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Biotech / Medical : Biotech News -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ian@SI who wrote (6739)	2/2/2010 11:03:44 AM
From: Jibacoa	Respond to of 7143

Do we really need stem cells? <g> There have been already reports of conversion of adult cells into other types of tissue, which could be used for repair and regeneration. Some isolated examples of adult cell reprogramming are known,but there was no general understanding of how to turn one cell type into another in a controlled manner. In 2006 the Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University astounded the world’s science community by developing a way to take ordinary skin cells and make them revert to a cell type found in the developing embryo, pluripotent stem cells,which have the capacity to change into any of the more than 200 distinct cell types in the body. In August 2008, a group from Harvard reported that they had identified a specific combination of three transcription factors, Ngn3, Pdx1 and Mafa, with which they were able to reprogram pancreatic exocrine cells into cells that closely resemble beta cells which were indistinguishable from endogenous islet beta cells, and were able to secrete insulin. Now a team from Stanford University in California has converted cells from a mouse’s tail directly into brain cells. :>) And although still much research remains to be done to confirm the breakthrough, they think that they have come up with an effective way to produce any of the many tissue types in the body. The goal is to be able to produce healthy replacement cells as a treatment for conditions such as motor neuron disease and Parkinson’s. This method is much simpler to achieve than that developed in 2006 by Yamanaka, since there is no need to revert the skin cells to pluripotent stem cells. The team at Stanford headed by Marius Wernig, an assistant professor of pathology at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, was able to take connective tissue cells from the tail skin of mice and make convert directly into neurons. They publish their findings in the journal Nature. Wernig used an initial trial and error method, inserting 19 different genes found in neurons into the fibroblast. But later he was able to reduce this until he could make the fibroblast convert directly to neurons using just three genes. Bernard