Stem cell data showing durable frailty gains earn @LGVNSocial a $1 million @xprize Healthspan milestone award. #longevity# #geroscience# #stemcells# #frailty# #healthspan#

They told us that once a heart breaks, it never truly heals. Science is proving them wrong. 🫀✨ ​At just 25 years old, Argentine biologist Pilar Ferrer is rewriting the rules of modern medicine. ​When a heart attack strikes, the damage left behind has historically been permanent—dead tissue, irreversible scarring, and a clock ticking down on heart failure. ​Ferrer and her research team turned to nature’s most profound blueprint of life: placental tissue. ​By harnessing the regenerative properties of the amniotic membrane, they engineered an injectable bioactive hydrogel designed to do the unthinkable: enter damaged cardiac muscle, act as a biological scaffold, rebuild broken blood vessels, and stimulate the heart to literally regenerate itself from the inside out. ​Think about that for a second. ​The very biological tissue that gives humans life in the womb is now being used to give human hearts a second chance at life. ​This isn’t science fiction. This is a 25-year-old visionary reminding the world that the future of humanity isn't just about surviving—it's about healing the parts of us we thought were gone forever. ​A broken heart no longer has to be the end of the story. ​Drop a ❤️ to salute the brilliant minds pushing human potential forward. ​— #Science# #Innovation# #StemCells# #RegenerativeMedicine# #FutureOfHealth# #Inspiration# #WomenInSTEM# #Cardiology#

🚨 A groundbreaking stem cell nerve therapy has officially entered human trials to reverse paralysis caused by spinal cord injuries. The treatment, called XS228, uses lab-grown neurons derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These cells are reprogrammed from adult donors and transformed into neural precursors capable of regenerating damaged spinal tissue. In preclinical studies, the therapy helped paralyzed animals regain movement by growing new axons and forming connections with host nerve cells. Now, researchers in China have launched the world’s first registrational trial to test its safety and effectiveness in humans. If successful, this could be a game-changer, offering a scalable, off-the-shelf solution to restore mobility and independence for millions affected by spinal cord injuries. This marks a historic step in regenerative medicine, offering new hope to the millions living with spinal cord injuries worldwide.

Another timelapse view into our beloved @Space_Station Lifesciences Glovebox – this time to harvest the stem cells and conclude the experiment (May 28 post). This goal of this experiment was to produce stem cells in large numbers, using the innovative microgravity bioreactor seen inside the glovebox. Stem cell therapies provide significant benefits to help patients fight disease or recover from chemotherapy. The scientists behind this experiment hypothesized that space-grown cells may retain the ability to continuously divide for longer than stem cells on Earth, which could create larger supplies of cells crucial to provide therapies for patients back on Earth. Stay tuned, because the initial results appear incredibly promising!

CiRa's President Yamanaka (President of Sumitomo Pharma's key research partner) paper from 2011: Modeling familial Alzheimer's disease with induced pluripotent stem cells Similarly to the 2000 Yamanaka paper scandal, a user by the name of David Sholto noted similarity within 2 images of the paper of which Yamanaka is listed as an author. Source:

Four periods a year instead of twelve. That's the pitch. Chinese biologist Hongmei Wang thinks she can stretch a woman's fertile window by slowing the menstrual cycle down to once every three months. Her logic? Fewer cycles means fewer eggs burned through. More eggs left in the tank means more years of fertility on the clock. Wang runs the State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology in Beijing, where the work isn't just academic. China's birth rate is collapsing, and extending fertility has become a national-level obsession. Here's the wild part of her argument. Women in ancestral times had roughly 100 periods in their entire life. Constant pregnancies. Years of breastfeeding. The body barely cycled. Modern women? Over 400 periods on average. Wang wants to dial that number back down, closer to how the female body operated for most of human history. Her team has already pulled off something startling. They injected human stem cells into sterile monkeys, and one of those monkeys gave birth to a healthy baby that's still alive today. A small human trial followed with 63 women suffering premature ovarian failure. Four of them ended up conceiving healthy children after stem cell treatment. But Wang isn't pretending this is simple. Suppressing ovulation also suppresses estrogen, the hormone that protects bones, the heart, and the brain. Strip it away and you trade one problem for several others. "It's one thing to prove something possible in the lab," she says. It's another thing entirely for women to actually want it. The science is real. The ethics are messier. And the question she's forcing the world to ask isn't going away. Source: EL PAÍS interview

