Podcast · Tech & Science

The Stem Cell Report with Janet Rossant

Stem cell science has catapulted to the forefront of biomedical research over the last decade, bringing with it the potential to transform human health and the treatment of devastating diseases and disorders. Janet Rossant, an internationally recognized stem cell pioneer and the dynamic editor-in-ch

New episodes: Monthly
Typical length: 43 min
Latest: 7 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026 · 30 min

Two Decades of iPS Cells: Perspectives from the Field

In 2006, Kazutoshi Takahashi and Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University published their landmark paper showing that mouse skin cells could be reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state using just four transcription factors. Over the past two decades, this finding has taken the field of stem cell research in many new directions, opening new ways to study human development, understand and engineer cell fate, model disease, and explore new stem cell–based approaches to medicine. As part of the 20th an...

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

S5 · E4 · 25 Aug 2026 · 56 min
Repair the Second Brain
The enteric nervous system (ENS) is an intricate network of neurons and glia lining the gastrointestinal tract, regulating digestion and overall health. Loss of ENS neurons, as occurs in Hirschsprung disease, leads to intestinal obstruction, and treatment options remain limited. One therapeutic approach for the disease is stimulating resident stem cells to regenerate the ENS, and another is through cell therapy to replace the missing cells — but significant challenges remain in translating ei...
S5 · E3 · 22 Jun 2026 · 37 min
Born Without a Nose
Bosma arhinia microphthalmia syndrome (BAMS) is a rare genetic disorder resulting in babies born without a nose, along with eye and reproductive anomalies. Our guests today investigated the developmental basis of this distinct defect using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) derived from patients with BAMS. They assessed the differentiation potential of BAMS patient-derived iPSCs into cranial placode cells, a group of progenitor cells that contribute to the formation of the nasal epitheliu...
S5 · E2 · 20 May 2026 · 49 min
Therapeutic Strategy for COVID-19-Induced Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome
Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) induced by COVID-19 was a leading cause of severe illness and death during the pandemic, driven by an intense innate immune response, hyperinflammation, and a decrease in lymphocytes. Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) represent a potential therapeutic option for ARDS due to their ability to modulate the immune system and inflammation. Our guests report results from a Health Canada–regulated Phase I and Phase II trials evaluating freshly cultured umbil...
S5 · E1 · 14 Apr 2026 · 51 min
Stem Cell-ebration: 5 Years of Breakthrough Science and Insightful Conversations
Five years ago, The Stem Cell Report set out with a simple goal: to bring the science, the people, and the stories behind stem cell research into one conversation. Since then, the field has advanced at an extraordinary pace—transforming our understanding of development, disease, and regenerative medicine. To celebrate, we’re doing something special. In this anniversary episode, we welcome back past guests—scientists, clinicians, and authors—to revisit where their work began, explore how it’s ...
S4 · E11 · 9 Mar 2026 · 46 min
Making Sense of Touch
Our guests today created new lab models to study Merkel cells using mouse whisker tissue cultures, mouse skin organoids, and human skin organoids. These models allowed them to study Merkel cells as they develop, validate the role of known signaling pathways, and even identify some new ones. Their work provides easier access to Merkel cells for future studies including disease models to understand the pathophysiology of these cells. Guests Ying Xiao, PhD, Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital, Scho...
S4 · E10 · 10 Feb 2026 · 35 min
Illuminating hPSC-derived Sensory Neurons
Human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) are transforming the study of biology and disease by enabling scientists to grow large amounts of specific cell types in the lab that were once difficult to obtain. Our guests today focus on improving the derivation and study of sensory neurons, which are sparse and diverse nerve cells near the spine that carry information like pain, touch, or position of the body to the brain. Damage to these neurons or sensory neuropathies, as can happen in diabetes or i...
