EP 22 · 43:16

Helper T cells from stem cells — a manufacturing unlock for cell therapies

From Cloud9 Dark Matter Halo, Jellyfish Sleep, and String Theory Hidden in Nature

Episode
7/16
String-theory geometry shows up in real biological networks, jellyfish sleep may be DNA repair, and Cloud9 could be a starless dark-matter halo.
Transcript

612 words · auto-generated from the episode video

43:18explanation, the analogy is imagine opening the hood of a car and using the engine to power a factory. Instead of just driving the car, researchers are using the machinery of life in a test tube to build sustainable products out of thin air. Again, that's out of Stanford University and Northwestern University. Story number three is a stem cell research story culturing the immune systems conductors. This is January 8th, 2026. Headline: UBC scientists solve the mystery of growing helper tea cells. Now, if you've watched this show in the past, you know we've talked about the

43:59immune system a lot. So, in our past episodes, we do cover this. But the log line is for the first time researchers have reliably produced helper tea cells from stem cells a major hurdle in creating offtheshelf living drugs. And this is out of the University of British Columbia led by Peter Zanstra and Megan Levings. Yeah, this one's interesting because, you know, we've been able to grow killer tea cells, which are, you know, the soldiers of our immune system, but the helper tea cells, which are kind of like the generals or like the kernels of the immune system, they're the ones that conduct all of the responses. They

44:40activate B cells to make antibodies. They trigger the macrofasages, which are the eating immune cells that'll like eat up bacteria and bad things. They conduct all of this stuff by releasing cytoines and all of these other important factors, but they're really hard to grow in a lab. And these guys precisely tuned a development signal called Notch. >> And they were able to direct stem cells to become either type, >> right? >> Either killer or helper, right? And now this allows for large scale manufacturing. Again, personalized drugs. You could take the stem cells from a patient and then make

45:21designed helper tea cells >> that are specific to like that specific patient. >> Yeah. >> Um >> it could be much more affordable. You know, you can customize patient specific therapies. It's very cool. >> So to the analogy that you brought up, we've already learned how to train soldiers to fight cancer, but we uh didn't know how to recruit the conductors who lead the orchestra on the battlefield. So this discovery finally gives us the full leadership team needed for a strong lasting immune response. Our last rundown story of the day as the UFO guy. You know we always have to some point talk about exoplanet exploration

46:04unmasking alien atmospheres. This is on January 12th. a conversation. NASA's Pandora Telescope will study stars in detail to learn about exoplanets orbiting them. Now, I'll just briefly note this is the not the last time we're going to be talking about uh exoplanet exploration. That's right. We're not going to leak any classified information at this moment in time. But for this story log line as the first mission of NASA's astrophysics pioneers program, the Pandora small sat will provide the first ever high precision tool for disentangling stellar noise from the actual atmospheric signal of distant

46:45worlds. And we did talk about this in the episode where we covered the greatest evidence yet. >> Yeah. K218b >> of life on an exoplanet. Uh, but this story is out of the University of Arizona led by Daniel Apay, NASA Gddard Space Flight Center and Ames Research Center and the Lawrence Liverour National Lab and Cornell University. Yeah, this one's a cool one because it's quite a small um satellite. The lens is only like 17 in, which is pretty small compared to like Hubble or James Web,

From the episode
  1. EP 22

    Cloud9 Dark Matter Halo, Jellyfish Sleep, and String Theory Hidden in Nature

    String-theory biology, jellyfish sleep, and a possible naked dark-matter halo.

    String-theory geometry shows up in real biological networks, jellyfish sleep may be DNA repair, and Cloud9 could be a starless dark-matter halo.