Medical Milestone: Scientists Reset Human Stem Cells

SternisheFan sends news that researchers from the University of Cambridge have made a breakthrough in the production of human pluripotent stem cells. The goal when developing this kind of stem cell is to have them as early in the cell's lifecycle as possible, so that they're more like true embryonic stem cells and can fulfill whatever role is needed. But all of them made so far are advanced slightly down their developmental pathway. The new work, published in the journal Cell (abstract), has found a way to "reset" the cells by introducing two genes that induce a developmental "ground state."

Comments

Re:hoooray

[justcauseisjustthat]

I can understand the cynicism , but allow the early adopters to pay the extremely high prices so that better and better, less expensive versions and techniques can be made.

The amazing thing about nature, it will always find a way to kill you! Sooner or later she's going to get you. Appreciate the beauty :-)

Well this should piss off everybody

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Since you know, righties hate stem cell research and lefties hate genetic engineering. (Which this apparently uses when they insert a couple of genes. Yeah, I'm cynical so go ahead and mod me down.)

Replacement Organs

[old_kennyp]

I would love to know if and when this sort of research will be able to provide replacement organs for those in need.
My Wife had Kidney failure 14 years ago, and receive a family members kidney 4 years later. The cost and problems associated with anti rejection drugs, although minor compared to Dialysis, do take their toll.
I am dreading the day the current kidney fails and as it health is slowly declining, that will be sometime in the next 10 years probably

To be able to have a new kidney created from her own cells would negate the need to most of those drugs and the associated issues with them. To me it would be work $10 - 20k to have one made

Re:hoooray

[Idou]

This is absolutely right, and I would go further to say that this kind of technology cannot be perfected without mass adoption. For instance, there is priceless value to the smart phone industry of having billions of "testers," an expansive variety of users that drives a healthy community of app developers, and a high enough density of adoption to justify wireless infrastructure investment. In the end, the economic value of the combined smart-phone user base is probably many times more than whatever resources the 1%ers could pool together to invent a technology that only they would use.

Now, consider the fact that medical treatment carries significantly more intrinsic risk to the user than smart-phone usage (though user born risk varies. . .), and it is hard to see why 1%ers would try to monopolize this technology. On the contrary, I think any rational person with significant wealth and interest would invest in ways to bring this technology to a large enough population in order to ensure related treatments could be confirmed safe at a statistical level.