A squad of biologists has turned mouse pancreas tissue into specialized cells, the same ones that go missing in juvenile diabetes.
The shiner study, light-emitting diode by Qiao Zhou of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, opens a new avenue to "regenerative medicine," in which physicians remake patient cells into tissues that can be secondhand to treat diabetes and heart and brain ailments.
magazine. "It was surprising how easy it was" once Zhou and his colleagues establish that only three genes trigger the "reprogramming" of the cells. Melton warns, however, that treatments with these reprogrammed cells must be tried in human cells and are likely years away.
"It would indeed be very nice if we could convert any one cell type into a dissimilar one," says cell life scientist Alex Meissner of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass. He called the study "a very elegant and important contribution to the reprogramming field."
The reputation of these "reprogrammed" cells follows the 2006 discovery that similar viral injections � with different genes � could turn skin cells into embryo-like cells.
In the three-year study, researchers infected the pancreases of dozens of 2-month-old mice with a virus that contained terzetto genes active in insulin-producing beta cells. More than 20% of the infected pancreas cells turned into beta cells, a rate hundreds of times better than past times attempts to turn embryonic stem cells into such specialized tissues.
Embryonic stem cells are the master cells from which specialized tissue arises. Harvesting them involves the destruction of embryos, which is controversial. Reprogrammed cells could remove regenerative medicine from the political and religious arena, although Melton and others order research progress requires all cell types.
Most intriguing, the reprogrammed cells made the beta cell switch in only three days. And they manifestly did so directly, without any signs of first dividing into less-specialized embryo-like tissues, which take weeks to develop into specific organ tissues.
Juvenile diabetics and some adult (or type 2) diabetes patients suffer from a lack of beta cells. If ordinary pancreas cells could be converted into beta cells, they volunteer a way of life to discourse for these patients. Doctors would silent need to prevent patient role immune systems from destroying these new cells, exactly as they killed the original ones. A alike approach power make successor heart or brain tissues, Melton says.
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