Date: October 25, 2012
Summary:
Coaxing a humble skin cell to become a jack-of-all-trades pluripotent stem cell is feat so remarkable it was honored earlier this month with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Stem cell pioneer Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, showed that using a virus to add just four genes to the skin cell allowed it to become pluripotent, or able to achieve many different developmental fates. But researchers and clinicians have been cautious about promoting potential therapeutic uses for these cells because the insertion of the genes could render the cells cancerous.
Now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have devised an efficient and safer way to make these induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, by using just the proteins that the genes encode.
The research is published in the Oct. 26 issue of Cell.
Coaxing a humble skin cell to become a jack-of-all-trades pluripotent stem cell is feat so remarkable it was honored earlier this month with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Stem cell pioneer Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, showed that using a virus to add just four genes to the skin cell allowed it to become pluripotent, or able to achieve many different developmental fates. But researchers and clinicians have been cautious about promoting potential therapeutic uses for these cells because the insertion of the genes could render the cells cancerous.
Now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have devised an efficient and safer way to make these induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, by using just the proteins that the genes encode.
The research is published in the Oct. 26 issue of Cell.
