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Stanford scientists convert skin cells to neurons Skin cells turned into brain cells while bypassing embryonic state January 27, 2010. www.startribune.com Cells from mouse tails were manipulated into neurons able to form connections crucial to brain function. In a feat of biological alchemy, scientists at Stanford have turned the skin cells of a mouse into brain cells without ever taking the cells back to the embryonic state, raising hopes that medicine may be approaching a new era. The work by scientists at Stanford University was described in a paper published online Wednesday in the journal Nature, and builds on the 2007 discovery that human skin cells could be reprogrammed back to the embryonic state. The reprogramming of human cells was first accomplished by the labs of James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University in Japan. "To me, this is huge progress for biomedical science," said Su-Chun Zhang, a University of Wisconsin stem cell researcher and professor of anatomy and neurology. Zhang said the technique could one day allow doctors to treat a patient who has lost a certain kind of brain cell by converting other cells already in the patient's brain. This would be much simpler than current techniques. "This is a long-awaited breakthrough. It makes the prospect realistic that any cell type can be converted into any other, once the magic combination of transcription factors is known," said Thomas Graf, a stem cell scientist at the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain, who was not involved in the Nature paper. The scientists at Stanford used techniques pioneered by Yamanaka and Thomson, searching for genes that can be inserted into one kind of cell to convert it into another kind. So far, master regulators called transcription factors have proved to be the best candidates. The Stanford researchers were able to accomplish the change from mouse skin cell to neuron by inserting three transcription factors. |
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