Scientists are very excited by the announcement of these findings, that cells that look and act like stem cells can be created from skin cells (known in science as fibroblasts).
These iPS cells, like stem cells derived from embryos, can be turned into many different kinds of cells, and researchers believe they eventually could be used to regenerate tissue for organs and repair damage.
The technique used by Green and Hollister is part of a burgeoning field called regenerative medicine, which involves engineering therapies -- using things like stem cells, or "body parts" constructed out of biological material -- to harness the body's ability to heal itself.
That technique for generating embryonic-like stem cells (called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells) bypassed the need for transferring the cells into eggs, as Wilmut had done, and also averted the ethical issues attached to extracting stem cells from embryos as Thomson had done.
While cloning stem cells is a technical breakthrough, there's already a method of deriving embryonic-like stem cells that doesn't require the use of embryos at all: induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells, said Dr. George Daley, who is director of the Stem Cell Transplantation Program at Children's Hospital Boston and an international expert in stem cells.
So they felt, well, hmm, if we can boost them in skin stem cells, maybe they'll start behaving like embryonic stem cells.
In November, we witnessed a landmark achievement when scientists discovered a way to reprogram adult skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells.
Indeed, the same objection also applies to stem cells that are extracted from embryos produced without nuclear transfer. (Usually these are surplus to requirements for in vitro fertilisation.) Both problems would go away if cells that behave like embryonic stem cells could be made without destroying embryos.
And what they found was that after a few days, these genes that they added were able to get the skin cells to start behaving just like embryonic stem cells.
His diabetes work led him to understand how to create a drug that would get directly into cancer cells, which were a lot like the stem cells he was studying in diabetes.
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Francesca Fusco, a Manhattan dermatologist, calls the venom "a new flavor of the month, " much like apple stem cells were a few years back.
Like embryonic stem cells, these new adult stem cells will divide again and again without appearing to age if cultured in the right conditions.
Issues like cloning, stem cells, and fetal research have become part of the national lexicon.
Except that researchers still couldn't prove that the heart, nerve, muscle and other cells they made from the iPS cells were exactly like the ones generated from the embryonic stem cells.
He said the aim now would be to look at adult stem cells to see if they could be genetically altered to behave like the mouse retinal cells.
Plus, the iPS cells had the advantage that patients could generate their own stem cells and potentially grow new cells they might need to treat or avert diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer's or heart problems.
Eggan's technique, which is the subject of a paper in the current issue of Nature, creates stem cells specific to a particular disease, like cancer or diabetes, without a supply of human egg cells.
Like natural selection and germs, the discovery of cancer stem cells illustrates how the most fruitful scientific findings are often not those of individual experiments, however intriguing, but those that organise knowledge into theory.
Weissman says these results shed doubt on the arguments against using embryonic stem cells, which are being pioneered by companies like Geron (nasdaq: GERN - news - people), Cythera and Bresagen .
But another approach to using embryonic stem cells--and cloning--has been in inventing drugs much like the ones we already have.
There aren't enough stem cells in an umbilical cord to serve as a treatment for a disease like cancer or heart disease.
This is true whether they use so-called adult stem cells, as Osiris Therapeutics and Cytori do, or the embryonic kind, like Geron.
There are some cells on the margin of adult retinas that have been identified as having stem cell-like properties, which the team says could be suitable.
Right now, scientists can only use stem cells to study particular diseases by creating embryos through the same process used to clone animals like Dolly the sheep.
Only last year, she said, Egli and Paull and their colleagues demonstrated that the nuclear transfer of eggs cells could generate patient-specific stem cell lines for potential cell replacement therapy to treat diseases like diabetes.
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