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Everyone knows about the potential of stem cells in the medical field, but until today, no one had found a way to recognize them in an organ or tissue. Thanks to a new study published in the ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ by 2007 Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, Mario Capecchi and researcher at Cattolica University in Rome, Eugenio Sangiorgi, this obstacle has been overcome. Experts have found a new technique to find stem cells hidden in the pancreas.
“Although the journals talk a lot about this topic,” said Sangiorgi, who has collaborated with Capecchi for years, “in reality, we experts don’t understand them very well. For example, we don’t have a method to distinguish between a stem cell and another cell a priori in the same tissue. By observing the cell’s behavior we can then figure it out.”
In other words, when a researcher observes a particular tissue, it is not immediately possible to identify the cell with certainty and isolate it.
In some cases, like in the pancreas, until a few years ago, it was doubted if these cells were even present in the organ.
“Together with Professor Capecchi,” continued Sangiorgi, “some time ago we created a method to mark stem cells in tissues. A sort of little flag that could help us label the cells that we were looking for.” To arrive at this conclusion, they used a portion of DNA, which in an animal model, is activated with the use of a drug. Once the marker is ‘turned on’, a special fluorescent protein is produced (which won its discoverers, Osamui Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Tsien, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2008) and is able to illuminate the stem cells. “To understand if they were actually stem cells,” continued Sangiorgi, “we just had to wait: a normal cell will die sooner or later, while a stem cell maintains its capacity to divide and replicate.”
In the new article, Sangiorgi and Capecchi demonstrated with their new technique that certain cells located in the pancreas, called acinar cells, are stem cells in reality. These cells are responsible for the production of an important digestive enzyme.
This is an interesting discovery from another point of view: “In general,” said Sangiorgi, “it was thought that stem cells were cells without a precise function, and that they were undifferentiated and had no set objectives other than tissue regeneration. Instead we have learned that acinar cells, although they are stem cells, have a precise role in the pancreas. They are like soldiers who perform their job normally for the army, but if they are needed they are also available to work for the government too.”
This work has paved the way for new studies on stem cells including their potential risks: “Thanks to their extraordinary reproductive power, they can even become carcinogenic. But if we manage to discover a way to isolate and study them in other organs, we will be able to analyze their properties in-depth and provide many responses on how they function.”
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