Future

Well, I’ve been doing this blog for nearly a year, and it’s time to check in and see if it is worth continuing. The subject matter is still interesting to me, and I think I’m doing a pretty good job at reporting on research developments and providing a single source of this information for interested people, but there are a couple issues that may get in the way of continuing it past the end of August.

One is money (which also equals time). It costs $$ to keep this going, in the form of the technical services (domain name and hosting, etc.), publicity (for example, listing the blog in Internet directories or Google ads for it), and of course there’s my time. I have decided to apply to law school for next fall, in part to study issues such as the stem cell patents, and I want to do as much prepartory work as I can for the first year so that my family life does not get shafted.

There’s also the issue of traffic (which is part of what leads to the issue of money). There are a number of regular readers out there, but it’s not a huge number, and it’s not really increasing. Is it worth it to keep this going when there aren’t actually a large number of people who benefit from it?

Given these issues, it’s important to see what support is available from readers, in the form of a small donation and letting friends and colleagues know about it and adding links to it where appropriate (with reciprocal linking if desired, of course). If readers can make donations totaling $1000 by the end of the month, it can keep going for a while— otherwise, it’s been a fun ride but time to move on.

Another Use for Stem Cell Transplants

Another Use for Stem Cell Transplants

Stem cell transplants are well known as a procedure after chemotherapy to help restore a drug-ravaged immune system, but that is not the only situation in which an infusion of stem cells into the blood can help. A few days ago the North Carolina Wilmington Star ran an article about the use of stem cells as a treatment for systemic scleroderma. The disease involves an overproduction of collagen, thereby causing the skin and internal organs to harden and become immobile. The article is mostly about the disease and various treatments that are being tried, one of which is stem cell transplants. While they have shown promise, they are still considered experimental and thus are unlikely to be covered by insurance, putting them out of reach for many patients.

I’m not surprised that stem cells might be effective against this disease, since it is an autoimmune disorder and stem cells appear to be highly effective against lupus, another autoimmune disease. Since the article did not focus on the treatment, there was no reporting of how many clinical studies have been done, what results have been, and so on. The NIH Clinical Trials site (clinicaltrials.gov) showed 4 current clinical studies recruiting when I search “scleroderma stem cells,” so try that if you are interested in finding out a little bit more.