“Latest Stem Cells News”

Sheng Ding, the leader of a group of researchers at the Scripps Research Institute of the La Jolla University in California, spoke about using chemistry-related techniques to obtain pluripotent stem cells from a miniscule section of skin at Milan University in a conference on stem cells.

Experts were able to cause some skin cells in mice to regress to their embryonic state by injecting four proteins into an adult mouse without performing any sort of DNA manipulation. A technique that, according to their idea, could be safer than techniques based on genetic manipulation. The cells obtained by intervening directly on DNA have proven to be potentially dangerous since in the long term, they have caused tumors in mice. Acting through proteins (and not through the genes that produce them) should allow this risk to be avoided.

The technique was described in a study published recently in ‘Cell Stem Cell’. Sheng Ding, dressed in a pink shirt, wearing a backpack, and looking like a student, spoke about his research. “Recent discoveries about the biology of stem cells can help us to find new approaches to treat various diseases,” he explained in his speech. “In order to reach these objectives a better comprehension of the mechanisms that control the destiny of stem cells is fundamental, as well as further studies into more efficient methods to manipulate them,” he reflected.

This is the path that Ding and his colleagues have followed in their lab in California: “Our most recent discovery represents a step towards controlling cells and the ‘self restoration’, survival, differentiation, and reprogramming mechanisms of pluripotent stem cells”.

Currently, scientists are faced with “just a promising path to explore. Clinical applications are far from a reality,” specified Fulvio Gandolfi, head of Unistem’s biomedical embryology lab (the stem cell research center of the university of Milan).

Certainly, if initial results are confirmed, he continued “Ding’s discovery would have important repercussions since they would solve a series of difficult ethical questions”. First of all, explained the expert, “we would be able to obtain pluripotent cells without using embryos”. It would suffice to have an adult cell and induce it to regress by using chemical techniques. There is another advantage though: any somatic cell that can regress into an embryonic state can be reprogrammed to replicate into any other human tissue, from heart to nerve cells. “Think about an elderly person who has just suffered a heart attack. We could obtain heart cells just by scraping away a little bit of skin,” observed Gandolfi, “without being forced to remove any damaged heart tissue. The same goes for nerve cells, which are difficult to obtain and subject to the effects of age”