> The new study … investigated a new treatment called cultivated autologous limbal epithelial cells (CALEC). This involves removing stem cells from a patient’s uninjured eye, growing their population in the lab for a few weeks, then surgically transplanting them into the injured eye.
14 patients tested. 79% reported healing in 12 months.
Note here that "complete success" doesn't seem to necessarily mean recovery of vision, just some kinds of testing of corneal health. The article vaguely says that "most" patients had some improvement of vision. I couldn't quickly find discussion of this in the actual study, but the study claims success in proving safety and suggests further investigation is necessary to show therapeutic efficacy.
Tangentially-related: the recurrent corneal erosion that I've been managing (painfully and unsuccessfully) for a decade has finally seen some measure of remission after I started self-treating with Fingerprick Autologous Blood. It's what it says on the tin: I use a blood testing fingerprick to draw a few drops of blood, which I insert under my eyelid. Blink. Done. Not even a month and half with a bandage contact lens helped as much. It's a little frustrating that years of dealing with far-flung ophthalmologists and expensive eye ointments that make things worse (Muro 128 costs more than printer ink) could have been preempted with a application of a substance that's already inside me.
Can’t comment on the technical quality of this paper but wanted to highlight that the research was funded by the NIH which our government is currently chaotically gutting.
Where did this bogus "transgenic" narrative come from? And BTW he didn't say "research on transgender mice", he said "making mice transgender"... which is technically incorrect but obvious to me (and, I thought, anyone knowledgeable in the field) that the research involved giving mice hormone therapy.
Saying "technically incorrect" is downplaying what is really totally incorrect from any reasonable interpretation. There is nothing in that fact check that it's close to what was said. Let's just call it wrong and not try to excuse it
The ability to turn a study on "the effects of testosterone hormone therapy on breast cancer" into "transgender", into "why are they twisting his words! everyone knows he didn't mean transgender" requires some serious excuse making mental gymnastics. Why are you still trying to convince yourself rather than just recognize maga has gone completely off the rails?
The president embarrassed himself by mistaking “transgenic” for “transgender”, and a good segment of the population further embarrassed themselves by embracing confirmation bias rather than stopping to think “wait, what can’t be right”.
Please refrain from posting deliberately misleading and inflammatory statements here.
The studies in question involve administering hormonal treatments to mice to investigate health outcomes relevant to humans, not altering the gender identity of mice.
You realize a lot of hormones could be classified as gender-affirming, right?
Testosterone therapy would be gender-affirming for most men. Huge numbers of women take progesterone. Many, many others hormones reinforce gender-associated behaviours and physiology. No one thinks anything of it until someone is taking it for reasons they don’t approve of.
But we could manipulate all kinds of studies we don’t agree with because they happen to utilize “gender-affirming” hormones. We could do this to tens of thousands of studies. We would be technically correct, yet extremely wrong.
In this case the main point of the study is laid out here: "information on the effects of sex hormone therapy on immune responsiveness is scarce"
If you ignore the reason this gap in knowledge became relevant, this has nothing to do with transgender people or affirming gender. It has everything to do with understanding the health of the broader population; particularly as sex hormones are used with increasing frequency (sex hormones are androgens, estrogens, and progestogens; very common, normal hormones used by all kinds of people).
Yes this kind of therapy is very important for some people to live a life where their hormones align with their sex. I have a friend who is a cis woman but has enough testosterone being naturally produced that she has some thicker facial hair. And this is with hormone therapy. If she wasn't taking supplementary female hormones, she'd likely have more serious misalignment between primary and secondary sex characteristics. And I have to imagine it could cause problems with her monthly cycle if the hormones aren't balanced right
but they are not searching for a way to make mice transgender. The point of the research is to model those effects as they might occur in humans, not to figure out how to make transgender mice.
Even if that were the case, is it wrong to support research into health related outcomes for American citizens? There’s nothing wrong with working on research to make American citizens medical and life outcomes better. That’s what government should be doing.
The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual).
Genuinely, how can someone take this language seriously? I don’t understand how this doesn’t leave a sour taste in anyone’s mouth, as though they’re being treated like gullible fools by their own administration.
