Source: Reuters
Posted: June 6, 2007 1:37PM EDT
Summary:
Reuters reports on a the discovery of a new method to make skin stem cells possess traits of embryonic stem cells, perhaps ending the ethical controversy that has surrounded embryonic stem cell research:
"Researchers have taken ordinary skin cells from a mouse and reprogrammed them to look and act like embryonic stem cells in a long-promised experiment that provides an alternative way to get the valued and controversial cells." Researchers caution that the finding is not yet ready to be tested using human cells and may not be for some time.
Stem cell researcher Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts describes how the function of proteins are involved in changing the cells in order to give them greater flexibility:
"They identified four proteins, called factors, that are active only in mouse embryonic stem cells and not in adult cells. "You introduce those four factors, which induce or kick these cells into a process which we call the reprogramming process," Jaenisch said in a telephone interview. The ordinary skin cells, which normally would only make skin and which would die in the lab after a while, instead proliferated in lab dishes. And when injected into other mouse embryos, they created chimeras -- animals with the genetic characteristics of two different individuals." He believes this finding could potentially enable genetic diseases to be treated using stem cells.
