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Non-Embryonic Stem Cells Developed From Skin Cells
juliangamble writes "Scientists reported Thursday they had developed a technique that can quickly create safe alternatives to human embryonic stem cells, a major advance toward developing a less controversial approach for treating a host of medical problems. The researchers published a series of experiments showing they can use laboratory-made versions of naturally occurring biological signals to quickly convert ordinary skin cells into cells that appear virtually identical to embryonic stem cells. Moreover, the same strategy can then coax those cells to morph into specific tissues that would be a perfect match for transplantation into patients."
are they identical or not?
I get the feeling these guys have been playing waaaay too much Starcraft 2.
The great thing about using stem cells from fetii is that for the brief time that they are taking the cells, the fetus is still biologically alive, so the stem cells taken are extremely high quality.
Skin cells cannot be taken without pain to the patient. Since it requires that the skin cells themselves be fresh and alive, the patient much undergo some pain while the cells are extracted.
We have so many fetii who will ultimately be thrown out with the rest of the biomedical waste. Why waste them when they could save lives? Religious extremists are forcing us to waste time finding workarounds to their ridiculous anti-science/anti-medicine policies.
On a side note, I'm worried that these policies will become stricter come November when the Tea Party looks likely to make significant inroads in Congress.
I thought one of the huge advantages of embryonic stem cells was that, once gathered, they could effectively be reproduced or cloned or something indefinitely without the need to gather more. Is that the case with these new cells? Or am I completely off base in the first place?
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'developing a less controversial approach'
Thank fuck for science.
I do not have the exact details but the last time I checked there was one trial for embryonic stem cells registered with the FDA, and it was still in the planning stages. There are many more (I seem to remember the number being around 1900) drug trials ongoing with using adult stem cells. Several of these drug trials are very promising. I am interested in the one showing promise against Parkinsons since a family member has this. In that case the results are not a "promise" that might someday materialize but are documented and present. No one is claiming these studies show a therapy that is ready for the market today but they show improvement that is statistically significant. They are also not in the planning phase but actively in drug trials.
Additionally many of them are funded by private money. It would seem to me that private investors are looking for a drug that will work (and presumably pay back their investment.) So I am always happy to see new research on this. I am just confused why people are pushing for federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. (Unless those pushing for it are the ones who would get the funding, and then there is a potential conflict of interest.)
Then you'll love this new technique.
These are not as good as stem cells from embryos.
The funny thing about all the anti-science religious freaks is no matter what solution you come up with, they'll find something to object about it - and the work will still be done somewhere in the world because scientists collaborate, so you're not "stopping" stem cell research using embryonic stem cells no matter how much you think it stops that.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I never would have taken the Slashdot moderators as anti-science crusaders.
Guess I know better now!
Due to "National Security" reasons, I need about 12 President-VICE Richard B. Cheney lookalikes.
Can these lookalikes be cloned from my skin?
Please forward your answers to :
Richard B. Cheney, President-VICE
Number One Naval Observatory Circle
Washington, D.C., 20007
Criminally As Always,
President-VICE Richard B. Cheney
One of the best songs by Sepultura: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNuJy6Ya4io
If we had Embryonic stem cells say from Cord blood or some other conflict free source.
Would the biological signals work the same on them to become muscle, nerve or organ replacement tissue?
11 more "man-size" safes.
I wonder though, if they don't find a way to lengthen the telomere tail on the cell's dna, it's age won't be reset. You can't just take anyone's skin cells and make stem cells from them, if they're older generation cells the telomere tail will be short and the cell culture's lifespan will also be short.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
While, I welcome any and all advances in the field of stem cells, I often wonder if the controversy around embryonic stem cells is mostly a product of language. As I understand it, the names "embryonic" and "adult" refers to where in the life-cycle of the stem cell it is in. It does not describe the source of the cells. Notice that even babies can have adult stem cells.
In cloud physics, there is a concept of a embryonic cloud drop. It is merely a label for a cloud droplet at the beginning of its life cycle, before it grows or evaporates.
So, are many people having problems with embryonic stem cells because they believe that it comes from an embryo instead of a zygote? Would public opinion be different if people understood this distinction? Would they care?
This isn't new, except for the part that says quickly.
Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPS cells) have been around for at least 4 years now
These guys are short-cutting the process of DNA makes RNA makes Protein, by directly providing the required mRNA, rather than inserting new required genes into adult somatic cells and then waiting for them to make the RNA and transform, as was done before.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
If only they could figure out how to use these stem cells to do something truly useful... like growing hair on bald men, enlarging penises, extending eyelashes, or inflating boobs.
Or perhaps they might finally find a cure for the dreaded RLS (Restless Leg Syndrome) which has been giving me so many nightmares!
Or maybe induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells which are reprogrammed, acquire more telomere transcripts which elongate the telomeres... Or maybe not... Who really knows for sure...
http://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/abstract/S1934-5909(09)00002-2
Summary
Telomere shortening is associated with organismal aging. iPS cells have been recently derived from old patients; however, it is not known whether telomere chromatin acquires the same characteristics as in ES cells. We show here that telomeres are elongated in iPS cells compared to the parental differentiated cells both when using four (Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4, cMyc) or three (Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4) reprogramming factors and both from young and aged individuals. We demonstrate genetically that, during reprogramming, telomere elongation is usually mediated by telomerase and that iPS telomeres acquire the epigenetic marks of ES cells, including a low density of trimethylated histones H3K9 and H4K20 and increased abundance of telomere transcripts. Finally, reprogramming efficiency of cells derived from increasing generations of telomerase-deficient mice shows a dramatic decrease in iPS cell efficiency, a defect that is restored by telomerase reintroduction. Together, these results highlight the importance of telomere biology for iPS cell generation and functionality.
go into your college/university library then. Use the terminals there.
