First trial of induced pluripotent stem cells on a human

Stem cells are not only about scandals, deaths and retracted publications. There is a lot of research going on and new medical applications are regularly presented in the news as "tomorrow's revolution".

This week, a Japanese team has taken a new step towards actually using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), for which Shinya Yamanaka and John Gurdon shared a Nobel prize in 2012. On Wednesday, Nature announced that a Japanese patient was about to receive iPS-based eye surgery, a test on human for which permission had been granted by a health-ministry committee. The surgery took place this Friday.

[Author note: As a side note, the team belongs to the same research center (CDB) from which the author of the retracted STAP papers originated]