Scientists create cells like human embryonic stem cells without using embryos

[Sir Stewart]

Link

 

By Colin Nickerson, Boston Globe Staff

 

In breakthroughs that burst like bombshells in biology's hottest field, rival scientists in Japan and the United States have announced that they successfully turned human tissue into cells that behave like embryonic stem cells -- potentially medicine's most powerful weapon against an array of deadly diseases.

 

The research seems certain to accelerate the pace of stem cell research. By using a simple recipe of four genes to "reprogram" ordinary adult skin cells into an embryonic state, the new processes bypass the ethical, religious, and political objections to creating -- and destroying -- cloned human embryos from which to cull the precious stem cells, which until now most scientists had seen as the most realistic method.

 

The ground-breaking work at Kyoto University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison also could lead the Bush administration to re-think its virtual ban on funding for embryonic stem cell research, perhaps opening the money spigots to at least those labs limiting themselves to researching stem cell batches, called lines, derived using the new procedures from cells acquired with cheek swabs or other such mundane means.

 

Stem cell scientists around the world hailed the work in humans as revolutionary.

 

"It's a bit like learning how to turn lead into gold," said Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer for the Massachusetts-based research firm Advanced Cell Techology. "If perfected, there will no longer be any need for human eggs [in stem cell research], or any of the controversy associated with destroying embryos."

 

He stressed, however, that "this is early stage research, and that we should not abandon other areas of stem cell research."

 

Shinya Yamanaka, the Kyoto researcher who earlier this year triggered a tsunami of excitement by forging functional embryonic-like stem cells from the tails of lab mice, accomplished his latest feat by using a potent cocktail of four genes that, when inserted into adult human skin cells, effectively turns back the clock and causes the tissue to regress to a stem-cell stage. The research was published today in the journal Cell.

 

University of Wisconsin scientists, in a near dead-heat finish with Yamanaka's team, also announced the reprogramming of adult human tissue into embryonic-like stem cells. They used a similar process, but a different combination of genes, or "transcription factors," that control the activity of other genes.

 

The Wisconsin results, which lent greater strength to Yamanka's research because the work was accomplished by more than one team, will be published Thursday by the journal Science.

 

"The induced cells do all the things embryonic stem cells do," said James Thomson, a stem cell pioneer who oversees the University of Wisconsin lab where scientist Junying Yu led the revolutionary research. "It's going to completely change the field."

There were plenty of hurrahs. But you could almost hear the gnashing of teeth in top research centers in Cambridge, Boston, and beyond, where teams of scientists had been closing on similar results.

 

"There's been a real race, and the competion has been intense, and this research represents a huge 'first' in a critically important area," said Leonard I. Zon, head of the stem cell research program at Children's Hospital Boston. "This is work of tremendous significance that is going to open a lot of doors in biology and medicine.

 

"But it doesn't mean the larger race is over," Zon said. "Enormous new discoveries are waiting in the field."

 

In fact, however, the new discoveries could dramatically alter the field. Proof that cells with the capabilities of embryonic stem cells can be engineered from adult tissue could eventually spell doom for controversial research at Harvard and other top centers focusing on creating embryonic stem cell lines from cloned embryos.

 

The cells made in the labs in Kyoto and Madison, called induced pluripotent stem cells, appear to function more or less the same as true embryonic cells, seemingly capable of replicating themselves endlessly and producing any of the 220 more specialized cells that form the body's blood, tissue, and organs. Still, these are early days and there are potential pitfalls.

 

It may prove in the long term, for example, that embryonic cloning -- for all its controversy -- yields purer, more "natural" stem cells than those engineered from adult cells using genes associated with cancer, tricky retroviruses, and other genetic materials that are employed in the new research.

 

"What patients need is the fastest, most effective way forward," said Douglas Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. "Until the alternative [approach] is shown to produce the same kind of extremely versatile, normal cells that we derive from previously frozen human blastocysts, it would be unfair to patients to renounce" use of embryonic clones for stem cell research.

 

Stem cells are thought to hold extraordinary potential for medical research and eventual therapies for an array of lethal ailments, ranging from Parkinson's disease to severed spinal cords. Stem cells made from a patient's own body might be used to create new genetically identical tissue -- heart cells, nerve cells, liver cells, and so on -- to repair, say, diseased hearts or the ravages of juvenile diabetes.

 

"From skin cells in a single 10-centimeter lab dish, you can get multiple [stem cell] lines," Yamanaka said from Kyoto.

 

Opponents and critics of stem cell research involing cloned human embryos were quick to hail the new methods. Said Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, spokesman for the National Catholic Bioethics Center: "This breakthrough effects the ethical discussion in a very positive way. These new strageies remind us ... it is never necessary for laboratory researchers to cross fundamental lines in order for science and medicine to advance."

 

Scientifically, it appears that reprogramming techniques may speed forward stem cell research by years, even decades -- only last summer, researchers were predicting that the forging of human stem cells from adult tissue lay somewhere in the far future.

