 |
 |
'Disease in a dish' method could lead to treatments for many serious disorders By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 5:01pm BST 07/08/2008 A "disease in a dish" method has been used on patients with 10 serious disorders to boost worldwide efforts to find new treatments. Patient's own cells mass produced for first time in lab Woman's skin turned to embryo cells American researchers have used a Japanese technique to turn cells from people with different diseases into stem cells with the same genetic errors. advertisement Stem cells, which can be grown indefinitely in the lab, have the ability to grow into the 200 plus cell types found in the human body, from muscle to heart to brain cell. They say these cell lines can be used to mimic human disease more reliably than mice and other animal models and will be a boon for efforts to find new treatments. They will it possible for researchers to explore the 10 different disorders - including muscular dystrophy, juvenile diabetes, bubble baby immune disorder, Down syndrome and Parkinson's disease - in a variety of cell and tissue types as they develop in laboratory cultures. These, in turn, can be used to test new drugs, for instance on stem cell derived pancreas cells that are affected by juvenile diabetes. These newly-created stem cells, which were created without the controversial step of making human embryos, will allow researchers to mimic tissue formation in a Petri dish as it occurs in individuals with any of the ten diseases, a vast improvement over current technology. But it could be extended to many more diseases. The feat is reported in the journal Cell by Prof George Daley, who is at Children's Hospital Boston. He worked with researchers from Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the University of Washington. The scientists hope to make the cell lines available to scientists worldwide on a not for profit basis through a core laboratory funded by the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. "The hope is that this will accelerate research," said Prof Daley. "Researchers have long wanted to find a way to move a patient's disease into the test tube, to develop cells that could be cultured into the many tissues relevant to diseases of the blood, the brain and the heart, for example," he says. "Now, we have a way to do just that, which means the cells can make any tissue and can grow forever. This enables us to model thousands of conditions using classical cell culture techniques." For years, researchers have grown human cells in the laboratory in an attempt to mimic various genetic diseases, but cells taken directly from affected patients typically have a limited lifespan when grown in laboratory dishes In this case, the cell lines were created using a new technique that reprograms human adult skin cells into cells that resemble embryonic stem cells. The technique used to make these cells - called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells - was a major advance in the field that was first reported in 2006 by Prof Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, Japan (pluripotent refers to how the cells can grow into many different types.) Over the longer term, Prof Daley expects the technique will be applied in the clinic. For example, it may allow scientists to develop therapies using a patient's own cells - reengineering the cells to correct a disease-causing defect then re-introducing them into the body to repair damage. Rayilyn Brown Director AZNPF Arizona Chapter National Parkinson Foundation [log in to unmask] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn