A team of Edinburgh scientists are aiming to harness and reboot the body’s own defence system in order to improve the safety of bone marrow transplants for older blood cancer patients.

The team, led by Professor Clare Blackburn at the University of Edinburgh, has been awarded £250,000 by the blood cancer charity Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research for their research into the thymus gland – a part of the immune system key to transplant recovery.

The European Commission has funded groups of European stem cell scientists to work together across national boundaries. Elena Cattaneo is coordinator of one of those groups, NeuroStemcell. Here, Elena reflects on the value of European level support for such collaborative research, and introduces the film Behind the Science - an inside view of EU research consortia.

Last year, the European Court of Justice ruled that no patents can be granted in Europe for inventions or technologies based on the use of embryonic stem cells. In a recent article, Professor Aurora Plomer, Chair of Law and Bioethics at the University of Sheffield, UK, argues that the Court's decision "represents an unprecedented and illegitimate constitutional interference with the autonomy of member states and a setback for science and the rights of those suffering from crippling diseases".

Patient associations and leading research funders have called on the European Parliament to continue EU funding for embryonic stem cell research. The Wellcome Trust issued the group's joint statement last Friday 15th June, ahead of parliamentary debates this week in which MEPs will discuss the EU's next major research and innovation funding programme, 'Horizon 2020'.

Last Friday a US federal appeals court overturned an injunction banning federal funding of research on human embryonic stem cells. The announcement grants a temporary reprieve to scientists, but the case is not yet closed.

We've started a new content series that aims to inform European citizens about public-funded progress in stem cell research. As EU-funded stem cell projects report on their activities to the European Commission, we're inviting them to post a short, accessible progress report on this site too.

Italian scientist Elena Cattaneo and medical historian Gilberto Corbellini have raised serious concerns about the affect of politics on Italian science and a lack of transparency in research funding.

Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, has received a grant of SEK 100 million (over 10 million Euros) from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation for a new regenerative medicine research centre – the Wallenberg Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WIRM). The centre will concentrate on new and pioneering research, with a special focus on the blood system.Growing knowledge of stem cells and regenerative medicine has opened up completely new avenues for the treatment of a number of diseases.

Canada’s Stem Cell Network and Pfizer Regenerative Medicine are offering an elite fellowship program to recruit the very best and brightest postdoctorates in the field, and put them directly where the action is.

If you’ve got the drive we’re looking for, you could spend two years in one of Canada’s leading academic stem cell research laboratories, and one year at Pfizer Regenerative Medicine in either of their UK or US-based facilities.

In the summer of 2009, three Italian stem cell scientists unsuccessfully challenged their government in the courts over its decision to exclude human embryonic stem cell research from a ministerial funding call for projects on stem cell biology. In correspondence published in Nature on 10th February 2010, the scientists argue that their case is both politically and culturally significant.