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How many of the authors who publish in Cell Stem Cell dream that their work will eventually wind up in the clinic? Probably quite a few. In the 10 years since its launch, Cell Stem Cell has featured many innovative discoveries, and several of them have gone on to become the seeds of burgeoning biotechnology companies with therapeutic aspirations. Two scientists who have seen that happen are Benjamin Reubinoff (Figure 1) and Derrick Rossi (Figure 2), both of whom led the clinical translation of technologies that made their public debut in Cell Stem Cell.

This i3 is a data visualization based on the Cell Stem Cell tenth anniversary theme of lineage tracing. Using Scopus citations of Cell Stem Cell research papers, it illustrates both the evolution of the stem cell field and the way new research builds on work that came before. Users can navigate the graphic and the represented papers by stem cell type, organism, and author online at cell.com/i3/cell-stem-cell/lineage. To view this SnapShot, open or download the PDF.

The nature of compensation for women who donate eggs (oocytes) for research remains a contentious issue internationally. This position paper lays out the arguments for, and discusses the arrangements in which, a modest payment might be ethically justifiable.

The recent Court of Justice of the European Union (2011)xSee all ReferencesCourt of Justice of the European Union (2011) opinion in Brustle v. Greenpeace caught the attention of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) and many others as a result of its severe restriction on the patentability of inventions arising from embryonic-stem-cell-related research. Strong criticism of the decision immediately arose in some quarters, including dire predictions that the ruling marked the end of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research in Europe and, ultimately, that Europe would not have access to resulting therapies (Naik, 2011xSee all ReferencesNaik, 2011). At CIRM we fund academic and commercial scientists conducting stem cell research ranging from basic science through to early clinical work, and a significant proportion of our funded projects involve hESCs. We appreciate that patent protection can be an important incentive for investment, and that it also often promotes innovation as it allows innovators time and a mechanism to recoup their outlay (Rai et al., 2010xSee all ReferencesRai et al., 2010). Our view is that the impact of the recent Court ruling on stem cell research and regenerative medicine will be significant but varied. In some instances, the ruling may deter European hESC research, in others such research may nonetheless continue or even increase; in still others, no impact may occur.In the area of basic or foundational hESC research, for example, we would not expect a significant impact from the Court ruling provided scientists expect that there will be continued funding of such research by government and not-for-profit entities. We would not expect that a diminished ability to obtain patent protection for basic research inventions would materially decrease research funding from these sources. Government funders tend to be less profit-driven than commercial funders. Moreover, hESCs presently remain the “gold standard” for regenerative medicine research (Smith et al., 2009xSmith, K.P., Luong, M.X., and Stein, G.S. J. Cell. Physiol. 2009; 220: 21–29Crossref | PubMed | Scopus (70)See all References, Fung and Kerridge, 2011xFung, R.K. and Kerridge, I.H. Bioethics. 2011; 2011: 4See all References). We believe scientists conducting basic research will be reluctant to focus exclusively on adult stem cells or even induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) given the unique advantages offered by hESCs.With respect to translational hESC research, the situation is more complicated. At this stage of research and development, profit-driven biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies are more actively involved. To the extent that the lack of patent protection following the Court ruling decreases the profit available (e.g., because patented inventions cannot be licensed and injunctions cannot be obtained to protect hESC patented inventions), biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies may be less motivated to invest in European hESC research. That effect may be even more dramatic for startup companies. A strong patent portfolio traditionally has been a prerequisite for attracting venture capital in the life sciences field. As reported by a U.S Department of Commerce white paper, “In a large-scale survey conducted in 2008, 76% of startup managers reported that VC investors consider patents important to funding decisions.” (Rai et al., 2010xSee all ReferencesRai et al., 2010.)On the other hand, we would not predict a complete dearth of European commercial investment in the hESC sector in the EU for several reasons. First, companies can still protect some of their work as traditional trade secrets. Second, as is often said of biologics, “The product is the process.” EU regulators will likely require that any company wishing to compete would have to incur the large expense of preclinical and clinical trials using their particular stem-cell-based therapy (Tam, 2010xTam, J.W.Y. Georgetown Law J. 2010; 98: 535–536See all ReferencesTam, 2010). Third, to varying degrees throughout Europe, the “Bolar Exemption” (European Union, 2004xSee all ReferencesEuropean Union, 2004) limited patent protection for certain types of research at this phase even before the Court ruling. Finally, the effect of the Court ruling on EU companies will vary depending on their specific circumstances. Companies that would have faced a freedom to operate problem because of hESC patents held by others may now be more likely to start, or continue, hESC research programs because the Court's ruling renders such