Stem Cells in the News

[lraynak]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two separate teams of researchers announced on Tuesday they had transformed ordinary skin cells into batches of cells that look and act like embryonic stem cells -- but without using cloning technology and without making embryos. Their breakthroughs could make possible the long-sought goal of tailor-made medicine, but without the political, scientific and ethical roadblock of using human embryos.Both teams call the new cells induced pluripotent stem cells and say they look and act like embryonic stem cells -- the master cells that give rise to every cell and tissue in the body."We can now envisage a time when a simple approach can be used to produce stem cells that are able to form any tissue from a small sample taken from any of us," Ian Wilmut of the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, said in a statement."This will have enormous implications for research and perhaps one day for therapy," added Wilmut, who helped clone the first mammal, Dolly the sheep, in 1997.James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin in Madison and colleagues reported their finding in the journal Science while Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan and colleagues reported theirs in the journal Cell.Both teams used just four genes to transform ordinary skin cells called fibroblasts into induced pluripotent stem cells -- iPS cells for short."We are now in a position to be able to generate patient- and disease- specific stem cells, without using human eggs or embryos," Yamanaka said in a statement.
11-20-07
Sounds promising
Lraynak

 

[barbara]

Wow and double wow

Larry - This sounds almost too good to be true. Was there any time frame given to actually apply this technology to a human?

 

[sp1d3rdan]

This is very big news! However this is very far from actual treatments. The gene delivery that is used to alter the skin cells into stem cells actually raises the chance of cancer formation significantly. Nonetheless they will be able to overcome this issue in time.

It will be years before they perfect it and begin treating people with this method. Hopefully it will be not THAT far off. This just shows how quickly they are moving with stem cell research. It was less than a year ago that they were able to do this in mice. Translating it to humans usually takes years not months. I am excited that this method will get quite a bit of funding from the government and will avoid the political debate with embryonic stem cells.

Also an even bigger issue that this method solves is that since the cells can come from the same person, it will not have the same rejection issues that embryonic stem cells may have. This makes the need for therapeutic cloning unnecessary. Also a huge issue. I think that we will see huge changes in treatment in the years to come.