 

Most stem cell scientists had believed that the cloning of human embryos through a process know as somatic cell nuclear transfer represented the best bet for producing useable human embryonic stem cells in the next five- or 10 years.

[EL the Famous]

this would be awesome. hopefully, it shakes out.

[Atticus]

this is just part of the vast right wing bush/cheney conspiracy to--

 

wait, what was the topic?

[EL the Famous]

this is just part of the vast right wing bush/cheney conspiracy to--

 

wait, what was the topic?

 

 

you know by the end of the day, someone will do that too...for real.

[cryptique]

So, how long before I start receiving spam with subject lines like "Stem cell breakthrough: add inches to your manhood"?

[Atticus]

has anyone else noted the author's name?

[Beltmann]

has anyone else noted the author's name?

Beat me to it!

[austrya]

So, if a dish of embryos and a dish of skin cells were in a burning building...

[Mr. Kinsley]

Please tell me you're coordinated enough to carry two dishes at once.

[Atticus]

these stems cells are sellouts and/or were supposedly behind 9/11 and also perform better while exposed to the music of sigur ros and/or are illegally migrating to the U.S. and buying bass guitars for folks on former alt-country band websites while radically shifting views on abortion

[austrya]

Please tell me you're coordinated enough to carry two dishes at once.

 

 

Um, they're on opposite sides of the building and you can only take one. Sorry.

[Edie]

In that case, I'll have what he's having.

[quarter23cd]

Every skin cell is sacred.

[stooka]

We currently use cadaver dermis grafts to assist in Rotator Cuff surgeries. Studies indicate after the repair, the skin graft takes on the characteristics of a tendon. This approach allows hope for folks with unrepairable tears and could help them avoid the inevitable replacement of the joint in the future.

[Good Old Neon]

has anyone else noted the author's name?

 

 

[Good Old Neon]

This lends credence to Peter Singers pro-choice argument that, given skin cells now have the potential to become a fully functional human, if this line of research pans out, and it now appears as though it will, should we afford skin cells the same sacredness some associate with human embryos? At this time, I assume most people would say no, but, given these sorts of advances, the line between a naturally occurring embryo and a cloned, or engineered (grown from human skin cells.) embryo becomes blurred.

 

"There are number of things that can be said about the specific speech that Bush made," Peter Singer said. "Essentially if you want to know in one sentence what the fallacy in his argument about the defense of embryos having a right to life was, it consists in the sentence in that speech, you can find it still on the White House website, that these embryos are human and therefore something precious to be protected.

 

"I think that they are human. I don't deny that these embryos are human, that is they are biologically, genetically human. And I don't deny that they are alive either. They are living. You can tell a dead embryo from a living one. But I don't think that's enough to make anything precious and to be protected. My colleague at Princeton Lee Silver has a nice little trick that he does when he's lecturing to his classes. He's a molecular biologist on stem cells." At this point Singer blew his nose into a tissue. "He does what I just did. Or what I pretended to do, I didn't really do it. And then he points out that in this tissue here there are now thousands of human cells, still alive, and each of which contains my genetic code. So, given a bit of technology, we may not be quite there yet but we are not too far off, we could create individual human beings from all of them. And that is true from all parts of your body. You are shedding skin cells, which have the potential to become new human beings. And they are alive -- for a while. They die obviously. But we don't feel that compulsion and obligation to make more human beings from them.

 

"I would argue similarly that the fact that a cell is human and alive and even that it has a potential be become a fully fledged human being is not itself a reason for saying that it has a right to life. That I think requires more. . . . it requires more development than an embryo has, which at the stage we are talking about is not even determinate as to whether it is a single individual or whether it is going to split and become twins or something of that sort."

[PopTodd]

Actually heard a short debate on this on NPR last night.

Both sides were in agreement that it was an exciting breakthrough and would be preferable to using embryonic cells. But the scientific side offered a caveat that.. it would be IF the non-embryonic cells were as effective as the embryonic ones.

 

The pro-life side refused to acknowledge that possibility and simply went on ahead with the fact that the current research has been promising.

 

So they agreed, but in totally different ways.

 

Odd.

[Good Old Neon]

Actually heard a short debate on this on NPR last night.

Both sides were in agreement that it was an exciting breakthrough and would be preferable to using embryonic cells. But the scientific side offered a caveat that.. it would be IF the non-embryonic cells were as effective as the embryonic ones.

 

The pro-life side refused to acknowledge that possibility and simply went on ahead with the fact that the current research has been promising.

 

So they agreed, but in totally different ways.

 

Odd.

 

Well then, I cannot wait to see the look on their faces when it is brought to their attention that like an embryo, every skin cell now has the potential to be a fully functional human being

[caliber66]

Well then, I cannot wait to see the look on their faces when it is brought to their attention that like an embryo, every skin cell now has the potential to be a fully functional human being