Source: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine
Date: July 16, 2010
Summary:
Take a skin cell from a patient with Type 1 diabetes. Strip out everything that made it a skin cell, then reprogram it to grow into a colony of pancreatic beta cells. Implant these into your patient and voilà! She’s producing her own insulin like a pro.
This type of personalized therapy is the ultimate goal of most stem cell research. But to reliably achieve that goal for treating diabetes and other diseases, there’s a whole network of genes, proteins and miniscule chemical reactions to decipher first.
Findings published today in the journal Nature put us a step closer to untangling that web. University of North Carolina biochemist Yi Zhang, PhD and his team have discovered that a protein called Tet 1 helps stem cells renew themselves and stay pluripotent—able to become any type of cell in the body.
