The new method boosts cell yields and increases safety, helping to get another step closer to regenerative medicine
A new method for generating stem cells from mature cells promises to boost stem cell production in the laboratory, helping to remove a barrier to regenerative medicine therapies that would replace damaged or unhealthy body tissues.
The technique, developed by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, allows for the unlimited production of stem cells and their derivatives as well as reduces production time by more than half, from nearly two months to two weeks.
“One of the barriers that needs to be overcome before stem cell therapies can be widely adopted is the difficulty of producing enough cells quickly enough for acute clinical application,” says Ignacio Sancho-Martinez, one of the first authors of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, the Roger Guillemin Chair at the Salk Institute.
They and their colleagues, including Fred H. Gage, professor in Salk’s Laboratory of Genetics, have published a new method for converting cells in this week’s Nature Methods.
Stem cells are valued for their “pluripotency,” the ability to become nearly any cell in the body. Stem cells for research and clinical uses are derived in two ways, either directly from cells young enough to still be pluripotent, or from mature cells that have been “reprogrammed” to be pluripotent.
The first kind are called “embryonic stem cells,” (ESCs) even though the term is a misnomer. They are actually taken from blastocysts, the hollow bundle of cells approximately the size of a tip of a pin that is formed by a fertilized egg after five days of cell division. After a blastocyst implants in the uterus, the embryo stage begins.
Aside from the well-known ethical controversies, ESCs have a less discussed problem: Tissues grown from ESCs may trigger immune reactions when they are transplanted into patients.
In order to overcome both ethical and medical concerns, scientists learned how to coax mature cells (called “somatic cells”) that had differentiated into particular types of tissue back to their pluripotent state. These so-called “induced pluripotent stem cells,” or iPSCs, set off whole new rounds of research, including a third way to get desired cell types.
via Salk Institute for Biological Studies
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