patents unenforceable. Companies working on the “improvement” of hESC related-technologies, for instance, which would have faced patent infringement litigation or would have had to pay royalties, may find themselves more incentivized to perform hESC research in the EU following the Court's ruling. By contrast, companies holding foundational hESC inventions might be incentivized to work in jurisdictions that offer patent protection for hESC inventions (e.g., the USA).Despite the Court ruling we believe that sponsors of hESC-based therapies will locate trials in Europe for a number of reasons. Companies developing hESC therapies will ultimately desire to sell their products on the European market. The EMA may require data from European clinical trials before it approves of any future hESC-derived therapy. Moreover, recent studies suggest that over 50% of products headed for FDA approval are in clinical trials that involve foreign study sites (Levinson, 2010xSee all ReferencesLevinson, 2010).Finally the possibility that some companies could be attracted to Europe because of this decision cannot be discounted. Although the Court ruling does not directly impact the patentability of hESC inventions in the U.S., it will have a ripple effect there. American companies facing a freedom to operate problem because of U.S. patents held by others may now reconsider their business plans. Moving their research operations to Europe becomes a more attractive option because the EU counterparts of those patents are no longer enforceable. These companies will balance the benefit afforded by the new EU patent landscape against the protection that the Hatch Waxman Act provides for certain research activities in the U.S. and the significant costs of moving an already established and ongoing research operation. A cost differential that disfavors the U.S. as an alternative to the EU may incentivize companies to consider moving their trials and preclinical efforts to places such as India or China.As Yogi Berra once said, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Everyone will need to wait and see how various stakeholders in the research community actually respond to the Court's ruling. Nevertheless, we are confident that the reaction will be dependent on many individual variables. As a result, we expect that some of the currently critical hESC research and development in the EU will continue to flourish.

Augenlicht and colleagues raise concerns about the impact of diet on stem cell regulation and call for more careful reporting on dietary conditions used in mouse studies on this topic. We agree that specific conditions for animal housing and care should be reported, and we encourage this in our STAR Methods guidelines for all papers. However, moving forward we will require more detailed reporting on dietary information for mouse studies where the main scientific focus concerns stem cell functions, and especially metabolism. This will include vendor information, stock number, and feeding schedules within the STAR Methods section and Experimental Models section of the Key Resource Table. We hope this will provide further reproducibility, robustness, and clarity in the papers we publish.

Disease modeling with human iPSCs has come a long way since it first began almost 10 years ago. Many of us can probably remember the time when just making an iPSC line from a patient with a recognized disease was a notable achievement. It didn’t take long, however, before expectations rose and we moved quickly past recapitulating relevant phenotypes to the situation today in which most studies aim to either teach us something substantial that we didn’t know before about a given disease or show a path to potential therapies (or, hopefully, both). Our understanding of line-to-line variation and controls improved, too, and as it became clear that simple comparison to a control line is not adequate, standards of either multiple lines or, when feasible, genetic correction became the norm.Many of the papers that make clear-cut progress toward understanding a disease using human iPSCs do so on the basis of a single characterized genetic mutation. There are understandable reasons why this is the case—it’s considerably easier to focus in on a relevant cell type and to make sure the controls are appropriate with a clear idea of the mutation that underlies the disease. However, some of the most prevalent and devastating diseases that our society faces don’t have that kind of readily identifiable underlying genetic basis, and instead are multifaceted and complex. Although there have, of course, been valuable studies, in general these diseases have proven markedly more difficult to model in a meaningful way with iPSCs.GWAS came at this problem from a different angle—using genomic technology to understand the genetic variation associated with different disease phenotypes to give us information about their association and basis. And we found that there is a lot of variation! The next challenge, however, is parsing which of the identified variants are functionally meaningful. We do have some tools to do that—genome editing technology has helped significantly—but at least with current approaches this analysis is time consuming and expensive, and not really feasible to apply at scale.This was the overall challenge that the NextGen consortium aimed to address—to use iPSC technology at a sufficiently large scale to allow robust analysis of the genetic basis of physiological variation. As Curtis Warren, Cashell Jacquish, and Chad Cowan outline in their overview piece, this consortium represents a joining together of nine hub groups across the United States, plus their collaborators, with the overall goal of generating a large collection of iPSC lines that would form a resource for investigation of physiology and disease. The different groups focus on distinct areas of investigation within the overall remit of the NHLBI (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute) and relevant diseases. We are very happy to now present the first coordinated wave of output of this consortium’s efforts, with seven papers in Cell Stem Cell, three in Stem Cell Reports, and one in EBioMedicine. We hope you will enjoy reading these papers and exploring them using our dedicated interactive web portal (http://www.cell.com/consortium/NextGen).The papers in this feature illustrate a broad range of the types of analyses that researchers can perform after putting together collections of iPSC lines. A number of the studies look at analysis of the iPSCs themselves, and give us an indication of how we can learn about the underlying genetic (or epigenetic) basis of variation through mining of information that comes from this type of large-scale resource. Some move further into disease modeling and use cells differentiated along specific lineages to understand the basis of variation in a range of disease contexts, based on existing knowledge and using that as a springboard to investigate the basis of phenotypic disease. Others take a more targeted approach to show how cells from this type of resource can be used for screening and drug discovery, with a particular focus on cardiovascular disease. Some studies also describe technological advances that were important for this project and have broader applicability. Taken together, these papers show how this consortium-based approach can be applied going forward to develop the initial analyses and move further toward the overall scientific and, ultimately, medical goals.NextGen is by no means the only project underway to gather a substantial resource of iPSC lines as an investigational tool. For example, there are two such efforts in Europe, the HipSci initiative in the UK and the EU project StemBANCC. We can presumably anticipate seeing further publications and analyses come from those and other efforts as the characterization unfolds. Although all of these projects have different remits, their underlying premise is similar—that by putting together large banks of iPSCs, we will be able to use them more effectively to help understand phenotypic disease. Projects like these also face similar challenges related to covering the costs of characterization, storage, and distribution of the lines to the research community. The NextGen investigators have addressed this latter issue by arranging to deposit their lines with WiCell and therefore make them available to the community via standard WiCell distribution policies.Beyond the emerging insights into the genetic basics of physiology and disease, what have we learned more broadly from this consortium so far? One not entirely surprising lesson is that this type of study is time consuming and expensive. The NHLBI NextGen consortium members are over 5 years into their project and yet still at an early stage of mining the resource that they have generated. With science funding increasingly under threat, especially in the United States, this project is a timely reminder that pioneering approaches to move our understanding of human disease forward often require considerable time and resources to both be effective and realize their full potential. A second lesson, I think, is that while iPSCs show considerable promise as a complement to GWAS in understanding the functional basis of variation, there is still quite a lot of work to do in terms of standardization of protocols and understanding of best practices to make this type of approach a reliable discovery tool. The potential is there, though, and it’s an exciting prospect to consider. Third, there are a variety of ways we can think about using this type of resource to further our underlying goal of using iPSC technology to develop better understanding of disease and more targeted therapeutic approaches. Some of them are illustrated here by this collection of papers; some are still to come.I hope that reading through these papers, and the associated commentary, will inspire some of you in our broader readership to apply these lessons as well, either to your existing projects or to new ones, and perhaps even to take advantage of the cellular and genomic resources that the project already provides. Moving forward, I also hope that these studies and others like them, when combined with current and future advances in technology and analysis tools, will indeed make a powerful contribution to helping us understand the ways in which we differ and how those differences contribute to disease.

Think back to where you were and what you were doing 10 years ago. Maybe you were in graduate school, maybe even high school, or perhaps you had just started your first lab and were working out how to transition from being a postdoc to being a leader of a scientific team. It’s likely that a lot has changed for you in the intervening time. For us at Cell Stem Cell the same is also true. Ten years ago during May (the time of writing both this editorial and the very first one), we were working frantically to finalize the content for our launch issue. For editors, especially, but also for the entire team, launching a new journal is an exciting but very stressful experience. We are a little frantic again this year, too, putting together all of the materials and plans for this tenth anniversary issue, but this time against the backdrop of a wealth of material to look back on and digest.When we started talking within the editorial team about a theme to use for our tenth anniversary, we focused on thinking how we could best showcase the great science we’ve had the pleasure to publish, and the ways in which all of these important contributions have helped to build and advance the field. Working from an idea that came from a colleague (credit where credit’s due!), we were inspired by the concept of “Lineage Tracing,” based on both the obvious connection to the stem cell field and the way new scientific