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The World Stem Cell Summit, December 10-12 in Atlanta, unites and educates the global stem cell community. With more than 1,200 attendees from more than 40 countries, the annual World Stem Cell Summit’s interdisciplinary agenda explores disease updates, research directions, cell standardization, regulatory pathways, reimbursements, financing, venture capital and economic development. Throughout the week, the Mayo Clinic Center for Regenerative Medicine will use social media to connect using the hashtag #WSCS15. At the end of the week, we'll let the tweets, Google+ posts, Flickr photos, Facebook posts and YouTube videos tell the story.

Michael Yaszemski, M.D., Ph.D., physician, orthopedic surgeon and engineer, wants to make it clear that the advances in orthopedic regenerative medicine are the product of teamwork. During his recent talk entitled "Mayo’s History of Military Research and Musculoskeletal Regenerative Medicine of Today," Dr. Yaszemski discussed the recent developments in regenerative orthopedic surgery and took the time to fully credit his team members for the hard work they've done. Since the advent of modern medicine there have been four eras of orthopedic surgery: resection, fusion, replacement and, now, regeneration. Resection was the process used in the very early days of surgery in which damaged joints were removed completely. This alleviated any pain but left patients unstable and unable to move freely. Next came fusion in which an injured joint was removed and the two bones fused together. Fusion gave patients stability but at the cost of mobility. In the 1950s replacement became the primary method thanks to the work done at Mayo Clinic under the guidance of Mark B. Coventry, M.D. During this era an injured joint was replaced with a metal or synthetic joint, which largely restored a patient's mobility. The issue with replacement is that the artificial joints will ultimately deteriorate, requiring repeat surgeries.

FEEL THE BEAT Saturday, October 17, 2015 10 a.m. - 3 p.m. Mayo Clinic Rochester, MN   'Feel the Beat' is a fun-filled day featuring new and exciting research taking place in the Todd and Karen Wanek Family Program for Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome (HLHS), connecting families to others in the HLHS community and providing an opportunity to listen to and meet special guest speakers. This year the event will feature Chris Moir, M.D., Mayo Clinic pediatric surgeon who led a team to successfully separate 5-month-old conjoined twins; Ethan Bortnick, a 14-year-old piano prodigy; and Joslynn Jarrett-Skelton, author of Charlie the Courageous. The day also highlights how the HLHS program is making a difference and how the community can come together to increase awareness and support for our HLHS warriors.

The 2015 World Stem Cell Summit and RegMed Capital Conference will be held December 10-12 at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, Georgia, shaping the next year of ...

Abba C. Zubair, M.D., Ph.D., medical and scientific director of the Cell Therapy Laboratory at Mayo Clinic in Florida has traveled far in his life, moving from Nigeria to America in pursuit of science. Dr. Zubair spoke recently at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, explaining his plan to send an experiment beyond all borders to the International Space Station, a strategy that may accelerate the growth of human tissues and organs which currently require a substantial amount of time to develop due to gravity. The goal of Dr. Zubair's research — and regenerative medicine as a whole — is to boost the body's ability to heal itself. While many of us have the ability to recover from a cold or heal after an injury, the body has a limit to what it can do alone. For example, after a cut your skin heals within a few days. Other organs do not repair themselves as readily. But cells in the body once thought to be no longer able to divide (terminally differentiated) have been shown to be able to remodel and possess some ability to self-heal. Dr. Zubair and teams in the Mayo Clinic Center for Regenerative Medicine are studying how to enhance these self-healing processes.

This story first appeared in Mayo Clinic Magazine. For Caroline Schlehuber, an artificial pancreas might mean an end to finger pricks, blood reads and daily shots. Caroline can never escape her diabetes. It was there on her first day of school, at her first communion. It's there every Halloween, every Christmas, every vacation. She's pricked her finger eight to 10 times a day since she was 3 years old, including the six birthdays she's had since she was diagnosed. She understands that it wasn't her fault that her body turned on itself, that her immune system attacked her insulin-producing islet cells. To quote Caroline, "Diabetes doesn't care how cute you are. Diabetes doesn't care how well you play soccer. Diabetes doesn't care who your friends are or how much your family loves you." From the outside, her life looks perfectly normal. She plays soccer, swims with friends and goes to ballgames with her family. But in the background is the relentless hum of type 1 diabetes, with vigilant blood sugar surveillance and insulin adjustments. Her parents, Tom and Michelle Schlehuber, are thankful for the lifesaving medications and technologies that keep their daughter alive, but they pray for the day when Caroline isn't one missed reading away from the emergency room, when her life isn't dominated by glucose meters and insulin pumps. That day may be closer than they imagined. NEW POSSIBILITIES The road to discovery is long and riddled with ideas proven wrong. Researchers repeatedly see the most promising ideas fail when subjected to rigorous scientific method. The experience leaves most of them hesitant to use a certain four-letter word — "cure." Instead they use euphemisms like "advancing care" and "better treatments."

Abba C. Zubair, M.D., Ph.D., medical and scientific director of the Cell Therapy Laboratory at Mayo ...

This story first appeared on the Mayo Clinic News Network. Approximately 30,000–40,000 people die from liver disease each year, according to the American Liver Foundation. For ...

This story originally appeared on the Mayo Medical Laboratories Blog. It’s almost a crime the outside world doesn’t know about the human clinical trials ...