Language like this is why I won’t vote for Pierre Poilievre here in Canada, or even take him seriously at all.
I almost can’t believe this stuff is on the White House website.
The gen part of transgenic comes from genes, not gender.
Transgenic refers to an organism or cell whose genome has been altered by the introduction of one or more foreign DNA sequences from another species by artificial means.[1][2]
Trumps’s team grabbed the term to anger credulous people and get their support. Trump might not know what it means, but his team does, and they don’t care. I expect depatru knows what it means as well, or is capable of finding it out. But he’d rather add to the manipulation.
I’m linking to both genome.gov and to Wikipedia in case the government site is taken down.
Idiocy is gaining a foothold everywhere it seems to me. I keep wondering if this is how civilization collapses? We just forget how to do stuff and recede back into darkness?
The posted article was about research to cure blindness with stem cells. The top comment implied that such research was being defunded.
I asked for an example that was not about defunding research on transgender mice. The only examples provided were for research that was confused with transgender research.
So it seems that Doge is not cutting research for curing blindness and the like but only for transgender and some related-sounding other studies that were lumped in together, which will probably be sorted out in time.
> The new study … investigated a new treatment called cultivated autologous limbal epithelial cells (CALEC). This involves removing stem cells from a patient’s uninjured eye, growing their population in the lab for a few weeks, then surgically transplanting them into the injured eye.
14 patients tested. 79% reported healing in 12 months.
Note here that "complete success" doesn't seem to necessarily mean recovery of vision, just some kinds of testing of corneal health. The article vaguely says that "most" patients had some improvement of vision. I couldn't quickly find discussion of this in the actual study, but the study claims success in proving safety and suggests further investigation is necessary to show therapeutic efficacy.
This is an important point. It looks like they didn’t directly make any measurements of vision, just biological markers of corneal health.
That doesn’t mean that vision didn’t improve. It’s just a bit odd that if it did, they wouldn’t have quantified it and added that to this paper.
If you read the article, they clearly test vision in the patients.
>the majority of patients regained some sight, with some advancing from legally blind to low vision.
Not for the faint of heart but look at figure 3 of the original paper: * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56461-1
Amazing!
My mom is 76 and she had a virus ruin one of corneas. I wish this was already a common practice but I doubt she will be able to benefit from this.
If your eye is irritated and redness doesn't go away for days - visit your doctor.
Whoa thats wild. Did they identify the virus?
Tangentially-related: the recurrent corneal erosion that I've been managing (painfully and unsuccessfully) for a decade has finally seen some measure of remission after I started self-treating with Fingerprick Autologous Blood. It's what it says on the tin: I use a blood testing fingerprick to draw a few drops of blood, which I insert under my eyelid. Blink. Done. Not even a month and half with a bandage contact lens helped as much. It's a little frustrating that years of dealing with far-flung ophthalmologists and expensive eye ointments that make things worse (Muro 128 costs more than printer ink) could have been preempted with a application of a substance that's already inside me.
Damn that’s metal as fuck.
Although I understand it doesn’t mean this is even nearly useable for a real thing rn, that’s fucking dope.
Can’t comment on the technical quality of this paper but wanted to highlight that the research was funded by the NIH which our government is currently chaotically gutting.
Link to paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56461-1.pdf
Thank you!
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You should take everything he says with a grain of salt. He’s defunding research on transgenic mice, not transgender.
Where did this bogus "transgenic" narrative come from? And BTW he didn't say "research on transgender mice", he said "making mice transgender"... which is technically incorrect but obvious to me (and, I thought, anyone knowledgeable in the field) that the research involved giving mice hormone therapy.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/04/politics/fact-check-trump-add...
Saying "technically incorrect" is downplaying what is really totally incorrect from any reasonable interpretation. There is nothing in that fact check that it's close to what was said. Let's just call it wrong and not try to excuse it
The ability to turn a study on "the effects of testosterone hormone therapy on breast cancer" into "transgender", into "why are they twisting his words! everyone knows he didn't mean transgender" requires some serious excuse making mental gymnastics. Why are you still trying to convince yourself rather than just recognize maga has gone completely off the rails?
