Scientists Turn Skin Cells Into Beating Heart Muscle

An anonymous reader writes "By taking skin cells and turning them into stem cells, a technique that is already well known, researchers at Technion Israel Institute of Technology were able to generate beating heart cells — a medical first. 'We have shown that it's possible to take skin cells from an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young — the equivalent to the stage of his heart cells when he was just born,' Lior Gepstein, study author and professor of medicine said."

Comments

A question for the bio geeks..

[wbr1]

By taking skin cells and turning them into stem cells as the precursor to other cell lines that match the patients genetic makeup. are you increasing the chances of cancer?
In my certainly uninformed view, skin cells are exposed to more radiation, thus more likely to have replication errors in their DNA, then adding the stress of modifying the cell to another form, I wonder what that does to it from a replication standpoint. It is nice to have fresh heat muscle I am sure, but to suddenly find yourself with melanoma in the heart would be a bummer.

Re:A question for the bio geeks..

[Biotech_is_Godzilla]

I'd agree about the imperfect stemming/heart cell conversion thing, but not with this:

Propagating genetic errors is certainly a concern here, but the same concerns exist for genetic transfer in breeding generally.

They're not exactly the same concerns. 'Normal' somatic cells, cells of the body which aren't stem cells, have a much higher capacity for surviving with DNA damage in their genomes than stem cells. This is because they have stopped growing & proliferating and hence stopped replicating their DNA, and a major method by which DNA damage is detected in the cell is by "testing whether DNA replication can occur". When DNA replication fails or is particularly difficult there's a good chance a proliferating cell (i.e. stem cells) will activate DNA damage checkpoints and die or senesce (stop growing permanently).

The methods used to make "stemmed" cells (induced pluripotent stem cells) usually involve introducing some oncogenes which ultimately mess up activation of the DNA damage checkpoints. Also, the genes that are introduced during the process of "stemming" are randomly scattered into the genome, potentially inserting into and knocking out the cell's tumour suppressor genes, so cells which may already be in a DNA-damaged state can be further damaged while being deliberately converted to a highly proliferating state. The process selects for cells which can proliferate even when damaged, which is not ideal as far as preventing cancer is concerned. New methods, using drugs and not the introduction of oncogenes, have been produced, but I don't think they're commonly used yet (correct me if I'm wrong, someone).

I don't pretend to understand what's unique about how DNA damage is dealt with during sex to prevent mutations being propagated to the next generation. I'm not sure that much work has been done on it, but germline sperm and egg-producing cells are stem cells, so damage isn't likely to be that well tolerated in them, and if sperm is very damaged it's likely to be inviable and won't lead to conception. I had to go off and research this to have something to say about it, during which I found the following tidbit: having sex/ spanking off once a day gets rid of damaged sperm and seems to be a way of maintaining a bloke's fertility in tip-top condition. So blokes are probably biologically programmed to masturbate, in case you needed an excuse!

immortality

[Anonymous Coward]

every advancement in medicine, and health is another step towards immortality.
Only problem is, you can replace everything in the body except the brain.

generations from now people will be living over 200 years of age, I can see new problems arising.
Over population is a problem and the average lifespan is under 70.

I see a future of hybrid human technology species

Re:More of this, please

[geekoid]

Great, so there is a copy of you on the internet, then what? is the meat you going to go kill itself? Or you can all create one big conglomerate of personalities, which would then stagnate.
Pass.

The machine alone is too limiting.

Re:More of this, please

[WillDraven]

Personally, I'm hoping that we get back on track with space travel, and then I can upload myself into an interstellar space probe. If nano-tech gets good enough, you could maybe even reconstitute a physical body if you find someplace interesting to land. With an electronic mind, you could alter your perception of time so the boring parts of floating between stars for years would only last a few minutes subjectively.

Re:More of this, please

[geekmux]

Hurry up already. I want to see easily replaceable hearts in MY life time...also ever other organ. IN fact, just full body clone replacements and transplant my head. .

Sure, no problem! I'm certain we'll have all that technology and more within the next 30 - 50 years.

Oh, I'm sorry, did you expect insurance to pay for ANY of that shit? Ha! Good luck. Might as well forget that retirement villa, you're gonna blow your 401k just trying to save your ticker, because even at that age, insurance will still be just as corrupt, and the medical industrial complex will continue its obscenely profitable model of treating instead of curing.