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Neurons Created Directly From Skin Cells
alx5000 writes "The Times is running a story about a neurologic breakthrough that could revolutionise treatments for conditions such as Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's: Neurons have been created directly from skin cells for the first time. Quoting neurobiologist Professor Jack Price: 'This suggests that there are no great rules — you can reprogramme anything into anything else.' The article also points out that this method could work around the ethical issues surrounding embryonic stem-cell research."
but where will south park turn to for jokes? skin cells are not that funny
Someday we'll hit the human carrying capacity. And the band will just play on.
...The next time I tell one of my users to get off their ass because they're depriving their brain of oxygen, it'll be more than a snarky, shit-headed remark?
So that's why they cut of the foreskin.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
I'm sure Conservatives will still find something to complain about.
They should just outright say, 'we're just afraid of science'
How long will researchers insist on exploring fetal stem cells when adult stem cells have proven themselves to be so much more promising and have actually produces therapeutic results?
I'm happy for those with MS & Macular Degeneration...
There is Hope!
(Just not the "Obama" kind of hope...)
I'm curious...
Is this possibly a cure for Alzheimers, as well?
Holy happy hippy crap!
Neurons have been created directly from skin cells for the first time.
This research counters all the arguments that people shouldn't do drugs because they kill brain cells. Now that we know how to create new brain cells, there is no excuse for not being stoned. And bike riders can now throw away there helmets. Science brings freedom back to democracy.
So, AWESOME!
Uh, do we have anyway to implant vat grown neurons into people in some meaningful way? Can we actually attach vat grown neurons to, uh, other neurons?
This is going to be one of those "wait 5 years" breakthroughs isn't it?
Oh yes there is: it's too expensive.
-kgj
...until this technology can be used to regrow luscious locks of hair for balding people? Just asking... for a friend... .
And people still bitch about the ban of embryonic stem cells. If we think of it, the ban actually spurs research to a much better direction.
Sick people don't have money because they spend it all on hospitals and medicine but horny old fat people have tons of money. If Dr. Jack wants some serious grant money he'd better try to turn fat cells in boner cells. He can use some of that cash to help him make Michael J. Fox less shaky and hell, why not give him a giant wang while he's at it.
He'd be great in a commercial, "Hi, I'm Michael J. Fox. You may have noticed that I'm a lot less shaky these days and I also have a giant wang now. I owe it all to Dr. Jack." Boom! Instant Nobel Prize.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
There are no "workarounds" in the need for embryonic stem cells. Each approach and method of stem cell generation have their respective strengths and weaknesses
Great... its The Thing.
Fine, fine, I accept the mod. I still say eating babies is funny, but there's no excuse for misspelling "smartest". That's just dum.
...but your brain?
Emphasis on directly, we've been able to coax human adult somatic cells to become pluripotent stem cells since 2007. The "ethical issues" are pretty much old news, bringing it up almost feels like troll bait. TFA suggests that these cells are much less prone to cancer than iPSCs, which seems like a rather important bit the summary omitted.
the most powerful intellect is that unbounded by indubitable preconception
"The article also points out that this method could work around the ethical issues surrounding embryonic stem-cell research."
Would we have had this development if there hadn't been any ethical issues with embryonic stem cells?
This is more a religious issue rather than ethical - much like the pro-choice and anti-choice debate. Same people are anti-stem cell as those who are anti-choice.
Don't get carried away and be all rash now.
Some drugs actually promote neurogenesis. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1253627/
You wouldn't want to get stoned all the time and then have this new cell therapy and end up with too many neurons.
For those of you trying to find the actual nature article, here. I know we hate paywalls, but it should really be required for submission to slashdot that a link to the real paper, not preview, be included.
I am not a stem cell biologist, nor am I a neurobiologist, and I will need to read the paper more carefully when I’m at home, but some of my thoughts:
There do seem to be some hurdles to using this in humans, but many are trivial in comparison, and the reason the authors didn’t do them yet is because they wanted to get this out there before anyone else did. For one thing, they haven’t shown this in humans yet, but it should work in human cells that’s their stated next step. These cells were grown using dead mouse “feeder cells” which is common in cell culture, but complicates things for human therapy. You don’t want even dead mouse cells or other people’s dead cells in something that is going to go into your brain. People are working on culturing without feeder cells, I’m not sure where they are on that. The method of getting the 3 genes in is also an issue. These guys used lentiviral transfection, which is not something you want for human cells. Earlier work on IPSC got it done by incubating cells with transcription factor –protein- modified to penetrate cells. That might be a good next step here, though it would probably decrease the efficiency.