S4 · E9 · 22 Jan 2026 · 43 min
Tuning the X
Epigenetic regulation of gene expression is an important mechanism in development and disease. N6-methyladenosine (m6A) is one of the most prevalent epigenetic modifications for RNA and has been shown to play critical roles in processes such as embryo development, cancer, and stress responses. Our guests today investigate how m6A regulates X chromosome dosage compensation to ensure proper balance of gene expression from X chromosomes between sexes. X-chromosome dosage compensation is accompli...
S4 · E8 · 19 Nov 2025 · 43 min
Building a Better Barrier: Modeling the Human Gut Epithelium
The human intestinal epithelial barrier comprises diverse proliferative, secretory and absorptive cell types that facilitate nutrient digestion and absorption and protect against harmful environmental agents. The barrier and its function can vary between individuals due to genetic differences thus impact processes such as digestion, drug metabolism, and drug sensitivity. Our guests today investigated the effect of diverse culture conditions on the cell type composition, gene expression profil...
S4 · E7 · 23 Oct 2025 · 30 min
Crossing the Border: Modeling the Blood Brain Barrier
The blood-brain barrier (BBB), formed by brain endothelial cells, pericytes, and astrocytes, is organized into a neurovascular unit that regulates the exchange of proteins between blood circulation and brain parenchyma. Human stem-cell-based models using brain endothelial cells are a powerful tool to investigate how disease-related conditions might affect the blood-brain barrier integrity. However, the cell type composition is critical to faithfully model transcytosis across the blood-brain b...
S4 · E6 · 22 Sep 2025 · 33 min
Movin’ On Out: Mobilizing HSCs From The Bone Marrow
Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) normally reside in the bone marrow niche but can traffic across the bone marrow endothelium into the bloodstream to populate different niches. This process of HSC mobilization from the bone marrow to the blood, is an increasingly favored procedure to obtain HSCs for hematopoietic cell transplantation therapy. Though mobilization is robust in many donors due to years of refined protocols and drug combinations, the process remains difficult or contraindicated amo...
S4 · E5 · 12 Aug 2025 · 46 min
Cancer Neuroscience, Tumor Organoids, and Understanding the Role of the Nervous System in Human Glioblastoma
The role of neuronal influences on cancer pathogenesis and progression is increasingly appreciated in the nervous system. Neurons have been shown to enhance the proliferation and migration of gliomas, a glial-derived tumor of the CNS, via diffusible paracrine factors or synaptic inputs onto tumor cells. In glioblastomas, a highly aggressive glioma, mostly glutamatergic inputs have been identified. While the potential for glioblastomas to receive projections from neurons of other neurotransmit...
S4 · E4 · 8 Jul 2025 · 40 min
Stem Cells in Space: Muscle Regeneration in Microgravity
Skeletal muscle is one of the most abundant tissues in the human body, representing approximately 40% of body weight. Under certain circumstances, skeletal muscle can be regenerated through satellite cells, a reservoir of quiescent muscle stem cells, that can be activated with injury or in certain diseases and give rise to newly formed multi-nucleated myotubes and myofibers. However, the regenerative potential of muscle is diminished or is completely absent in the course of normal aging, cert...
S4 · E3 · 13 May 2025 · 39 min
Parkinson's Disease, Cell Therapy, and Exercise
The potential of pluripotent stem cells and the ability to scale and differentiate them to generate large numbers of enriched cell populations has created new opportunities and approaches to treat human disease. Preclinical proof-of-principle data demonstrates that stem cell-derived neural grafts can be used to reverse symptoms of multiple neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s Disease. Cell grafts enriched with dopaminergic neurons, can structurally and functionally integrate in the ...
S4 · E2 · 7 Apr 2025 · 54 min
Leaving an Imprint: The Function, Impact, and Detection of Epigenetic Marks
Parent-specific epigenetic marks (imprints) leading to parent-specific gene expression are crucial for normal growth and development, yet their mechanisms of establishment and maintenance are not fully understood. In humans, approximately 200 imprinted genes have been discovered, and improper imprinting can manifest in growth restriction, obesity, intellectual disabilities, behavioral abnormalities, and an increased risk of certain cancers. While the use of pluripotent stem cells, especially ...
