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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."
So that's why they cut of the foreskin.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
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!
It all depends on where they get the skin, and from whom.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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.
...until this technology can be used to regrow luscious locks of hair for balding people? Just asking... for a friend... .
If the implications pan out, not much longer.
I like stem cells, but feel that abortion is the most sensitive of issues and ought to remain free of any profit motive.
To me this breakthrough seems like a win-win.
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
I don't get it. That joke in no way implied that my mom was fat or a whore. How is that funny?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
If you never do research with fetal stem cells, you'll never know what they can do. When the alternative to fetal stem cell research is throwing the fetal stem cells in an incinerator, don't we have a moral obligation to get the best use out of them that we can?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
...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
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 a while probably, at least until adult stem cells are actually proven to be as useful as embryonic stem cells and are able to be used interchangeably. Yes there are some uses of adult stem cells that have produced therapeutic results but not every therapy or study can be done with adult cells.
Furthermore there is not much of an ethical dilemma for using embryonic stem cells as they are not children nor will they ever develop into children. The problem is political and based in the morality of others which doesn't consider very deeply the question. The problem is that people often equate potential life for life, and this is wrong and ultimately produces evil.
For instance if you really believed that embryos had the same worth as a fetus or a child and a hospital was burning and you could only rescue all the babies in the maternity ward(we'll say 24 of them) or all of the potential babies in the cryogenic freezer then you logically would rescue the freezer as you would save far more lives. I for one would choose the actual babies and save the maternity ward.
Nature is only organic if it has carbon in it.
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 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.
So you want to take your body cells from where the sun doesn't shine.
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We also owe a very very large portion of our current medical knowledge to the Nazis. If it wasn't for their 'human experiments' we wouldn't know some of the stuff we know today.
Where do you think we got the 'how long you can survive without food/water' stats?
Doesn't mean it was right.
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.
If you never do research with fetal stem cells, you'll never know what they can do.
To add to that, you know what research started us down this whole avenue, right? There are quite a few genes in the genome, but they only looked at 19
How did they come up with that magic 19 instead of like 100,000 in the mouse genome? Other studies that used fetal stem cells, or possibly IPsC cell studies, which themselves were discovered based on knowledge gleaned from studies in fetal stem cells.
If there had been no research on fetal stem cells we wouldn't have this, induced pluripotent stem cells, OR much knowledge about adult stem cells (which, not for nothing, haven't gotten us to the finish line yet, which is -why- research continues) and very little hope for anyone who has medical conditions like paralysis or parkinson's disease.
Instead we would have a little more incinerated biomedical waste from fertilization clinics.
Yeah, we really made the wrong decision there.
So, if you need neurons replaced in your forbrain they will make then from foreskin?
insert dickhead joke here
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