discoveries build on those that came before. We took this theme and ran with it, and we have put together a variety of articles from a range of different contributors that we hope will showcase how the work that we’ve published has fit into and helped advance the field overall.We have four overall article types in our special journal feature, each of which highlights the “lineage” associated with some of our most widely appreciated papers in a distinct way. We based our selection of papers on a combination of citation information, download data, and, particularly for the more recent examples, collaboration with PLUM Analytics to look at readership and sharing. We then organized the papers into topical themes that we felt represent some of the key overall interest areas that have developed over the past 10 years, and we selected an approach for highlighting how the Cell Stem Cell studies fit in. For a series of Voices articles, we chose three papers from each of five topical areas—cancer stem cells, disease modeling, aging, epigenetics, and single-cell technology—and asked a scientist who cited each paper to write about how the work contributed to the development of their thinking. For three topics—organoid technology, reprogramming, and genome editing—we asked one author each from three of our most prominent papers to contribute to a Q&A discussing the current questions and future directions in these rapidly moving areas. Because we understand that many stem cell researchers are motivated by the potential for their work to ultimately help patients, we have also included a Profile that illustrates this type of trajectory by focusing on two Cell Stem Cell papers that formed the underlying basis of biotech startup journeys leading to clinical trials using modified RNA technology and cell transplantation. Lastly, to go behind the scenes for one of our most exciting recent papers and show just how much dedication and coordination went into it on all sides, we asked Hongjun Song, Guo-Li Ming, and Hengli Teng to put together a Backstory article about the work that led up to their 2016 paper on Zika infection of neural progenitors. This paper formed one of the major underpinnings of the subsequent CDC declaration about the link between Zika and microcephaly. We have two different forms of this Backstory article, one in the standard journal format that is relatively conventional, and then an enhanced, more immersive version online with additional images and embedded videos. This approach is a new experiment for us, so we’d love to hear from you if you enjoy it and would like to see more. You can pick up a print copy of this special issue at our booth, #719, at the ISSCR 2017 Annual Meeting, along with a copy of our latest “Best Of” edition in your delegate bag. There will also be a digital edition of the entire issue on our dedicated anniversary website, which will go live before the ISSCR meeting.Returning to online presentation, we would also like to highlight the interactive data visualization, or i3, that will form the cornerstone of our anniversary website, our cover image, and the theme for our “Pin to Win” badges at ISSCR 2017. The i3 is also part of the lineage tracing theme, and the underlying inspiration for the approach that we took in fact comes from representations of clonal analysis of hematopoiesis. The data being represented are Scopus citations of Cell Stem Cell papers year by year since launch. We chose to focus on research papers, and we then categorized them by stem cell type and organism. Using those parameters, you will be able to navigate around our online tool to look at the citation contribution of specific areas and stem cell types over time as the journal and field has developed, and even at specific authors or papers. Cell Stem Cell is of course just one journal of the many that publish stem cell papers, and citations are also only one measure of field size and interest. However, we often hear feedback that Cell Stem Cell is a “must read” journal for the stem cell community and that it mirrors the way the field is changing and evolving. So, we’d like to think that in addition to chronicling the evolution of Cell Stem Cell itself, this visualization also gives a window into the ways that the stem cell field has developed over time. We’re already seeing some surprising things from navigating around the tool as we set it up and we hope that you will be able to help us figure them out!Many, many people deserve thanks for their contributions to the success of Cell Stem Cell and the role the journal plays in the stem cell community. Within Cell Press we’ve had a wonderful team of scientific editors, assistants, production editors, marketing managers, and designers. Beyond that we of course owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to all of the authors who chose to send their work to us or to write review articles, and to the reviewers who gave us invaluable feedback that helped us both select which articles we choose to publish and improve the quality of the ones that do appear. Our advisory editorial board members have been a fantastic source of support and input as well, and they have helped us shape the journal and its contribution to the field. We have also very much appreciated our ongoing partnership with the ISSCR and their support of Cell Stem Cell as an affiliated journal. More proximally, we’d like to thank Thermo Fisher for their support of our anniversary website and overall feature.The stem cell field has changed a lot in the past decade, and although 10 years ago the reprogramming field was already starting to take off, many other areas that are important now, such as organoid technology, CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing, and single-cell sequencing analytics, weren’t on the radar or even in existence. If history is anything to go by, we can expect many more new developments and exciting changes in the future as stem cell research continues to grow and evolve. Here at Cell Stem Cell we all very much look forward to seeing what the next 10 years will bring.

