Washington: Scientists claim to have made a major breakthrough in generating safer stem cells from adult cells, a discovery which can spark the development of many new types of therapies for people.
Researchers usually use a virus to make the switch but this makes the resulting stem cells "incredibly dangerous" for use in humans as they can cause cancer. Now, a team at Scripps Research Centre has said that they can use harmless proteins to carry out the same task. In fact, they converted adult cells all the way back to the most primitive embryonic-like cells, without using the dangerous genetic manipulations, the 'Cell Stem Cell' journal reported.
According to the scientists, the new technique solves one of the most challenging safety hurdles associated with personalised stem cell-based medicine because for the first time it enables them to make stem cells in the laboratory from adult cells without genetically altering them.
"We are very excited about this breakthrough in generating embryonic-like cells from fibroblasts (cells that gives rise to connective tissue) without using any genetic material. Scientists have been dreaming about this for years," team leader Sheng Ding said.
The scientists accomplished this extraordinarily challenging feat by engineering and using recombinant proteins that is proteins made from the recombination of fragments of DNA from different organisms.
They found that those reprogrammed embryonic-like cells from fibroblasts behave indistinguishably from classic embryonic stem cells in the molecular and functional features, including differentiation into various cell types, such as beating cardiac muscle cells, neurons, and pancreatic cells.