Vanessa Scanlon, PhD

For my lab lead friends, check out this article of best practices from my colleagues and I on the ISEH Junior PI committee on organizing a leading your team. authors.elsevier.com/c/1lxZ~,6sio...

Interested in understanding AI better and best practices for using it in research? Don't forget to register for our @isehsociety.bsky.social webinar happening 10/22 @ 9am ET to learn how to use AI responsibly and effectively! iseh.org/Webinars-Eve...

2025 Interview Spotlight Series: Part VI This week on Simply Blood we are completing our 2025 Interview Spotlight Series. This final part features the ISEH 2025 Leadership in Divers...

This is an incredible honor owing to the many people who supported my professional development and allowed me to be a part of theirs. @isehsociety.bsky.social www.simplyblood.org/2025/07/2025...

The findings at the recent trial and today's Columbia chaos is pushing me to the edge.

I just sent the following email...

ISEH Committees - International Society for Experimental Hematology

Calls for volunteers to serve on a variety of committees for the @isehsociety.bsky.social are open now! Check out these opportunities if you're interested in developing leadership skills and your professional network. It takes a village! www.iseh.org/page/ISEHCom...

I’m honored that I was asked to attend these advocacy meetings, and so proud to have participated in our democratic process.

I really hope people move past the two-party mindset because I genuinely worry, as our first president George Washington warned, that it will cause the collapse of what I still believe can be a great nation.

After my experience today meeting with Congressmen across the aisle, I know that we the people are polarized, it shows in who we elected.

I took for granted my whole life that the newest, safest, most effective medical treatments in the world were accessible to me. That is no longer a given when we bow out of our leadership role and allow other countries to become potential gate keepers of innovation and regulatory standards.

but in reality will unleash predatory clinics that omit necessary data that patients need to make their own informed decisions.

Because publicly available documentation on this meeting is conspicuously missing, we are concerned that the discussion that ensued is attempting to spin deregulation as an attempt to “increase access to healthcare”

with invited representatives from unproven stem cell therapy clinics that intentionally excluded community-respected experts on stem cell biology and their therapeutic use.

Distressingly, I learned that Secretary Kennedy (😖) has conducted at least one private round table discussion (which are required to be publicly announced and documented)

because most people don’t understand a whole lot about the differences between tissue-derived adult stem cells and how they work.

As more adverse events from unproven stem cell therapies are uncovered (because without regulatory oversight the clinics are under no obligation to report them), I am concerned that people will lose trust in life-saving scientifically tested stem cell therapies such as bone marrow transplantation

and also deter people from receiving rigorously tested gold standard treatments that have demonstrated safety and efficacy.

I expressed concern that deregulation of stem cell therapies by the FDA would allow for more snake oil on the market which would precipitously increase the adverse events already being seen in many patients,

But they pose significant safety risks because they are collected and injected in unsafe labs that have high risks of contamination, which has resulted in patient harm including sepsis, blindness, paralysis, and even death (these are adjudicated cases by the department of justice).

On the second point, I shared anecdotes of vulnerable people like my grandparents being swindled by businessmen who claim to have the ability to cure their illnesses with “stem cell injections” that neither contain stem cells, nor effectively cure their disease.

I talked about the 250% return on investment that NIH-funded research has historically yielded for the American public, and emphasized the economic cost of losing that kind of investment. The ultimate consequence of all of this is our abdication of global leadership in science and technology.

I shared stories from the senior grad students whose thesis committees I sit on who are no longer expecting to stay in the U.S. but instead are seeking more stable training opportunities and finding more job prospects and security abroad.

because we don’t have the confidence that the awards will resume and we won’t be able to pay them for all 5 years of training (on average) without grant money.

This next generation of scientists (most of whom were going to work in the private sector after training) have now lost their training opportunities because PhD programs reduced or eliminated this next year’s training slots

the broken workforce pipeline due to the fact that the vast majority of NIH funding was actually supporting the costs of living for the graduate students, postdocs, and staff scientists who are receiving training and actively generating new knowledge in the biotech and medical fields.

I talked about the active brain drain occurring and the incentives other countries are offering to American research labs if they move there;

I explained that the shotgun blast approach to eliminate waste at the NIH has resulted in a broken chain of communication that has created chaos, confusion and destroyed critical infrastructure necessary for it to execute its mission.

I talked about the ongoing obstruction of already federally approved funding of peer-reviewed meritoriously selected awards (including those of friends and colleagues whose applications were awarded, yet the money never came).

On the first point, I shared my first-hand accounts of the utter collapse of U.S. support for science, research and technology development. I shared about the unlawful termination of a grant that supported my graduate student.

I went to Capitol Hill yesterday as part of the @isscr.org advocacy day to talk about two emergent issues: 1) the defunding of public research, and 2) the threats of deregulation of unproven stem cell products.

I hate that I’m part of this statistic. Anyone who doesn’t see this as the back slide that it is, is intentionally sticking their head in the sand.