S4 · E1 · 20 Mar 2025 · 43 min
Don’t Dull the SPARCL: The Lung Microvasculature and its Role in Development
The mature lung in both humans and mice is highly vascularized, with approximately 30% of all cells being endothelial cells (ECs). The blood vessels have a physiological role in gas exchange within the tissue, but the vascular cells have additional role(s) beyond supplying oxygen and nutrients to the tissue. For example, the adult lung endothelium responds to injury by activating pathways for alveolar re epithelialization and during embryonic development, disrupting vascularization ex v...
S3 · E14 · 13 Jan 2025 · 58 min
A Look Into the Future of Stem Cell Reports: A Conversation with Janet Rossant
In this special edition of the podcast, we will talk with the new Editor-in-Chief Janet Rossant and hear about her vision for the journal, its promising future, and what she sees as some of the exciting prospects over the horizon for stem cell research. We will also talk with Yvonne Fisher, the journal’s Managing Editor, and Jack Mosher of the ISSCR, about the evolution of the journal and its role in the Society. Guests Janet Rossant is the new Editor-in-Chief of Stem Cell Reports. She hold...
S3 · E13 · 9 Dec 2024 · 34 min
SeqVerify: A New Easily Accessible Tool for Comprehensive Cell Line Quality Assessment
During the last decade, advances in genome editing and pluripotent stem cell (PSC) culture have let researchers generate edited PSC lines to study a wide variety of biological questions. However, abnormalities in cell lines such as aneuploidy, mutations, on-target and off-target editing errors, and microbial contamination can arise during PSC culture or due to undesired editing outcomes. To ensure valid experimental results and the safety of PSC-derived therapeutics, it is important to detect...
S3 · E12 · 12 Nov 2024 · 54 min
Guidelines for Managing and Using the Digital Phenotypes of Pluripotent Stem Cell Lines
The ability of human pluripotent and somatic stem cells to differentiate into multiple cell types of the human body makes them uniquely useful to model human development and disease. As a result, these cells are shared, edited, and differentiated by laboratories across the world for basic research, clinical translation, and commercial applications. Large and genotypically diverse collections of pluripotent stem cells are being generated to support large cohort-scale research into conditions s...
S3 · E11 · 25 Oct 2024 · 43 min
PSC Developmental Bias: The Mechanism and the Variation in Human Neural Development
Pluripotent stem cells are defined, in part, by their potential to generate cell types from all three embryonic germ layers. However, it is well known within the field that there is variability in developmental potential between cell lines. This phenomenon, sometimes referred to as lineage bias, is manifest in a variable response of individual cell lines to induction of differentiation into a specific germ layer lineage. Although lineage bias in pluripotent stem cells has been reported for so...
S3 · E10 · 10 Sep 2024 · 40 min
Aging, Stem Cells, and Biological Clocks
Epigenetic clocks based on tissue DNA methylation analysis have emerged as robust and powerful biomarkers of aging. This technology has allowed scientists to investigate how diseases affect the aging process, to evaluate the effectiveness of therapeutic aging interventions, and to correlate age with overall health among the general public. Today you can even purchase test kits online that enable you to measure your own biological age. However, despite the growing use of epigenetic...
S3 · E9 · 12 Aug 2024 · 52 min
Evaluating the Expanding Models of Brain Disease
Those who study neurological diseases and their underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms have a number of scientific models at their disposal. In vivo animal models, particularly those bearing targeted genetic modifications, remain the gold standard, especially when it comes to assessment of behavioral readouts and neurobiological disease mechanisms in vivo. Historically, animal models have been widely used for preclinical validation of drug efficacy and safety. Increasingly there...
S3 · E8 · 11 Jun 2024 · 31 min
Going Out on a LIM: Rethinking the Role of LMX1A in Patterning Dopaminergic Neurons
This episode of The Stem Cell Report will discuss the process of directing stem cells to acquire the proper identity, an essential step in the development of effective and durable cell replacement therapies. Specifically, we will talk about the process of directing cells into a ventral mesencephalic dopaminergic fate for treating Parkinson’s disease. Guests Agnete Kirkeby is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Copenhagen, a Principal Investigato...
