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Advance In Making Stem Cells From Skin
KillerBob writes with an advance on the news from a year back that stem cells can be produced from human skin — discussed here. Now Canadian researchers have found a safe way to generate stem cells without using viruses to modify the genome, a process that can have its own dangers. "The ethical debate over embryonic stem cell use may soon be moot, thanks to a Canadian team of researchers who, together with a team out of Scotland, has found a safe way to grow stem cells from a patient's own skin. The revolutionary finding, described in a paper published yesterday by the international science journal Nature, means doctors may be one step closer to treating a multitude of diseases, including Alzheimer's, diabetes and Parkinson's."
Advance In Making Stem Cells From Skin
Don't get me wrong, I understand why this is cool. But I'd still much rather hear that there'd been a breakthrough in making skin from stem cells.
A-Bomb
We must move to ban all exfoliating soaps! Murder!!
MABASPLOOM!
We see these stories about eight times a year. "New alternative to embryonic stem cells just around the corner". It's never clear how far around the corner it really is, though.
In any case, I'm certain that sooner or later some brilliant soul will crack this code. I can't help but wonder, though: how much scientific effort has been displaced into "finding other ways to make stem cells" that could otherwise have gone into "finding ways to use stem cells to treat medical conditions".
They haven't shown that the cells can actually differentiate into any cell type. They have just shown that they express the biological markers that make it look like a pluipotent stem cell. Meaning that expresses a few surface markers that they tested. That dosen't mean that it can turn into any type of stem cell. I wouldn't hold my breathe.
/bring me another beer!
Killing babies still has a much better chance of growing me a new liver.
Make stem cells the way nature intended: from aborted fetuses.
Quit wimping around.
Trolling is a art,
Any way to access the article without paying through the nose?
The universities in the study in question are both public universities. This is government science funding at work; its a shame it isn't US government science funding.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The question of whether these cells can be re-differentiated without using a virus to reprogram the cells is an important question yet to be answered from this research.
There is another important question to be addressed with this technique, however.
The article mentions cancer as a side effect for virus-engineered stem cells and immune rejection for stem cells from other people.
Would this technique manage to create stem cell-derived new cells without their own set of side effects?
Cancer is assumed as a side effect of the virus-engineered stem cells only. Since any tissue being made from converted stem cells is put through accelerated growth, what safeguards are there against tumor growth (cancerous or non-cancerous) with this new technique?
I ask this since I read another article noted tumor growth at stem-cell graft sites is common. That article didn't note whether these cases were from virus-engineered stem cells or not.
Disclaimer - I work with these guys on occasion.
I am an hESC biologist, and this stuff is quite significant. I expect iPS cells will take over from hESC in the near to mid-term future (5-10 years). Not that I have any problems with hESC, but as a professional in the field, if they can do the same things and not bother people as much, why not? It's worth noting though that this would never have happened without research on embryonic stem cells to allow us to identify the culture conditions etc necessary to maintain puripotence. This lab is not-coincidentally also one of the few Canadian labs licensed to make new hESC lines from discarded blastocysts. Also worth noting that iPS lines will eliminate some of the ethical issues around hESC - but definitely not all of them. This will be particularly important in the U.S. IIRC - Canadian law on hESC is defined around pluripotence (e.g. it includes human iPSC), whereas I don't think this is the case south of the border.
In a timely juxtaposition, the other primary front-page story in today's Globe and Mail was about cutbacks to Canadian research funding. While you guys get Obama and an extra $10bn to the NIH, we are stuck with a conservative government and losing hundreds of millions from our research councils. Our Minister of Science and Technology (a chiropractor FFS) apparently screamed at representatives of the national organization of University professors and stomped out of the room when asked about it.
For those Canadians reading this: Canadian scientists are among the best in the world. We can compete on this and many other playing fields - but we need stable, non-politicized funding, most particularly for basic research like this. Industry will not do this kind of work, the profits are too far down the road. Our government needs to stop playing silly power games, and pay attention to the task at hand, before we lose a lot of these top players to the U.S.
Please write (snail-mail as always is both free and most effective) your MP and encourage them to support scientific research in Canada. If nothing else, when the bailout money runs out and the carmakers finally go belly up, this is where the next generation of jobs will come from.
I find it funny when people go on about stem cell research and how it's always promised it will be around the corner, 10 years away. Stem cell research only had enough potential for the public to get excited about about 10 years ago, and now, about 10 years latter their has already been amazing successes using stem cell treatments, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. it's makeing steady progress, and it's the most amazing medical advancement since the concept of organ transplants started looking like it might be possible.
Dupes are the left over stem cells that refused to differentiate.
Failure to follow this advice may result in non-deterministic behavior.
To which I say "Horseshit!" The day that American medicine finds a cure for cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes and Parkinson's is the day that American medicine goes out of business. Doctors, HMOs, big pharma and hospitals are too busy making money off the sick to fix these problems.
We've been paying for a war on cancer for over 50 years and don't have a cure; surgery remains butchery; antibiotics are losing their effectiveness; no significant inroads against viruses have been made. The American medical establishment needs a radical dollar-ectomy in the form of
"One step closer" doesn't mean anything when you're miles from home.
...that the bulk of the comments here are some sort of ridicule for the Christian Right, instead of plaudits for the idea of an advancement that makes the 'farming' of stem cells morally neutral.
Are we really so shallow that rather than confronting someone else's (and it's not a trivial % of the populace) genuine moral questions in sympathy, that we simply mock them? Don't bother replying, we all know the answer.
I don't necessarily agree with the concept that every zygote is sacred; nevertheless I can well see the difficulty of harvesting something from those zygotes for the people who do. (More accurately stated, their fear that there will be a sudden discovery of 'value' in these zygotes, inspiring the full range morality-free behaviors which typically characterize humans when confronted by something of value.) What's more ironic is that the unbelievable, staggering values that's been postulated for embryonic stem cells remains apparently that after all these years: apparently the entire world outside the US is furiously researching uses for these cells, as well as any US lab capable of operating free of the US gov't largesse, but nobody's managed to come up with a real-world useful therapy yet? Curious.
To get back to the point, I feel however that Christians' furor over stem cells would be more accurately directed at the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of fertilized eggs 'disposed of' in the artificial insemination process every year...but that cat is well out of its particular bag, culturally speaking.
I find it equally ironic that some of people that rail against the 'naive' Christians for their 'ridiculous' discomfort at harvesting a resource from zygotes, are some of the same people who express outrage at the ripping of inorganic resources from a not-potentially-a-person ground. I guess it just depends where a person sees value.
-Styopa
Really, you have never seen articles about "We found out how you can prevent yourself from getting"? You have never read about how smoking causes health problems? You have never read about how increasing dietary fiber reduces the risk of colon cancer? There are more, but I think this shows that your premise is bunk.
The problem is that the "diseases of old age" have many possible causes and it takes a long time to identify them.
People forget that in 1900 greater than 3 out of 100 children died between the ages of 2 and 20, in 2000 that rate was less than 2 out of 1000.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison