Nerve Cells Made From Blood Cells

BarbaraHudson writes: CBC reports that Canadian scientists are turning blood into nerve cells. They do so by manipulating stem cells that have been taken from a patient's blood, eventually switching them into neural stem cells (abstract). These can then give rise to multiple different nerve cells suitable for use in the rest of the body. Team leader Mick Bhatia said, "We can actually take a patient's blood sample, as routinely performed in a doctor's office, and with it we can produce one million sensory neurons. We can also make central nervous system cells." They're working on turning the neural stem cells into motor neurons for treatment of diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Comments

Re: Query

[NotInHere]

Welcome to slashdot!

Re:Wouldn't the new cells have the same diseases?

[NotInHere]

If you are researching in the Neuroscience field, you have a simple descision: either you accept that most grant money is inside the "curing Altzheimer" corner, and start constructing a story how your research can heal patients from Altzheimer, Parkinson or HIV, or you are heroic and don't get grant money. Your competition does get the money though, so you end up with them having an advantage.

I mean this is an effect of giving money only to research that has curing these illnesses as goal. If you do the groundwork, you don't get any money, so you have to do some of the higher level stuff too, which perhaps others would do if grants were fairly distributed. You can debate whether this is good or bad, both sides have their points.

Re: Query

[crimson tsunami]

And you my friend, didn't even read the post you attempted to reply to...

Thats just standard level retardedness apparently.

Re:Wouldn't the new cells have the same diseases?

[durrr]

Parkinsons and alzheimers are neurodegenerative diseases, it takes time for the degeneration to happen.

It's like replacing a rust eaten component with a new shiny steel one. Yes it will also rust eventually but it will keep things working until then.

Re:Wouldn't the new cells have the same diseases?

[rmdingler]

I'm unclear as to why the new cells wouldn't be subject to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Wouldn't they just get the same diseases as the existing cells? Same genetics and environment should lead to the same result.

Both diseases often overcome a patient later in life, leading us to believe the degenerative effects might be forestalled further by the introduction of healthy young nerve cells.

It seems like this would be more helpful for trauma treatments where the neurological damage was caused by an event that will not be repeated.

It is helpful for the study of all human neurological problems, as human neural cells are difficult to acquire for research purposes. FTA: most research is done with a line of rat neural cells.

Re:Wouldn't the new cells have the same diseases?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is a pretty huge problem. People want to skip all the necessary intermediate steps (like ensuring you are measuring the correct thing) and jump right to the cure. There are tons of examples where some assay is used over and over but no one has ever really fully characterized what is going on. Like this:

For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on--with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.

The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.

He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.

Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using-- not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.

I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic example of cargo cult science.

http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html

Re:Wouldn't the new cells have the same diseases?

[St.Creed]

I think that article should be required reading for any scientist, and repeated before running ANY experiment (on animals or humans).

Re:Wouldn't the new cells have the same diseases?

[ScentCone]

which perhaps others would do if grants were fairly distributed

Translation: everybody who wants grant money should get it. There should be an infinite supply of other people's money so that everyone engaged in their own pet field of research should be able to do whatever they want, indefinitely, without worrying about demonstrating to anyone else that what they're working on is more interesting, more useful, or even sane, compared to the next guy's project. That would be truly fair. The guy looking to synthesize unicorn DNA from horses and narwhals should definitely get some funds diverted his way from that jerk across the hall in the other lab who's working on that stupid HIV vaccine. Because otherwise it's NOT FAIR.

Re:Wouldn't the new cells have the same diseases?

[ScentCone]

In other words, you're looking for the people doing the baseline, basic research to be better at demonstrating the importance of their work in the grant marketplace.

Re: Wouldn't the new cells have the same diseases?

[toppavak]

In most cases they would, the thinking is that once you can grown custom neurons outside of the body, you can also modify them to be resistant to or able to reverse the disorder. For example, what if you could re-engineer normal neurons from a patient with Huntington's disease. Injecting them back in, maybe they would replace some of the dying neurons and at least diminish the effects of the disease. If you could engineer glial cells that can properly transport beta-amyloid or are hyper effective at it, maybe they can compensate for cells that can't and slow down the progression of Alzheimer's to push it back beyond reasonable human lifespans. The other key idea is now you have a way of producing cells that carry the disease genes without having to cut open someone's brain to get at them. This is one of the first necessary tools to study and develope new treatments to fight these diseases for which no human-derived models exist. This is probably the likliest short term benefit of such technology (ie benefit in 10-20 years rather than 20-50 year timeframe) accelerating the pace of drug discovery.