A bigger issue to me is what they are transfecting. They’re putting in three transcription factors, Ascl1, Brn2 (also called Pou3f2) and Myt1l. One of them, Ascl1, is found in many cancers (according to wiki anyway) and might be tumorgenic. Especially if they find they can’t get it to work without viral transfection, that could be a concern. The other two though aren’t tumorgenic apparently. Brn2 (also called Pou3f2) and Myt1l are both associated with neuron differentiation, which is interesting.
They did overcome a big hurdle: these are not pluripotent, which probably means there’s less chance of causing tumors, teratomas. With induced pluripotent cells, that is a concern. If you were to inject IpsC into your brain, you don’t know what you’re going to get. You could get bone cells growing in there, cells which aren’t supposed to be there that could potentially cause tumor formation. This doesn’t seem like that will be an issue here, they apparently get all neurons, neurons which appear not to continue dividing. I do find it a little hard to believe though that these only produce neurons and never glial cells, though I’ll need to reread it a few more times.
This is also a interesting paradigm shift for developmental biologists: apparently you don’t have to go back to square one to switch cell fates, it will take longer and be less efficient to do so. IpsC take about a month to become pluripotent and then be grown back into neurons, and only about 1% of the cells do that if I recall correctly. These take a week.
For much of the study, they seem to be using 5 different factors, not the 3 minimal ones. They state that Ascl1 alone was sufficient to make these cells start looking like neurons, but the other two were needed for them to look and behave like mature neurons. Most of the figures were working with a combination of 5 factors. With all 5, they showed a good mix of different types of neurons, but that had less efficient conversion than the minimal 3. I’m wondering if you’d actually be able to get all the different types of mature neurons with just the 3. I’d guess it’s not that they intentionally did it that way, but they wanted to hurry up and publish ASAP, so they skipped doing that characterization for now.
One problem facing all these therapies eventually, as I understand it, is that you want to get one specific type of neuron for therapy. I have no idea what strategies there are to direct differentiation into specific types of neurons, but this seems like it would be the bigger hurdle.
I'm not particularly keen on the idea of using skin cells for this. Sure, they're readily accessible (not very invasive), but skin cells are really close to the surface of the body (or at the surface of the body), and therefore really close to environmental influences. They die frequently (a fair amount of the dust in your house is dead skin cells), and are exposed to many things that can cause genetic mutations, sunlight probably being the biggest thing. If I had to regenerate neurons from other body cells, I'd rather something that was a bit more internal and reasonably far away from damaging sources (liver, for example).
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Is anyone worried about this virus escaping? We could all end up as a big blog of brain cells sitting on the floor! :D
I mean the "This suggests that there are no great rules -- you can reprogramme anything into anything else." quote. From what I remember from bio class tissues in mammals split into 3 different layers early on, the ectodermm the mesoderm and the endoderm. Oddly enough both skin and nerves come from the ectoderm. So what the scientist has demonstrated is he can turn on part of the ectoderm into another. (Not that he could say take endoderm from say the intestines and convert it into skin.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Just print yourself up a new body and replace the brain one hemisphere at a time and you too can live forever!!!!
No guarantees if you can preserve you "ghost"..... or not....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Not the first time, but the first announced. :}
"Men willingly believe what they wish." - Julius Caesar
and Arms and dick
> The choice we are talking about is regarding the adult, not the fetus.
If the fetus isn't human, what species is it? By what right do you deny them a choice?
And if you're going to tell me that reasoning is "speciesist," please explain why killing a fly for annoying you isn't speciesist, because the only reason people do it is because they regard flies as less valuable than human beings. No one would regard someone as anything but a murderer if they killed a person for the reasons they might kill a fly.
So the obvious next step is to create neurons in situ for a wearable biocomputer powered by your body! Yes the world of the future is a bit like having bees live in your head but, there they are, and like the lady said "I said live it, or live with it!"
Seastead this.
There is no need for a work-around on Stem-cell research. Stem-cells are taken from already dead fetuses. There is no ethical issue. Why do people have so many damn problems with using dead tissue to save lives? Either way the technical feat achieved here is still remarkable. It is a work-around not from an ethical perspective but getting the same results from a more abundant cell.
From the article:
A further question is why, if cells retain an underlying versatility, they don’t switch between cell types throughout our life
No answer to that. Freaky. Try to figure all nasty corners such technologies could bring the mankind to.
When will living people's skin cells start turning into neurons then?
Oh, neurons are different than neutrons?