Researchers find Easier Way to Make Stem Cells
By Thomson Financial News,
Thomson Financial News
| 10. 12. 2008
WASHINGTON, Oct 12 (Reuters) - Researchers trying to find ways to transform ordinary skin cells into powerful stem cells said on Sunday they found a shortcut by 'sprinkling' a chemical onto the cells.
Adding the chemical allowed the team at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Massachusetts to use just two genes to transform ordinary human skin cells into more powerful induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells.
'This study demonstrates there's a possibility that instead of using genes and viruses to reprogram cells, one can use chemicals,' said Dr. Doug Melton, who directed the study published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
Melton said Danwei Huangfu, a postdoctoral researcher in his lab, developed the new method.
'The exciting thing about Danwei's work is you can see for the first time that you could sprinkle chemicals on cells and make stem cells,' Melton, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, said in a statement.
Stem cells are the body's master cells, giving rise to all the tissues, organs and blood. Embryonic stem cells are considered the most powerful kinds of stem cells...
Related Articles
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Sarah Kliff and Azeen Ghorayshi, The New York Times | 07.15.2024
By Katie LaGrone, WPTV | 06.28.2024
Image by National Cancer Institute from Unsplash
TAMPA, Fla. — A Tampa jury recently found the now-defunct Lung Institute in Tampa guilty of engaging in “deceptive or unfair practices” while it offered customers “valueless” stem cell therapy to treat incurable...