So they felt, well, hmm, if we can boost them in skin stem cells, maybe they'll start behaving like embryonic stem cells.
Investors should take careful notice of the field of tissue regeneration: companies like Advanced Tissue Sciences (nasdaq: ATIS - news - people ) and Organogenesis (amex: ORG - news - people ) that try to use skin stem cells to create replacement skin for burn victims.
Right now, the new techniques, which change skin cells into stem cells by using a virus to alter four genes, still need to be proven.
It is hoped the techniques will revolutionise medicine by using a sample of person's skin to create stem cells.
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In November, we witnessed a landmark achievement when scientists discovered a way to reprogram adult skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells.
They took a sample of human skin cells and converted it into stem cells, which are capable of becoming any other type of cell in the body.
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).
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.
The iPS cells, which have many of the same basic properties, do not raise the same ethical questions as embryonic stem cells because they come from skin or now fat cells that have been reprogrammed to go back in time, so to speak, and have the ability to turn into any other kind of cell in the body.
The technique takes the same sample of skin cells but converts them using proteins to "induced pluripotent" stem cells.
Scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered that the millions of fat cells removed during liposuction can be easily and quickly turned into induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, more easily than the skin cells that researchers used when the first iPS cells were created in 2007.
The transplanted bone marrow contains stem cells that can turn into skin cells.
Animal tests, described in the journal Cell Stem Cell, have now used modified skin cells to repair the insulation.
The other thing it does is it makes it extremely easy now to tailor a stem cell to an individual because all I have to do is get a few skin cells from you and then put in these magic factors, and suddenly I've got an embryonic stem cell line that's tailor made directly to you.
We will be growing new organs from stem cells that are created from our own skin cells.
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Its goal is to create pills that unlock the potential of stem cells already situated inside the brain, skin, and bone marrow.
Since that time, more advanced cloning technologies have evolved, including the iPS system of induced pluripotent stem cells, which can be grown from nearly any skin cell.
After several days, the ball of cells that results contains a blanket of embryonic stem cells endowed with the genetic material of the donor skin cell, which have the ability to generate every cell type from that donor.
In a recent development, embryonic stem cells have been created by using viruses to modify the genes of skin cells.
Induced pluripotent stem cells can come from any cell in the human body, including skin cells, so they don't have the moral quandaries surrounding them.
When the first iPS cells were developed two years ago in Japan and the United States, skin cells were reprogrammed to be able to have properties similar to a human embryonic stem cell.
First came the remarkable work of Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, who showed it was possible, by activating just four genes, to take a mature cell (he used a bit of skin but other cells would work) and turn it into the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell with the potential to become any other cell in the body of mouse or human.
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