Slashdot Mirror
Ultimate Stem Cell Discovered
bofh31337 writes "Newscientist is reporting that the University of Minnesota has discovered a new stem cell in adults. It is thought this stem cell will be able to turn into any single tissue in the body." The article is kinda breathy, especially for New Scientist - but if this is true, which needs to be studied more, this will dramatically alter the landscape for stem cell research.
It looks like simple mitosis, but the telomeres get shorter. When you run out of telomeres, the cell has reached the end of its life.
Most cell knows when it is going to die. Our skincells for example are programmed to die after about 7 weeks, in this way, the skin does refresh itself and you have a nice healthy skin. ;), so she is "ageing" very fast to catch up with herself.
So.. if you clone a cell that is already say 3 weeks old, all clones from that cell will start of at the age of 3 weeks, having only 4 weeks left to live until "terminated".
This is what happened to Dolly, the cloned Sheep. Dolly's cells started of with the same biological clock as her "mother" (herself ?
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
incidentally, this is what cancer does. it prevents the shortening of the telomeres, so cells that have turned cancerous don't "die".
http://www.micab.umn.edu/faculty/Verfaillie.html
m d= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11458512&dopt=Abstrac t
and an abstract of one stem cell paper is at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?c
"others think the selection process actually creates the MAPCs.
.with no signs of ageing" could herald this find as biomedical fountain of youth, the raoyalties could be astronomical, especially when used for non-life-threatening conditions.
I don't think there is 'a cell' that is lurking there that can do this. I think that Catherine has found a way to produce a cell that can behave this way," says Neil Theise of New York University Medical School.
If this turns out to be the case rather than the cell naturally occurring in bone marrow, it has tremendous implications from a patent perspective. Since you cannot patent a naturally occuring object, anyone who could reverse engineer the selection process would be able to produce these cells. But if it is the process itself that transforms otherwise non stem-cell behaving cells into MAPC's then process itself would be patentable and I believe even if you reverse engineered it you would be expected pay royalties. Since claims like "cell lines have been growing for almost two years . .
WOW, who would have thought that the fountain of youth, and a source of infinite free power would be announced on the same day?
Work for Change & GET PAID!
telomeres are special structures at the end of eukaryotic chromosomes that protect the ends and facilitate DNA replication of linear DNA. cells that have circular genomes (such as bacteria) do not have DNA ends and therefore do not have nor need telomeres. old cells have short telomeres and therefore have a harder time replicating their DNA. This is an overly simplified explanation, of course.
NO CARRIER
Well, the big point from this research may be that the only person needed to "donate" the stem cells may be the exact person needing the treatment. If every adult human being has these stem cells, then there is the possibility for a person to grow cells (or organs or such) from their very own cells, with their very own DNA.
This not only avoids most of the ethical problems completely, it should eliminate any worries about rejection of the new cells, since there isn't a difference between them and the ones already there.
I hope this turns out to be true, this would be so huge for curing diseases, reparing damage caused by accidents or neglect, and in general really helping to increase human longevity.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Every other type of stem cell except for the Embryonic Stem Cell (ESC) exhibits rapid aging. By rapid, they mean hours to days before the entire cell line is dead (in culture). These cells have very short life spans and take a very short time to reproduce. By aging, they mean "unbidden mutation." ESCs don't do this, and apparently neither do these. This is an amazing advancement.
But you're right, the important thing is whether or not these cells can be put into a human (and work). Then we would find out what kind of aging (in the well-known human sense of the word) these cells experience.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
They're applying for a patent on the extraction and enrichment process, not the cells themselves, folks. Stem cells can't be patented, because the host person could simply claim prior use and blow the patent.
Virg
I just got out of a colloqium presented by one of the researchers and she was careful to point out that they do not have cells that can fully differentiate, just that they have cells that they have *so far* been able to turn into anything they want. They haven't tried everything yet.
While your DNA (and mine too - I'm also a type 1) contains markers that predisposed you to get diabetes, there was also a roll of the dice involved. Some unknown environmental factor - most researchers suspect a virus - triggers the autoimmune attack that actually makes one diabetic.
If you could grow a new pancreas from your own stem cells, it would still contain the markers for diabetes, but it would also contain the same functional, insulin-producing beta cells that you had prior to becoming diabetic. If you never had another autoimmune attack, you'd be non-diabetic for the rest of your life. One quick writeup of this theory can be found in Dr. Bernstein's book.
So far as I've read, a pancreas grown from someone else's cells would face the same tissue rejection issues that you see in today's experimental pancreas transplants.