Stem Cell Alchemy Refinement
The stunning announcement that researchers were able to turn adult skin cells into virtual stem cells gave us hope, and even more so when we learned that the researchers were, in part, driven by ethical concerns.
The process involved showering hundreds of adult skin cells with retroviruses, and picking out those that were affected the right way after the viruses attacked the cells. The problem, as those still favoring embryonic stem cell research pointed out, was that the cells that were attacked in a way favorable to the process had a tendency to become cancerous later on. And the technique produced a variety of acceptable cells every time it was attempted, removing the ability to fine tune the results with a particular type of cell. It was like your grandmother’s baking; the results are very good indeed, but you are not sure you can duplicate it because you don’t really have a recipe.
Now, the same researchers have found a way to get the recipe right. As the Wired Science blog notes:
Rather than using retroviruses, they used drug-controlled lentiviruses. Unlike genes added by retroviruses become, these don’t shut down once a treated cell turns pluripotent, then stay inactive as the cell divides. Lengner and Werner’s genes can be turned on and off in new cells. Critically, they can even be controlled in cells taken from mice that have been grown using reprogrammed cells.
From Wired Science
Lengner is quoted in the article saying, “We can now generate millions or billions of fibroblasts that contain the exact same integration that allows reprogramming to occur. We eliminate the whole heterogeneity of having different viral integrations.”
For researchers, this is a wonderful and important step that should remove the need for embryonic stem cell experimentation.
