Wednesday August 27, 2008
(foodconsumer.org) -- Forget about stem cells research! Researchers
at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital in Boston have
found a way for them to bypass stem cells to make special cells
directly from adult cells, according to a study report released in
the journal Nature.
Specifically, the researchers were able
to turn adult cells into insulin producing beta cells, which is
what type 1 diabetes patients need to produce insulin and metabolize
blood sugar.
The study was conducted on living mice
though. Diabetic mice receiving the induced beta cells artificially
made by the researchers improved their blood levels.
"These cells are very stable and
live for the life of the mouse," Dr. Douglas Melton,coauthor of
the study was quoted by Reuters as saying.
The technique used is called direct
reprogramming which bypasses the need for stem cells to make
functional cells or tissue or organs.
Dr. Melton said it is possible to use
abundant human cells like liver, skin or fat cells to regenerate
functional cells.
Last year, it was discovered that
ordinary skin cells can be reprogrammed to turning them into an
embryonic-like state. These induced stem cells may then be used to
study or treat disease in the future.
But the researchers of the current
study did not even need to convert the adult cells into stem cells.
They directly converted adult cells into insulin producing beta cells
in diabetes mice.
Research on stem cells is controversial
and sources are limited. The U.S. government does not allow federal
funding for stem cells research due to some ethnic and moral
concerns.
For the study, Dr. Melton and
colleagues went through thousands of genes and identified three genes
Ngn3, Pdx1, and Mafa that are active when the pancreas is developed.
They inserted them into ordinary cold virus - an adenovirus, which
carried these three genes into the exocrine cells of the pancreas.
As a result, they were able to convert
about 20 percent of the exocrine cells to beta cells that produced
insulin and diabetic mice that received the induced cells lowered
blood sugar levels.
Dr. Melton was cited as saying that
this method could be used in humans with severe type 2 diabetes.
