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After nearly a decade of setbacks and false starts, stem-cell science finally seems to be hitting its stride. Just a year after Japanese scientists first reported that they had generated stem cells by reprogramming adult skin cells - without using embryos - American researchers have managed to use that groundbreaking technique to achieve another scientific milestone. They created the first nerve cells from reprogrammed stem cells - an important demonstration of the potential power of stem-cell-based treatments to cure disease...
...Kevin Eggan at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Christopher Henderson at Columbia University, the 13-person team reported online today in Science Express that they had generated motor neurons from the skin cells of two elderly patients with a rare form of ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, a progressive neurodegenerative condition. The new study marks an important first step on the road toward real stem-cell-based therapies, and also answers several plaguing questions about the pioneering stem-cell technique known as induced pluripotent stem cell, or iPS, generation...
...first described by Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka, who, in 2007, showed that the introduction of four genes into an adult human skin cell could reprogram it back to an embryonic state (Yamanaka had reported the same achievement in mice the previous year). Like embryonic stem cells, these reprogrammed adult cells could be coaxed into becoming any other type of cell - from skin to nerve to muscle. But researchers questioned whether the new stem cells would behave as predictably or as safely as embryonic stem cells, or whether iPS would consistently yield usable cells. "Our work shows that the original method...
Researchers also questioned whether iPS would work with delicate cells from older people or with cells taken from patients with disease (Yamanaka used skin cells from healthy middle-aged people in his study). Eggan and Henderson tackled both issues at once, by working with cells from two siblings, ages 82 and 89, who both had ALS. It turned out that generating iPS cells from older patients proved no more difficult than growing them from younger ones, says Eggan. "This study puts those issues definitively to rest," he says. "It opens the door to being able to make patient-specific stem...
...answers to those questions, says Eggan, may come in a matter of "months, not years." It's still unclear whether the new iPS nerve cells can live up to the gold standard of cells created from human embryonic stem cells, but Eggan, Henderson and their colleagues are confident that their current achievement brings stem-cell science one step closer to the original and ultimate goal: cures for diseases such as ALS, Alzheimer's and diabetes...