This year, we are delighted to welcome the stem cell community to the annual ISSCR meeting in our “home town” of Boston. The ISSCR last chose Boston as a venue for its meeting 9 years ago, when the society and the meeting were considerably smaller, so we are very excited to see the meeting back here now that it has grown into such an impressive and multifaceted event. In the registration bag this year, instead of a copy of our June issue, meeting attendees will find a variation on the popular “Best Of” reprint collection series focusing on Cell Stem Cell articles published in 2012. This collection will also be available in an extended version as an online digital edition, so even if you are not coming to Boston for the meeting this year, you will be able to browse and enjoy the full collection at your leisure.For the review feature in our June issue, we have chosen to focus on the application of stem cells to therapeutic discovery through a series of Perspectives from leaders in the field in the areas of disease modeling and application. In one of these articles, Florian Merkle and Kevin Eggan discuss disease modeling using human iPSCs, and in a second, Dinesh Puppala and Sandra Engle cover the integration of human pluripotent stem cells into drug discovery programs. The third article, from Fred Gage and colleagues, covers the application of iPSCs to devising treatments for neurological disease, while the fourth, from Jessica Garbern and Richard Lee, looks at cardiac regeneration. Together, these articles give a timely update on some of the key areas of development for the stem cell field. They also form a prelude for other events scheduled for later this year, particularly a Cell Symposium on “Using Stem Cells to Model and Treat Human Disease,” being held in Los Angeles in November. Between now and the Symposium, there will be two focused webinars on related topics, so look out for news about these soon as well. To complement this review feature, for our cover we have chosen a painting entitled “Popred” by the artist Sarah Ezekiel, who is connected to the theme of the issue through MND/ALS, one of the diseases that forms a focus of discovery efforts.This year also sees some important developments for Cell Stem Cell and the ISSCR. One of the most significant is that we are excited to welcome a new journal into the stem cell fold: Stem Cell Reports, which launches in June and at the ISSCR meeting. You will find a copy of the inaugural issue of this journal in your registration bag along with the Cell Stem Cell “Best Of” collection. Stem Cell Reports is a new journal owned and run by the ISSCR and published by Cell Press, and it has a distinguished editorial team led by Christine Mummery. With its open-access model and focus on concise papers, Stem Cell Reports will be a valuable complement to Cell Stem Cell for the publication of important studies in the stem cell field. The scope, focus, and emphasis of Cell Stem Cell will not change: it will continue to be owned and run by Cell Press and affiliated with the ISSCR. However, the ISSCR pages and articles that previously appeared in Cell Stem Cell have now instead moved to Stem Cell Reports, along with oversight by the ISSCR Scientific Director, Heather Rooke.At Cell Stem Cell, earlier this year we were very happy to add a new member to our in-house editorial team, Jonathan Saxe, who joined us from a postdoctoral position in Haifan Lin’s group at Yale University. This month, we have also made some changes to the organization and membership of our advisory editorial board. In keeping with our updated relationship with the ISSCR, the Cell Stem Cell ISSCR advisory board members (Arnold Kriegstein, Haifan Lin, Toshio Suda, and Leonard Zon) have transferred over to become part of the main Cell Stem Cell editorial board. They are joined on the board by 16 additional new members, all of whom we are delighted to welcome to our team: Iannis Aifantis, Caroline Alexander, Hans Clevers, Hongkui Deng, Elaine Dzierzak, Richard Gilbertson, Konrad Hochedlinger, Craig Jordan, Hanna Mikkola, Huck Hui Ng, Stuart Orkin, Emmanuelle Passegue, Kathrin Plath, Yoshiki Sasai, Deepak Srivastava, and Mervin Yoder. At the same time, we are bidding a fond farewell to Thomas Laux, Angela McNab, and Shinichi Nishikawa, and we thank them for all of their efforts and contributions over the past 6 years. Several of our new editorial board members have contributed to a Voices article in this issue, in which they prepared a short piece about a 2012 Cell Stem Cell paper that they particularly enjoyed. I hope you in turn will enjoy reading these diverse perspectives on a broad range of studies, and that doing so will perhaps encourage you to go back and revisit some of the papers with a fresh eye. The topics covered in these highlights range from chromatin regulation in ESCs (Brookes et al., 2012xBrookes, E., de Santiago, I., Hebenstreit, D., Morris, K.J., Carroll, T., Xie, S.Q., Stock, J.K., Heidemann, M., Eick, D., Nozaki, N. et al. Cell Stem Cell. 2012; 10: 157–170Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (82)See all ReferencesBrookes et al., 2012) through morphogenesis (Nakano et al., 2012xNakano, T., Ando, S., Takata, N., Kawada, M., Muguruma, K., Sekiguchi, K., Saito, K., Yonemura, S., Eiraku, M., and Sasai, Y. Cell Stem Cell. 2012; 10: 771–785Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (210)See all ReferencesNakano et al., 2012) and lineage contribution (van Amerongen et al., 2012xvan Amerongen, R., Bowman, A.N., and Nusse, R. Cell Stem Cell. 2012; 11: 387–400Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (118)See all Referencesvan Amerongen et al., 2012) to the ways in which stem cell regulation contributes to hematopoietic disease and cancer (Ceccaldi et al., 