Aggregated News
STANFORD -- Some day -- when your heart needs healing, your bones need bonding or your skin needs stitching -- clusters of new cells now growing in a Stanford University lab could offer a fix.
For the first time, researchers at Stanford's School of Medicine have quickly and efficiently generated pure colonies of 12 different specialized cell types from embryonic stem cells that could be used to repair the human body.
These various cells have been grown before, but the process has been fiendishly difficult to control. Experiments often ended up with impure mixtures of multiple cell types, with limited practical use. And it took a long time -- weeks or months -- to grow them.
The Stanford team, collaborating with the Genome Institute of Singapore, grew the cell colonies in mere days. This was made possible by the team's improved understanding of the complex symphony of chemical signals needed to direct cellular development.
"It is fantastic -- a gateway to a lot of applications in regenerative medicine," a field that uses cells to build healthy replacement tissue, said Kyle...