Word: skin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...edge of the sidewalk and spoke to it for a while, moved it along the palm of her hand, put it rightside up and upside down, stroked it, and finally she took off the leafy part and left the veins exposed, a delicate green ghost was reflected against her skin,” writes Cortázar. When La Maga disappears, a despairing Oliveira returns to Buenos Aires to track her down...
This week, scientists at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) reported the first success in generating new populations of insulin-producing cells using skin cells of Type 1 diabetes patients. The achievement involved the newer embryo-free technique for generating stem cells, and marked the first step toward building a treatment that could one day replace a patient's faulty insulin-making cells with healthy, functioning ones. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
Douglas Melton, co-director of HSCI, and his team took skin cells from two Type 1 diabetes patients, exposed the cells to a cocktail of three genes that converted them back to an embryonic state - which are referred to as pluripotent stem cells - then instructed the newly reborn cells to grow into beta cells, the cells in the pancreas that secrete insulin. In Type 1 diabetes, these beta cells no longer work to break down the glucose that floods the body after each meal, leading to blood-sugar spikes that can damage the kidneys and heart...
...example, it turns out that the new beta cells can be made to survive the attack by the immune system, then the next step would be to return the functional beta cells, generated through strategies like the one used by Melton, back into the patients from whom the original skin cells came. But even that won't happen until more testing is done on the cells to ensure they are both safe and effective...
...problem is that the cocktail of genes that the HSCI team used to turn back the clock on the patients' skin cells work by integrating themselves into the genome of the skin cell with the help of a virus. Such embedding of foreign matter isn't ideal for a treatment designed for the clinic, since changes in the genome could result in a variety of potential problems, including the formation of tumors and uncontrolled cell growth. Melton's group, as well as those in other stem-cell labs around the world, are working to substitute these dangerous genes and viruses...