2012xCeccaldi, R., Parmar, K., Mouly, E., Delord, M., Kim, J.M., Regairaz, M., Pla, M., Vasquez, N., Zhang, Q.S., Pondarre, C. et al. Cell Stem Cell. 2012; 11: 36–49Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (73)See all ReferencesCeccaldi et al., 2012; Magee et al., 2012xMagee, J.A., Ikenoue, T., Nakada, D., Lee, J.Y., Guan, K.L., and Morrison, S.J. Cell Stem Cell. 2012; 11: 415–428Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (58)See all ReferencesMagee et al., 2012; Kalaitzidis et al., 2012xKalaitzidis, D., Sykes, S.M., Wang, Z., Punt, N., Tang, Y., Ragu, C., Sinha, A.U., Lane, S.W., Souza, A.L., Clish, C.B. et al. Cell Stem Cell. 2012; 11: 429–439Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (59)See all ReferencesKalaitzidis et al., 2012). This Voices article is also included in the “Best Of” collection as a complement to the selection of articles based on downloads, and all of the papers featured in the selections are included in the extended online edition.If you are coming to Boston for the 2013 ISSCR meeting, we hope you will have time to visit our booth in the exhibit hall (#627). You will be able to pick up a free copy of this June issue, an extra “Best Of” if you’d like one, plus many of the other journals in the Cell Press family, including Cell Reports, our broad scope open-access journal launched last year. You could also learn about our other planned activities, including the conference and webinars mentioned above, and meet editors from Cell Stem Cell and other Cell Press journals to get an inside look at the publishing process. We will have information about the new Cell Press full text and Snapshot iPad apps, and you will have a chance to try them out at the booth. At Cell Stem Cell, we have continued to expand our social media presence, and before and during the meeting we will post news and information via Twitter (@CellStemCell or https://twitter.com/cellstemcell) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/cellstemcell). Don’t forget to enter the Cell Press “Boston Experience” competition by sending us a photo of yourself at a Boston landmark (and yes, the convention center does count!) via social media or email for your chance to win an iPad Mini or a scarf featuring “Popred,” the painting that graces the cover of this issue and, if you are fortunate enough to win, could soon be gracing you.In closing, and unfortunately on a more somber note, I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to Dr. Christa Muller-Sieburg, who sadly passed away earlier this year. Dr. Muller-Sieburg made many pioneering contributions to studies of HSCs, and particularly, as Connie Eaves and colleagues outlined in their Perspective article last year (Copley et al., 2012xCopley, M.R., Beer, P.A., and Eaves, C.J. Cell Stem Cell. 2012; 10: 690–697Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (69)See all ReferencesCopley et al., 2012), to initial investigations of HSC heterogeneity that formed a foundation for current and future analyses. Her influence will no doubt be evident in HSC work presented at this year’s ISSCR meeting. I am sure I speak for the entire Cell Stem Cell team when I say that we look forward to sharing all of our stem cell experiences with you, at this meeting and beyond. As always, we welcome your feedback and input about the journal and the field overall.

It is hard to believe that the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) is 10 years old, and that coincident with this is the fifth-year anniversary of Cell Stem Cell. Having participated in the creation and development of the society and the journal, the success of both has made me appreciate my matchmaking skills.When I founded the ISSCR, I was responding to a call from stem cell researchers to bring investigators together and form a community. The annual meeting served this purpose from its fledgling initial meeting in Washington, D.C., with about 550 people, to this year's meeting in Yokohama with about 4,000 individuals. There is a tremendous need for scientific interactions, and the community is vibrant and operates at a very high level.One of my initial thoughts for the ISSCR was that it needed a journal. A key driver was the stem cell research community's call for a dedicated forum to publish stem cell research and to discuss issues faced by the field—a high-quality and high-visibility journal to give the field credibility and capture the highest profile papers. In this endeavor, after a long negotiation, we affiliated with Cell Press to start Cell Stem Cell. I am pleased to have been integral in the discussions that resulted in the strong partnership between ISSCR and Cell Stem Cell.Cell Stem Cell has accomplished all of its goals admirably from its initiation, and Debbie Sweet has been a pioneering editor with great vision. With a 2010 impact factor of 25.9, it is clearly a high-end journal that publishes impactful papers. The reviews are fantastic and comprehensive. The ISSCR section of the journal is one of its unique features, presenting key undertakings of the society such as committee activities, task force initiatives, and professional guidance. The ISSCR meeting reviews are greatly welcomed.When Cell Stem Cell needed to become nimble, decisions were made to create new sections that reflect the progress in the field. I am particularly interested in the Clinical Progress section that allows data to be put into the journal that bridges basic research and clinical application. There is also a diversity of articles in Cell Stem Cell. This includes the tremendous literature on induced pluripotent stem cells (a field in itself and one that will greatly contribute to science and medicine in the future). The journal, in short, has been a great success, has had wonderful interactions with the ISSCR, and has moved the field forward in a palpable and self-renewing manner.The ISSCR has tackled many issues in its first 10 years. One of the most