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/s?
The president embarrassed himself by mistaking “transgenic” for “transgender”, and a good segment of the population further embarrassed themselves by embracing confirmation bias rather than stopping to think “wait, what can’t be right”.
Please refrain from posting deliberately misleading and inflammatory statements here.
The studies in question involve administering hormonal treatments to mice to investigate health outcomes relevant to humans, not altering the gender identity of mice.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-tr...
Interesting times indeed https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-...
They are not "transgender mice studies". They are human health studies using mice as a model animal, as is routine in biological research.
$455,000: “A Mouse Model to Test the Effects of Gender-affirming Hormone Therapy on HIV Vaccine-induced Immune Responses
You realize a lot of hormones could be classified as gender-affirming, right?
Testosterone therapy would be gender-affirming for most men. Huge numbers of women take progesterone. Many, many others hormones reinforce gender-associated behaviours and physiology. No one thinks anything of it until someone is taking it for reasons they don’t approve of.
But we could manipulate all kinds of studies we don’t agree with because they happen to utilize “gender-affirming” hormones. We could do this to tens of thousands of studies. We would be technically correct, yet extremely wrong.
In this case the main point of the study is laid out here: "information on the effects of sex hormone therapy on immune responsiveness is scarce"
If you ignore the reason this gap in knowledge became relevant, this has nothing to do with transgender people or affirming gender. It has everything to do with understanding the health of the broader population; particularly as sex hormones are used with increasing frequency (sex hormones are androgens, estrogens, and progestogens; very common, normal hormones used by all kinds of people).
Yes this kind of therapy is very important for some people to live a life where their hormones align with their sex. I have a friend who is a cis woman but has enough testosterone being naturally produced that she has some thicker facial hair. And this is with hormone therapy. If she wasn't taking supplementary female hormones, she'd likely have more serious misalignment between primary and secondary sex characteristics. And I have to imagine it could cause problems with her monthly cycle if the hormones aren't balanced right
It’s the title the researchers chose.
but they are not searching for a way to make mice transgender. The point of the research is to model those effects as they might occur in humans, not to figure out how to make transgender mice.
Even if that were the case, is it wrong to support research into health related outcomes for American citizens? There’s nothing wrong with working on research to make American citizens medical and life outcomes better. That’s what government should be doing.
Language like this is why I won’t vote for Pierre Poilievre here in Canada, or even take him seriously at all.
I almost can’t believe this stuff is on the White House website.
The gen part of transgenic comes from genes, not gender.
Transgenic refers to an organism or cell whose genome has been altered by the introduction of one or more foreign DNA sequences from another species by artificial means.[1][2]
Trumps’s team grabbed the term to anger credulous people and get their support. Trump might not know what it means, but his team does, and they don’t care. I expect depatru knows what it means as well, or is capable of finding it out. But he’d rather add to the manipulation.
I’m linking to both genome.gov and to Wikipedia in case the government site is taken down.
[1]https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Transgenic [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgene
Animal testing should be banned, so that's fine
Then ban animal testing no stopping the whole research funding but that’s not the reason why the funding stopped.
The shadow druids are gaining a foothold in Silicon Valley circles, it seems.
Idiocy is gaining a foothold everywhere it seems to me. I keep wondering if this is how civilization collapses? We just forget how to do stuff and recede back into darkness?
It was good research, Duke was doing a study on optimizing the HIV vaccine in a high risk group—work that benefits us all: https://reason.com/2025/03/06/no-hhs-didnt-spend-8-million-m...
The posted article was about research to cure blindness with stem cells. The top comment implied that such research was being defunded.
I asked for an example that was not about defunding research on transgender mice. The only examples provided were for research that was confused with transgender research.
So it seems that Doge is not cutting research for curing blindness and the like but only for transgender and some related-sounding other studies that were lumped in together, which will probably be sorted out in time.
They seem to be making broad cuts that will effect all research: https://apnews.com/article/trump-cuts-research-funding-nih-d...
I believe you may be making your conclusion too early.
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Is it?