Channel: AHJAlternativeMeds clear
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| 1 | AHJAlternativeMeds | Stem Cell Reprogramming | 220 | 1 | 40.9 | 4:08 | How does one cell, known as a stem cell, give rise to millions of cells? And how do they come to be organized into complete structures, such as limbs, a heart, or a brain? Dr. Juan Carlos Belmonte, a professor in the gene expression laboratory of the Sauk Institute in La Jolla, is researching how these stem cells work. The very first days after a male and a female cell get together, you form an embryo. And inside the embryo, the very first few cells, these are what we call embryonic stem cells, because they come from the embryo. And they make all the different cell types of our body, which we have around 250 different cell types. They come from these stem cells, so they can become anything in vivo and they do so. And the idea is that how can we educate that process outside of the embryo, in vitro, how can we can educate any cell type to become any other cell type? We asked Dr. Belmonte, what is stem cell reprogramming? To say in other words, is to convert one cell into another cell type. To program that cell again to do something different. And that's one of the goals of regenerative medicine to produce cells, to restore other cells that are gone. They don't work normally. And one way to obtain these cells is through convert one cell type into another reprogramming them. To make a hair cell become a liver cell, or to make a heart cell become a neuron. Just convert one cell into another reprogrammed their genetic machinery to make a different cell type. But imagine that our hair is not healthy, that somehow has a disease, that the disease is general. Or the cell we start with, the heart, or the skin, or the pancreas, you have diabetes. You don't start with a healthy cell. So you first need to make that cell be normal, a healthy cell, and then reprogrammed or reeducated that cell to become a stem cell. So that's an experiment we did a few months ago. We started with a hair from a patient that had a disease, and we obtained blood at different cell type, but not anymore with the disease. That proves that you can manipulate, which has a few genes, how a cell can become another cell type. The major problem now, okay, that's great. So now you could put these cells, the blood cells you have generated into the patient, and try to alleviate the problem the patient has. So the major bottleneck that the field has right now, I would say, is that in this process of reprogrammed the cell, we are generating a cell with the potential to induce tumors. And therefore, until we don't have a better knowledge and handle how to avoid that problem, this technology will not progress too much into the clinical application. Instead of trying to educate the cell to become a very primitive embryonic stem cell, and then educate back again to be whatever. With the caveat, we generate cancer, the idea could be just to differentiate then a little bit, figure it then just one step, and then do the particular tissue we are interested on. So that would be another avenue to work towards regeneration in general. | ↗ |