important aspects was mentoring. It is clear that young investigators have found a home in the ISSCR. The society has a special committee for junior investigators and there is a formal mentoring session at each annual meeting. I remember the time period before induced pluripotent stem cells were available when young investigators were unclear if any funding would be available for human pluripotent stem cell studies on the only available technology, human embryonic stem cells. It was hard to have the courage to start a lab working on pluripotent cells, and now with many advances, the field is vibrant with many junior investigators.The ISSCR has highlighted ethical questions in various ways, including having Laurie Zoloth make a presidential session speech at one of the annual meetings. The society has also made a strong effort to reach out to patient advocates and policy-makers, and few will forget the powerful speech that one such advocate, Charles Sabine, gave at the 2011 meeting. The ethics of working with stem cells were brought to the forefront because of a Presidential executive order. Many of us from the leadership of the ISSCR have appeared on radio, on TV, and in other contexts to inform and educate the public about stem cell research.The stem cell field has also had to deal with some difficult issues over the past 10 years. We found out that human cloning was not in fact performed in Korea despite prior publication. In Europe, a landmark legal decision about patenting of human embryonic stem cells changed the landscape for future research and commercial development. U.S. researchers weathered considerable uncertainty when a judicial process based on a lawsuit brought by investigators who do not support research on embryonic stem cells shut down federal funding for a period of time. The society responded by defining its role in embryonic stem cell research (a role that not everyone in the field embraces, but one that is practical and informative). At this point, it seems as though embryonic stem cells are becoming less of a “big issue” and there is broader recognition that they are important for the future of the field. In vitro fertilization was once a huge source of ethical disagreement, but is now mainstream. I hope that embryonic stem cells will achieve a similar status.The ISSCR has also provided information and expert opinions to help many governments address their stem cell issues. As part of that effort, the society produced an international document on the practical use and ethical use of stem cells. In addition, counseling of individual governments facilitated the set-up of stem cell institutes in various countries. Government policy has been strongly influenced by the advice of several ISSCR presidents and leaders.The public efforts of the ISSCR revolve around a single topic chosen every year by the president. In my case, I focused on education of the public. More recently, there has been a decision to examine questionable clinics that do stem cell research. Such “snake oil salesmen” often promise major clinical success for therapies that are not scientifically based. The society is in the process of evaluating how to call out companies that are involved in such efforts and how to inform the public of such behavior. In the interim, we have created a web page to provide information to patients who seek to evaluate new stem cell therapies (http://www.closerlookatstemcells.org).It has been interesting to watch the leadership transitions that occur through the ISSCR. Each year a new president takes the helm and brings their unique perspective to the role. Greg Schultz, the founding executive director, was absolutely critical in the process in the early days, and Nancy Witty, our current executive director, has done a wonderful job over the past 6 years. It is clearly through Nancy's leadership that the mission of the ISSCR has been truly executed.I see a number of future opportunities for the field of stem cell research and regenerative medicine in which the ISSCR and Cell Stem Cell can play a vital role. One of those is clinical translation. Existing successes include limbal stem cells being transplanted to treat corneal eye diseases and the expansion of blood stem cells. The study of patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells or “diseases in a dish” will undoubtedly yield information that will be brought to the clinic. The need for a facilitation of this process is very important and a journal is critical. I feel that Cell Stem Cell could have a pioneering role in promoting translation of stem cell research. There are many issues yet to be overcome, including ones related to safety, manufacturing, and access to stem cell treatments.Another issue for the field is to maintain the quality of the research it produces. With the increasing number of researchers getting involved, it is critical to remain rigorous, and to ensure that published conclusions are well supported by data. The field has already seen its share of retractions and controversy. I hope that everyone working in this area will continue to produce fantastic research that builds to a crescendo of clinical relevance.Here is what I said at the very first meeting at the end of my presidential speech:“I am very enthusiastic about the Society, and I hope that 20 years from now we will be utilizing stem cells in the clinic as routine medical therapy for many genetic and degenerative disorders, that the basic genetics and molecular biology and cell biology of the stem cell will be largely understood, and that the Society will be filled with wonderful young trainees and old investigators such as myself.”We are now at the halfway mark, celebrating the ISSCR's 10th Annual Meeting where we are hearing a wealth of progress towards this goal, presented by a truly global community of all ages.I want to raise a toast to ISSCR and Cell Stem Cell: to a happy birthday and continued success.

