It is still less than a year since the first human IPSCs were derived. One of its supposed downsides as a technique was the need to use retro viruses to effectuate the change from differentiated cell (e.g., skin, or other type of body cell) into pluritpotent stem cell. The fear was this could lead to cancer if the cells were used in therapies.
Then, as reported here at SHS, in mouse studies scientists discovered how to use viruses that disappeared. Now, they have been able to make the change using mouse cells without using viruses at all. From the story:
Japanese scientists have demonstrated a new way to reprogram cells without viruses, an important advance toward the goal of one day turning our own cells into a powerful tool to fight a wide range of diseases.Let us concede that more work has to be done, including translating these approaches from the animal to human model. But this is great news.
The new technique, reported Thursday in the journal Science, appears to be both safer and simpler than previous methods, bypassing the cancer risk associated with using viruses and genes that remain inside a cell.
The Japanese team, led by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, delivered the reprogramming genes into mouse cells with plasmids. Plasmids are essentially small, very stable circles of DNA...
“I think it’s very significant,” Alexander Meissner, an assistant professor at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, said of the new paper. “It shows you really can make these cells without any use of viruses. . . . All of these things are the most basic biology that can be done.”
It looks increasingly to me that Shinya Yamanaka deserves a Nobel Prize for this amazing work.
But would be human cloners need not be too depressed. Just move to California. Thanks to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto of SB 1565, once we have borrowed money to pay for the most expensive buildings money can buy, we will still shell out $300 million a year we don’t have for your research-even if the science moves completely into the IPSC pasture.
