Stem Cells From Human Hair

October 19th, 2008

Some time ago there was an announcement that successful reprogramming of adult human cells back into so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells was achieved. What this means in layman terms is that embryonic stem cells were being created simply by using a strand of human hair.

The problem was, according to the study, was that only one out of 10,000 cells could be persuaded to turn back the clock. A new team of researchers led by Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, has now succeeded in boosting the reprogramming efficiency more than 100-fold, while cutting the time it takes in half. In fact, they repeatedly generated iPS cells from the tiny number of keratinocytes attached to a single hair plucked from a human scalp. If this works anything like computer memory I guess they are right on schedule in speeding it up everyday.

OK…that’s some pretty scientific language about what this is all about. Certainly very few of us really undeerstand any of these terms fully. I know I certainly don’t. It would help first and foremost just to get a basics of stem cells. At least it gives you an idea of why they are even trying to do any of this in the first place. Maybe even helps you understand the debate about researching stem cells in the first place.

Their method, published ahead of print in the Oct. 17, 2008 online edition of Nature Biotechnology, not only provides a practical and simple alternative for the generation of patient- and disease-specific stem cells, which had been hampered by the low efficiency of the reprogramming process, but also spares patients invasive procedures to collect suitable starting material, since the process only requires a single human hair.

“Having a very efficient and practical way of generating patient-specific stem cells, which unlike human embryonic stem cells, wouldn’t be rejected by the patient’s immune system after transplantation brings us a step closer to the clinical application of stem cell therapy,” says Belmonte, PhD., a professor in the Gene Expression Laboratory and director of the Center of Regenerative Medicine in Barcelona, Spain.

The original link in this post is probably going to give you more in depth discussion on this particular experiment than I can. Even so…you are going to need to fire up Google for a lot of these terms as they certainly aren’t things you hear in everyday conversation :).