Nobel Winner Ties to California Stem Cell Agency

The California stem cell agency can claim a connection to two of the winners today of the Nobel Prize in medicine, including one who was involved as far back as 2005.

Writing today on the agency's blog, Amy Adams, the agency's communications manager, said,

“Randy Schekman established the stem cell training program at UC Berkeley, which supports graduate and post-doctoral students working in stem cell labs.”

That grant was approved in September 2005 although the agency did not immediately have the cash to fund it.

Adams also wrote,

“Thomas Sudhoff (of Stanford) is a collaborator on a Tools and Technologies Award to Marius Wernig...In the collaboration with Wernig, the group intends to study defects in the normal signaling between neurons in people with autism, schizophrenia, depression and other diseases. Starting with stem cells developed from people with those diseases, they’ll be able to study the defects in cellular communication and then try to find ways of fixing those defects.”