Word: stemming
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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...
...does all this science affect the millions of patients banking on the promise of stem-cell therapies? Each of the investigators stress that their results, while exciting, have not yet been tested with human cells, although those studies are already under way. But the basic principles involved in generating stem cells in mice and man are the same, and with a few modifications, the scientists hope to have similar success with human cells. "It's likely to be the case that since this discovery is based on such fundamental cell biology principles, that the overarching rules [for mouse and human...
...indeed possible to take a skin cell from an adult patient and tweak it to revert to an embryonic-type cell, that would mean that any patient needing a stem-cell-based treatment could, in theory, heal himself. Last year, Yamanaka was the first to announce success with this approach, by exposing the cells to four growth factors and nutrients. But the stem cells he generated were genetically abnormal and unstable. Building on the initial technique, Yamanaka's group, as well as those led by Rudolph Jaenisch at Whitehead and Konrad Hochedlinger at HSCI, showed that the process does indeed...
...meantime, Eggan's group has provided an alternative method for generating customized stem cells that would take advantage of the early-stage embryos frozen in IVF centers around the country. The most reliable way of generating patient-specific stem cells remains nuclear transfer-taking the nucleus from a patient's skin cell and inserting it into an egg that has had its nucleus removed. This hybrid then begins to divide, and within a few days, generates stem cells that are genetically identical to the patient. The problem, however, as Eggan puts it, is that "there are never any extra unfertilized...