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| Skin yields stem cell clue to diseases |
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By Nic Fleming, Science Correspondent
Scientists have created stem cells from skin taken from patients with seven different diseases, raising hopes for potential new treatments. The breakthrough will allow researchers to gain insights into the cause of illnesses including Type 1 diabetes, Down's syndrome and Huntington's disease. Last November researchers in Japan and America developed induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells, which can apparently transform into any of the 200 or so different cells found in the body. Dr Willy Lensch and colleagues at the Harvard Medical School have used this technique to develop IPS cell lines from seven diseases. Dr Lensch said: "This will help us to understand the environmental causes that push these undefined cells to become diseases. "We can lok at what is happening to the hormones, the genes, the growth factors, and then compare that to cells that don't have the mutations, and learn new things." A team at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts also reported that they had seen improvements in rodents with Parkinson's disease using reprogrammed IPS cells. Rudolf Jaenisch, who led the research, said: "This experiment shows that in-vitro reprogrammed cells can in principle be used to treat Parkinson's disease." |
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