Does this work even if the university close to where I currently live isn't the same university I graduated from?
usually - most colleges will honor an alumni card from another university for research library journal usage
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I don't even see why stem cells were controversial in the first place. They acted like they were ripping babies out of pregnant women, which obviously wasn't the case.
Not all skin cell donors consented.
The right wing, self appointed, pseudo morality police, other wise known as lunatics have been throwing up the protect the fetus related objections for years. Now if we have an easy way to get cells that will work as well as embryonic stem cells they will have to invent another excuse for trying to block progress. Frankly the sick suckers should be dragged into the streets and lynched.
Distro is d0ne Here polite to bring need to scream that
if Bush had not limited the harvesting of embryonic stem cells if this would have been discovered. The whole lowest hanging fruit and all that...
This is so wasteful. Fundies who only want to punish women for having sex extend their ignorance to block real medical research and the research community has to spend time and money coming up with things like this.
Just use the left over embryos, that otherwise are thrown out, and stop all this wasteful spending/time/research.
Wake me up when we can make stem cells out of fat! Now I will have another donut.
Awesome headline. And in other news:
Non-Orange Juice developed from Apples !
Non-IE Web Browser developed from Mozilla Codebase !
Non-C Computer Program Developed in Lisp !
Okay, that last one actually _is_ news.
I'm simultaneously trying to RTFA and look at the comments here, but it looks like a very nice paper at first glance. The technique itself is elegant: modify messenger RNA to make it less likely to be destroyed by cellular defenses, then pump a bunch of it into the cell to induce the production of the proteins of interest.
The earlier techniques, published about 4 years ago by Takahashi and Yamanaka (doi:10.1016/j.cell.2006.07.024), depended on using viruses to insert genes for 4 factors (Oct3/4, Sox2, c-Myc, and Klf4), and then letting the cell transcribe those genes and make the proteins. This has some dangers, as you're inserting stuff into the genome, and you can never precisely control where it goes.
In contrast, Warren and colleagues cut out the middleman by sending in mRNA for those four factors, and just letting that get translated. No viruses, no risk of borking the cells' DNA, and fairly precise and efficient control of the expression levels.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lab scientist, but I am working in RNA bioinformatics, and it certainly smells like a real breakthrough. My toddler is running around, and I'm happy for her, for me, and potentially my parents (assuming the technique pans out and depending how quickly it can be translated into therapies.)
I (heart) science.
What they did was convert them into pleuripotenet stem cells. (The long and short of it is that stem cells are cells who's job it is to make more cells. The problem is that certain stem cells can only make certain other cells. So skin stem cells can probably only make either more skin stem cells or skin cells. Pleuripotent stem cells can make any cell that appears in the adult organism. Oh for those that care the "top of the line" stem cells would be totipotent. Not only can they make any cell pleuripotent can but they can make other stuff like placenta and umbilical cords.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Moreover, the same strategy can then coax those cells to morph into specific tissues that would be a perfect match for transplantation into patients.
I think he misspelled "patents".
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The distance between an embryonic stem cell and a zygote is basically a kick in the pants. Zygotes and blastocyst are developing and keep developing and are going through a series of changes that lead to individuals, but in theory a totopotent stem cell (which this process makes) can be put into a blastocyst and will develop into the organism (if you use a special type of flawed blastocyst that will not fully develop, you can even clone with this process now (though the previous inefficiencies and cancer inserting methods were highly problematic but hopefully that's yesterdays news). And it might well be possible to kick off the full development process within stem cells. In which case, what is the moral implications of destroying a skin cell?
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
In 2007, a method of inducing cells into being stem cells was developed out of Japan. It involved injecting 4 genes into a cell and resetting it to an embryonic state. So they basically found a reset switch to turn them into stem cells, but were hitting it with a sledge hammer. From there, other methods of changing the cell with less deadly inserts were invented, then without needing to insert anything by dusting them, but these methods make like one stem cell in hundreds of thousands of cells. It's crap and makes it really really hard to use. This method offers the prospect of efficiently and effectively hitting the reset switch.
That said, skin cells are better then embryonic cells. We don't just want tissue that are from some undeveloped embryo. We want tissue that is genetically identical to you. We want to take some skin cells, and turn them into beta pancreatic cells and cure your diabetes. That means we need methods of effectively taking cells, resetting them, and setting them down some specific developmental path to becoming what we want. We want those cells because you'll never reject them because they are genetically you.
The reason we needed to look at embryonic stem cells is to figure out how they work and how we could make them. This is better because it's genetically identical to you, but this isn't a sudden magical ad hoc new thing, it's the result of a lot of very good research much of which was in looking at how embryonic stem cells work, and then looking for how to get them to work.
This method is better because it works with a much higher success rate than the previous methods. We've been long since able to make stem cells from fully differentiated cells. And we're moving towards being able to do so very effectively, which many of the current methods lack. It's really hard to make a stem cell line if only one in a million converts, and it's really hard to make a useful stem cell line if it gives you cancer because you jackhammered genes randomly into a genome that already had them. This method gets passed that and makes the process much more streamlined. Making cancer-free stemcell lines.efficiently.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Just another example of how, ALL, LIBERAL POLITICS IS ENDLESS STREAM OF ABORTIONS !!!!!!
HOW, can they believe they are SMART !?!?!?!?!?!?