Musculoskeletal Disease

Student science rendezvous in space

August 8, 2016

Current and former HIP interns launch research projects on the same rocket

by Hannah L. Robbins

Mosquitos buzzed in the warm, night air at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Half past midnight on July 18, and still the spectators could not detect activity on the launch pad. In the dark, among fellow scientists and students, Harvard Stem Cell Institute Internship Program (HIP) intern Michael Liu waited.

Roughly two miles away, the SpaceX Falcon9 rocket stood on Space Launch Complex 40 ready to launch the Dragon spacecraft. Among two...

Read more about Student science rendezvous in space

New research implicates immune system cells in muscle healing

December 20, 2013

Harvard stem cell scientists have found that cells known primarily for tempering immune response also exist in injured muscle tissue, an unexpected role for regulatory T cells.

Regulatory T cells, or Tregs for short, accumulate in the skeletal muscles of mice after injury or after the animals developed muscular dystrophy, the researchers found. Their...

Read more about New research implicates immune system cells in muscle healing

Human muscle stem cell therapy gets help from zebrafish

November 7, 2013

Harvard Stem Cell Scientists have discovered that the same chemicals that stimulate muscle development in zebrafish can also be used to differentiate human stem cells into muscle cells in the laboratory, an historically challenging task that, now overcome, makes muscle cell therapy a more realistic clinical possibility.

The work, published this week in the journal Cell, began with a discovery by Boston Children’s Hospital researchers, led by...

Read more about Human muscle stem cell therapy gets help from zebrafish