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Breakthrough In Stem Cell Culturing
Science Daily reports that for the first time, human embryonic stem cells have been cultured under chemically controlled conditions without the use of animal substances, which is essential for future clinical uses. "Now, for the first time, we can produce large quantities of human embryonic stem cells in an environment that is completely chemically defined," says professor Karl Tryggvason, who led the study at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet. "This opens up new opportunities for developing different types of cells which can then be tested for the treatment of disease."
Pah! Finally, those uncultured stem cells will learn the finer arts of high society!
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
Dont worry you will forget all your problems soon enogh.
It's funny until you've seen it happen. The person with Alzheimer's will certainyl forget but those around them certainly won't. Eventually Alzheimer's gets to the point where they forget *everyone* and everything. They often have depression from the times that they realize what is going on and not knowing who anyone is around them. Alzheimer's fractures the mind to the point where it has effectively combined aspects from their childhood, teenage years, adulthood and older years all wrapped up in the same person. They lose the ability to speak, walk and in the end even move. As bad as it is for them, it is fucking terrible for their family to watch that unfold when you know that there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it. Stem cell research has the potential to significantly curb the effects of Alzheimer's but alas it will not be in time for my own grandmother who is in the final stages of Alzheimer's.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Some important background that this article doesn't specifically mention (another one I read did), in 2008, that same lab had shown this was possible with mouse stem cells. That's not to knock them, just it's important to point out that these things don't just come from out of the blue, nor does biology move as quick as we would like. This group has been working on showing this goes on in human stem cells for at least 2 years, who knows how long it took them to find this out in mice, or narrow down this one specific protein. Those years between when they discovered it in mice and showing it in humans probably also represents a lot of work. Science is hard.
I would guess that the next step, maybe one they're already working on, is to show that induced pluripotent stem cells can be cultured on this same protein. IPsC are when they take cells from your own body and make them revert back to a similar state to embryonic stem cells, to where they can then be turned into any cell type you want (the advantage there being they're your cells so you wouldn't get tissue rejection like you would with embryonic stem cells.)
Three big barriers to using IPsC for therapy were/are 1. that they were made using viral transfection of cancer-causing genes, 2. culturing them required feeder cells which the article describes why that's bad, and 3. it's hard to completely differentiate a population of pluripotent cells into one cell type you're trying to get. There have been some breakthroughs on 1, last I heard a group had shown you can just culture with modified proteins to induce pluripotency. This is a breakthrough on 2. Unfortunately 3 might be harder. You want to be sure you've differentiated all the stem cells before you put them into a patient. If you inject stem cells into a patient, they're going to get one of the worst types of tumors: teratomas, so you want to be absolutely sure you've gotten them all. And each different cell type seems to differentiate in different ways. We might figure out how to turn stem cells completely into skin cells, but that may not help us learn how to turn a culture of stem cells into brain cells.
Nonetheless, this was an important 2 part solution to a barrier to using stem cells to their full potential. Double kudos to them, they've made a real contribution here.
Patent application title: COMPOSITION AND METHOD FOR ENABLING PROLIFERATION OF PLURIPOTENT STEM CELLS
Authors: Karl Tryggvason, Anna Domogatskaya, Sergey Rodin, a subset of the authors of the paper referenced at the end of TFA. I don't know enough about stem cells to say that the patent application is identical to TFA, but it's on at least highly similar subject matter. Prof. Tryggvason has over 30 patents as per his bio on the Biolamina corporate website, a company he co-founded. As a scientist currently trying to bring some academic research out of the lab and into deployment, I can tell you that this is just how things are done. It isn't perfect, but without the protection of a patent it's hard to see any company willingly expose itself to the massive risk and cost of developing, producing, testing, and marketing Prof. Tryggvason's work without the profit motive that patents protect.