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Main Category: Stem Cell Research
Also Included In: Biology / Biochemistry
Article Date: 19 Jul 2013 – 5:00 PDT
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Researchers in China announced in a paper published in the journal Science on Thursday that they have developed an “easy and safe” way to make stem cells that could rekindle the great hope for growing tissue and organs from stem cells to treat a range of diseases.
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Pluripotent stem cells are capable of giving rise to all the body’s cell types – the stem cells in embryos are pluripotent. Inducing this embryonic-like state in adult cells is groundbreaking medical science.
Stem Cell research has led us to know that everyone of us has reserves of stem cells in our bodies. Our bodies are able to activate these stem cells when we get the proper nutrition. God gave us all the elements we need to live & be healthy on this earth. On the right track about stem cells, but scary that you think of it as engineering. Wouldn’t it be easier to find the natural elements that will activate these stem cells we all posses, instead of engineering the procedure?
How they did it
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Sheng Ding, a reprograming researcher at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, California, told
MLA
In their paper the team describes the many advantages of small molecules: they pass easily through cell walls, they don’t affect the immune system, the are cost-effective, and they can easily be synthesized, preserved, and standardized.
They finally settled on a cocktail of seven small compounds, which they showed was able to convert 0.2% of the adult tissue cells into iPSCs, which is comparable to the gene insertion conversion rate.
The chemical insertion method of inducing cells used by these researchers is simpler and easier than the gene insertion approach, which, they note, has also tended to limit the clinical application of iPS cells.
For their study, Deng Hongkui, a professor and stem-cell biologist at Peking University in Beijing, and colleagues, induced a pluripotent state in adult cells from mice using seven small-molecule compounds.
Stem cells helped growth of heart, brain, liver, skin and muscle tissue
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The researchers showed that the CiPSCs were pluripotent by introducing them into developing mouse embryos. As they grew and were born, the resulting mice showed signs that the CiPSCs had contributed to the formation of all tissue types, including heart, brain, liver, skin, and muscle.
Work to do before human benefit
Unlike mice bred using the gene insertion method, the mice generated from CiPSCs were “100% viable and apparently healthy for up to 6 months.”
“Moreover, their effects on inhibiting and activating the function of specific proteins are often reversible and can be finely tuned by varying the concentrations,” note the authors.
Earlier this month, scientists in Japan reported how they managed to grow functioning human liver tissue from stem cells, bringing the day closer when engineered tissue can be used to alleviate the acute shortage of donor tissue for transplants.
Written by Catharine Paddock PhD
Copyright: Medical News Today
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