A Leap Forward for Stem Cells
(sz) After plodding along at a snail’s pace over the past five years, stem-cell research—at least the scientific side of it—took a few bold steps forward Wednesday. As Congress gets set to vote on legislation that would expand federal funding for the field to include studies on excess IVF embryos, researchers in the U.S. and Japan announced exciting advances in their ability to turn back the clock on older, adult cells and get them to generate embryonic stem cells. The findings could expand the ways that doctors and patients eventually generate customized stem cells for treatments.
The work, published in the journals Nature and Cell Stem Cell, represent true milestones, not only in the field of stem-cell research, but in the broader discipline of early biological development. Led by Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, one group successfully coaxed a mouse skin cell to reverse its development and return to an embryonic stage at which it produced stem cells. Two other groups, based at Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT, obtained similar results working independently. In the final paper, Kevin Eggan, also at HSCI, showed that even fertilized mouse zygotes at the one-cell stage can be reprogrammed to generate stem cells. Previously, biologists had believed that once fertilized embryos embarked on the developmental path, they could not be manipulated to produce stem cells. more…
From: »Time«