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Cell Breakthrough May Transform Transplants
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists said Thursday they have accomplished a stunning feat -- growing cells in a laboratory dish that have the potential to become any kind of cell at all.
The cells are known as ''stem cells'' and are a kind of Holy Grail for cell biologists trying to make advances in transplantation, gene therapy and other fields.
The work ''shows you can derive and culture these cells, and it opens the possibility for some dramatic new transplantation therapies,'' James Thomson, a developmental biologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who led the study, said in a statement.
Most cells have a function. They are liver cells, skin cells, brains cells and so on -- and once they have taken on this function, a process known as differentiation, there is no going back.
But stem cells, a very small percentage of cells in the body, can grow to be anything.
In a study funded in part by Geron Corp. (Nasdaq:GERN - news), based in Menlo Park, California, Thomson's team managed to find and grow human stem cells.
They used blastocysts -- clumps of cells a few days old that are grown from fertilized eggs -- that were left over from test-tube fertility treatments and donated by the parents.
Because of U.S. federal laws against experimenting on human embryos, no federal funds were used in the study.
Writing in the journal Science, Thomson's team said they got five different independent cell lines to grow. A cell line is a laboratory dish of cells that are living and dividing as if they were in the body.
''What we can do now is grow a number of different cells, including muscle, cartilage and neurons,'' Thomson said in a telephone interview.
He said this does not yet mean that scientists can grow a liver in a lab dish, however. ''So we are not talking about making whole organs but we are talking about repairing organs,'' he said.
''It's extremely unlikely we could grow a heart anywhere in the near future,'' he added. But heart cells could be grown and used for therapy.
Thomson thinks huge banks of frozen stem cells could be established, each tissue-typed in the same way that organ donors now are. Such technology might be possible in five years, Thomson said.
''If you had large population of uniform heart cells, you could use them for drug testing,'' he said. ''It's a way to screen through large numbers of compounds.''
The stem cells can also be used for basic scientific research such as human developmental biology. Because of ethical concerns about using human embryos, little is known about how people develop in the womb.
''Everything we know about human development we know from the mouse, and the mouse is different,'' Thomson said.
''This will be important for understanding infertility, birth defects and pregnancy loss. Ultimately, if we understand development enough we should be able to treat or prevent those conditions.''
A second team did a similar experiment with cells from aborted fetuses. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, John Gearhart of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and colleagues, also partly funded by Geron, took primordial sperm and egg cells from the fetuses and grew them into stem cells.
''The potential of these unique, versatile cells for human biologic studies and medicine is enormous,'' Gearhart said in a statement. |