We just wrapped Draper Summit 2026 at Half Moon Bay. Every year we host this reunion of people who are changing the world. We heard from some of the top leaders today including: Baiju Bhatt, Founder of Robinhood → Aetherflux (this man does not slow down) Rosie Rios, former Treasurer of the United States. Rob Kaplan, Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs. Sal Khan, who is revolutionizing how every human on Earth learns. The conversations were so futuristic, you would have to hear it from our entrepreneurs to believe it. HexemBio is rejuvenating all your blood cells. There were stealth companies regenerating limbs via bioelectricity, replacing brain cells, and rethinking human reproduction entirely via artificial wombs. Muse Bio launched the world's first topical rejuvenative serum made from menstrual blood stem cells - promoting scarless healing and glowing skin. Autolane is building the orchestration layer the autonomous world needs to function. Feltsense is building founder agents that source ideas, build product, and go to market without a human in the loop (they replicated the entire YC batch a few weeks ago). Venus Aerospace is developing the most efficient rocket engine ever built. Gemma Robotics sent a robot to autonomously apply professional make up - airbrushed foundation, contour, etc. The results were fantastic. And we live taped Meet the Drapers Silicon Valley! You'll have to tune in to see the winner… Another summit in the books, for the books. The greatest takeaway about what made Draper summit successful: We all were able to spend time in a beautiful location, learning about frontier tech, getting to know each other deeply, and creating real, meaningful friendships while simply having a lot of fun. At Draper, we know that VC runs on relationships that compound over decades. We are here to build trust with you as you build generational companies. Thank you to all our LPs, founders, ecosystem members, co-investors, and of course the relentless Draper team for coming and making this all possible. Let me know in the comments if you should come next year. Hope to see you there.

I'm a cardiologist. Every day I tell patients some version of the same hard truth: the heart muscle you lost in your heart attack is gone. It won't grow back. We can open the artery, but the dead zone becomes scar — and scar doesn't beat. A 25-year-old scientist in Argentina is trying to prove me wrong. And her approach is clever enough that I'm rooting for her. Here's the problem she's attacking. When an artery blocks, heart muscle in that zone starts dying within hours. Unlike your skin or your liver, the adult human heart barely regenerates. So your body does the only thing it can — it patches the hole with fibrous scar. That scar doesn't contract. The heart pumps weaker, stretches, thins, and marches toward heart failure. This is why roughly half of heart failure patients die within five years. We manage the decline. We don't reverse it. Pilar Ferrer and her team at Amnova Biotech are going after the thing we've never solved: rebuilding the muscle itself. Their tool is inspired by one of the most quietly remarkable tissues in biology — the amniotic membrane. The sac that surrounds a baby in the womb. It's rich in regenerative and anti-inflammatory factors, and doctors already use it to heal stubborn wounds and repair the cornea. They've turned that biology into an injectable hydrogel. Cell-free — no stem cells, no animal components. It ships as a room-temperature powder, gets reconstituted, and is injected directly into the damaged heart zone, ideally during bypass surgery — the operation another Argentine, René Favaloro, gave the world. Once inside, it acts as a temporary scaffold that reengineers the healing environment: it calms the destructive inflammation, grows new blood vessels, and signals the heart's own cells to proliferate and repopulate the dead zone. Instead of surrendering to scar, the tissue gets a second chance to rebuild. The early data, in sheep — chosen because their hearts are close to ours in size and physiology — showed at 28 days: smaller infarcts, improved heart function, more new blood vessels, more dividing cardiac cells. Now the honest part, because I owe you both halves. This is early. It's preclinical. And the history of cardiology is a graveyard of therapies that looked beautiful in sheep and pigs and then failed in humans — different immune responses, different healing, different scale. Human trials aren't expected until around 2028. There is no peer-reviewed efficacy publication yet. This is a candidate to watch, not a treatment to expect. But I want to tell you why it still moves me. The whole strategy is elegant. It doesn't fight the body — it borrows the body's own oldest regenerative wisdom, the biology that builds an entire human being from scratch, and points it at a broken heart. It's cell-free, so it sidesteps the rejection and manufacturing nightmares that have stalled stem-cell approaches. It's stable at room temperature and delivered during an operation we already perform. Practical, not sci-fi. And it's the frontier I've been writing about for months, arriving from an unexpected place: the shift from managing damage to reversing it. Gene editing for cholesterol. Cell therapy for diabetes. Enzymes that erase arterial aging. And now, maybe, a gel that teaches the heart to remember how to heal. For my entire career, "the muscle is gone" has been a sentence with no appeal. A 25-year-old may be writing the appeal. Science with an Argentine accent — born in the same country that gave the world the bypass. Worth watching closely.