S3 · E7 · 20 May 2024 · 38 min
No Oligo Monopoly: Oligodendrocyte Precursor Cells in the Developing Cortex
Myelination is one of the last events during mammalian brain development and is thought to continue into young adulthood in humans. Even in adulthood, ongoing low-level myelination is essential for neural homeostasis, and for dynamic processes such as learning and memory. Deficits in myelination resulting in abnormal white matter and disruption of neuronal function are observed in a wide variety of disorders of the CNS. One strategy for alleviating these deficits is to enhance the genesis of ...
S3 · E6 · 9 Apr 2024 · 25 min
Enhancing Connections: Rebuilding Neural Circuits in Spinal Cord Injury
Biomedical researchers have long sought ways to repair spinal cord damage with the holy grail of the pursuit being the reconstitution of lost function. In the mid 1990’s with the successful culture of human embryonic stem cells, and about a decade later induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), the field was energized with a potential new approach to replace the lost neurons and glia cells and restoring neural connections. In the decades since that discovery some progress has been made, h...
S3 · E5 · 11 Mar 2024 · 43 min
Climbing the Scientific Mountain of Retinal Regeneration
Collectively, retinal degenerative disorders are a major cause of blindness worldwide. For example, one of the most common disorders is age related macular degeneration, which alone affects nearly 200 million globally. In humans, and other mammals, the loss of the retinal cells is an irreversible process. However, in some non-mammalian vertebrates like frogs and fish, retinal neurons can regenerate. This process is dependent upon Müller glia, which can re-enter the cell cycle and reprog...
S3 · E4 · 12 Feb 2024 · 38 min
Human Fetal Tissue: A Legacy of Biomedical Research Contributions
Since the 1930’s research using human fetal tissue has been used in numerous scientific and medical advances that have saved millions of lives, including the development of vaccines and treatments for diseases. Despite its substantial contribution to medicine and science, significant public debate and misinformation persists surrounding the ethical use of human fetal tissue in biomedical research. The ISSCR, led by its Public Policy Committee, have been tireless champions and advocate...
S3 · E3 · 13 Nov 2023 · 49 min
The Selling of Stem Cells
This November marks the 25th anniversary of the successful isolation and culture of human embryonic stem cells by Jamie Thompson. This breakthrough was a turning point in biomedical research. This discovery provided scientists with a limitless source of human cells to understand human biology and model disease. The discovery also provided a novel pathway to develop tissues and cells that could potentially be used to provide curative diseases like diabetes and Parkinson’s, among others. ...
S3 · E2 · 12 Sep 2023 · 53 min
Setting the Standards for Human Stem Cell Research
Human stem cell technology has led to remarkable insights into human biology in health and disease. However, for the results and outputs from this research to be accurate, meaningful, and durable, it is important that the field have agreed upon standards that ensure reproducibility and reliability of the data. The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) has developed a set of recommendations, including reporting criteria, for scientists in basic research laboratories. These crite...
S3 · E1 · 7 Aug 2023 · 39 min
Organoids: Multi-Dimensional Standards for Three Dimensional Models
The use of organoids as an experimental system is rapidly advancing in pace and complexity. Derived from pluripotent or tissue stem cells, organoids are three-dimensional, in vitro, structures intended to model functional or developmental aspects of in vivo organs. They are also being used to model complex physiological systems in organ-on-chip devices and in assembloids, the combination of organoids from different tissues. Organoids are especially useful to model and understand aspects of hu...

About The Stem Cell Report with Janet Rossant

The Stem Cell Report with Janet Rossant is a English tech & science podcast from ISSCR. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: ISSCR
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Monthly
Typical length: 43 min
Latest episode: 7 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1561269675

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