Re:Query

[someone1234]

My guess: probably yes, but it would be impractical.
Blood is more readily available.

Good, this is the future

[50000BTU_barbecue]

I wish I could repair the arthrosis in my neck, I'm an otherwise fit man and I get nailed down by bizarre pains that strike me down when I walk. I can't bike anymore either as my neck hurts like crazy. All I need is to regrow the thin layer of biological Teflon between my vertebrae I guess.

I'm baffled as to why my body seems to be able to grow an endless supply of utterly useless hairs and cherry angiomas, but a few microns worth of slippery fat on the end of my bones? Nope. Not happening.

Clearly my cells were able to do it ONCE, can we do it again, please?

This is the future, electronics is mature, computers have become this hermetic playground whose benefits elude me, but biology is really still in its infancy.

Re:Good, this is the future

[Ol Olsoc]

I'm baffled as to why my body seems to be able to grow an endless supply of utterly useless hairs and cherry angiomas, but a few microns worth of slippery fat on the end of my bones? Nope. Not happening.

Clearly my cells were able to do it ONCE, can we do it again, please?

This is the future, electronics is mature, computers have become this hermetic playground whose benefits elude me, but biology is really still in its infancy.

It's because we are trying to make science do what we are not made for, You and I have lived long past our useful and biological lifetimes.

I was listening to a Ted Talk on stopping the aging process. It was interesting, but in the end, the people involved sounded rather demented, like Dr Frankenstein only less shrill.

And sad to say, all the years added to our lives are at the wrong end. If I could be in my 30's for an extra 40 years, that might be okay. But even the people who live to be in theier early second century tend to be more like prunes than people. That's what we are attempting to do, live out half our life in nursing homes.

No thank you, I'd trade off being dead now instead of that horrible drawn out death.

Re:Good, this is the future

[cwsumner]

biology is really still in its infancy

To say the least!

We have design drawings and manuals for computers and such. Somebody a long time ago lost the manuals for the human body. ;-}
Unless we can find copies of them, it will be a long grind to make more from scratch.

Until then, our best are not much more than tinkerers. 8-{
(With all due respect to the hard-working medical researchers! Thank you.)

Re: Wouldn't the new cells have the same diseases?

[j]

Related to this?

"Study pinpoints the likeliest rodent sources of future human infectious diseases"

http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...

I'm glad to see...

[Bartles]

...that we have found another excellent use for embryonic stem cells.

Re:I'm glad to see...

[Bartles]

Bingo.

BS "we did it first" claims

[virtualXTC]

It is definitely no the first time it has been done with adult blood, this was done in in 2013

The scientists that published that just must not be up on their literature or the author is just confused and the scientists are trying to talk up their research.

Re:Future applications

[lucien86]

"... The main problem with an in vivo approach would be targeting specific locations or cells rather than miniaturization. How do you get the nanobots to go only where you want them to go?"

Only one of about a dozen critical problems with using real nanobots. The most obvious of course is that 'nanobots' don't actually yet exist.. For a brief period I worked on assemblers way back around 1991, they were about 10 to 20 years away then - and they are still about 10 to 20 years away today..

To build an assembler for real the starting price is at least 1 to 2 billion $ and you also need working Strong AI tech.. and that 10 years.. Then add in another 10 to 20 years to get the things up to speed as a medical technology. :) The main danger is dying od old age first..

Re:Wouldn't the new cells have the same diseases?

[lucien86]

Great quote cargo cult science is a great name for it. I know - am working on (against) what has to be one of the biggest examples in the whole of science - general relativity. In short general relativity has a really stupid flaw that makes the whole theory a complete nonsense, but this flaw only really appears in the FTL part of its geometry.
One fairly simple way of describing the flaw - The speed of light C isn't just a speed but also has a direction (is a vector). Put light as vector into the system and space time fits into three dimensions instead of four, it turns out that time is point like and not an actual dimension. - Space time was actually 'borrowing' the dimension from the spatial direction of light or other relativistic objects. Dimensional time still exists but only as an abstraction or on quantum scales. There are many physicists who know about this and other problems with general relativity, but there is an extremely aggressive establishment that cannot tolerate any substantive criticism of the theory. .

turning blood into nerve cells

[jan_jes]

I have heard this research first time through this youtube video and read about this is in Canadian press release. Few years ago this same team has successfully converted skin cells into blood. So i think this research of converting one cell type to other plays huge role in future in curing diseases...

I always knew

[Ol Olsoc]

If there is a cure for these diseases these diseases, this is degeneration to do it.