If you have looked at the cover of this issue, you may be wondering why we chose a picture of an engineer repairing telephone wires. The link to stem cells might not be immediately apparent. However, if you look closely, you will see that there is an underlying theme. The telephone wires represent communication, and the drawing incorporates various elements of the interconnected network of ethical and practical considerations involved in regenerative medicine, some of which are highlighted in our issue (see if you can guess the artist whose work we are subtly emulating!). The engineer has a role to play too—as a depiction of the stem cell-based approaches that are tapping into that network to help make progress toward repair and regeneration.The underlying prompt for the cover theme came from this month's review section, which looks at the importance of communication at different stages of the research enterprise. In their Forum, Erica Haimes and Ken Taylor advocate for strong connections between researchers, clinicians, and patients to help ensure smooth and effective provision of materials for scientific research. Once materials are available, discussion and exchange of reagents is more straightforward if information about them is presented clearly. To that end, the two Letters both comment and build upon a Forum that appeared in our April issue calling for a standardized approach to nomenclature for human pluripotent stem cell lines (Luong et al., 2011xLuong, M.X., Auerbach, J., Crook, J.M., Daheron, L., Hei, D., Lomax, G., Loring, J.F., Ludwig, T., Schlaeger, T.M., Smith, K.P. et al. Cell Stem Cell. 2011; 8: 357–359Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (15)See all ReferencesLuong et al., 2011). The Perspective from Christopher Goldring and colleagues arose from communication, as it is based on discussions between authors from a broad range of academic institutions and companies at a workshop. This article outlines the many different factors that need to be taken into account for assessing the safety of any stem cell-based therapy, regardless of the cell type and source being used. Richard Maziarz and Dawn Driscoll look at the other end of the process by outlining the need for early interaction between those developing treatments and the health care organizations that will ultimately be asked to pay for them. Last but not least, we also focus on the importance of communication with the general public, through patient advocate Brooke Ellison, who gives us an overview of a new book, “Stem Cell Hope” by TIME Magazine reporter Alice Park; and through outgoing ISSCR President Elaine Fuchs, who in her President's Note emphasizes the importance of active engagement with lay audiences to promote understanding and appreciation of stem cell research.In the context of a journal, the concept of communication is always relevant—it is our raison d'etre. We are therefore happy to be “communicating” a strong selection of new research findings in this issue, ranging from regulation of lung stem cells to suppression of aberrant transcripts in ESCs. Some papers were available online ahead of the issue date; others are newly available now. As always, you can find a summary of these studies and how they relate to each other on our Editors' Notes page. Last month, we partnered with our sister journal Neuron to bring you a focus on neural stem cells. This focus had two parts, the first being a collection of review articles and primary research papers in our May issue. Then, later in the month, Neuron published a special review feature covering a variety of different topics related to neural stem cells and adult neurogenesis. This month, Cell will also be publishing a collection of stem cell-related review articles. As I discussed last year (Sweet, 2010xSweet, D.J. Cell Stem Cell. 2010; 6: 493Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (2)See all ReferencesSweet, 2010), Cell Stem Cell aims to follow the progress of the stem cell field toward clinical translation, and the most recent addition to our article type repertoire, “Clinical Progress,” fosters communication in that realm by presenting high-quality work that bridges the divide between basic research and clinical application. In this regard, we were pleased to see that last month Thomson Reuters highlighted Cell Stem Cell as a Rising Star in the field of Clinical Medicine, based on its citation record. Later this year, we hope to promote interaction in a different way, by cohosting a Cell Symposium on Stem Cell Programming and Reprogramming in Lisbon, Portugal, from December 8th to 10th. You can find information about the confirmed speakers and how to register to attend online at http://bit.ly/i9UZBs. Alternatively, if you prefer your missives about stem cell research in a more succinct form, you may want join our growing band of followers on Twitter (@CellStemCell).As I write this Editorial, we are making preparations for the ISSCR 2011 Annual Meeting. At the meeting itself, we are delighted to be partnering with the University Health Network – Toronto and the ISSCR to bring you a free half-day symposium to honor the scientific legacy of Ernest McCulloch (see Iscove, 2011xIscove, N. Cell Stem Cell. 2011; 8: 250–251Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMedSee all ReferencesIscove, 2011). All registered attendees for the ISSCR meeting are welcome to join us for this Focus Session, which will take place from 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 15th. You can find more information about it and register your interest on the premeeting events page of the ISSCR website. Cell Press will have an exhibition booth at the meeting (#811), and we invite you to visit us to learn more about our various initiatives, including the special issues mentioned above, to meet Scientific Editors from Cell and Cell Stem Cell, and to enter to win an iPad 2 by connecting with us on Facebook. At the booth, we will also announce the results of our website-based “Best Paper” contest, so you can find out which of the six finalists was the most popular among our voters. In addition, you will be able to learn about an exciting new Cell Press tool designed to take authors “behind the scenes” in the publication process. When you pick up your delegate bag, you will see that it contains a copy of this issue of Cell Stem Cell (perhaps that is even where you found this Editorial). We are very grateful to Stemgent for providing the sponsorship that made it possible for us to distribute these journal copies. Stemgent focuses on developing cutting-edge products for the stem cell community, including a new mRNA-based reprogramming protocol based on a paper that Cell Stem Cell published last year (Warren et al., 2010xWarren, L., Manos, P.D., Ahfeldt, T., Loh, Y.-H., Li, H., Lau, F., Ebina, W., Mandal, P.K., Smith, Z.D., Meissner, A. et al. Cell Stem Cell. 2010; 7: 618–630Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (1007)See all ReferencesWarren et al., 2010).In closing, I'd like to offer congratulations in advance to Robert Blelloch for receiving the ISSCR Outstanding Young Investigator Award this year, and to the winners of two new awards: Kazutoshi Takahashi and Shinya Yamanaka, receiving the McEwen Centre Award for Innovation, and Robert Klein, receiving the Public Service Award. As always, I look forward to communicating with as many of you as possible during the course of the ISSCR meeting, and of course to hearing about all of the latest and best research. See you there!