| 1 | StemCellChannel | What are induced pluripotent stem cells? - Dr Andrew Laslett explains | 4755 | 23 | 2 | 45.3 | neutral | 5:08 | In juicepluoripotent stem cells, stem cells that we've made by putting in genes or factors that we know from embryonic stem cell research are able to what we call reprogram a cell an adult type cell back to its original state where it can become any cell in the body. So the great thing about induced puberty potent stem cells is that they're as able as embryonic stem cells to form every cell type in the body, but we can really easily choose which cell types we make them from. So whether or not it's from somebody that's healthy, we can make an IPS cell control, or we could potentially make IPS cells from someone with a specific disease to allow us to set up models of that disease in a dish to study in the lab. With IPS cells at the moment with the way they're made, we do not know whether they are safe for treatment of humans. The way they are made currently in the main is using viruses that can cause cancer. We don't know their long term stability and we really don't know a lot about them because they're so new as they were first created in a mouse in 2006 and in a human IPS cell line in November 2007. People are claiming is that IPS cells get around all of the ethical concerns with using excess embryos for the creation of human embryonic stem cell lines. There are a large number of ethical or ethical questions involved with the use of IPS cell lines that still need to be addressed in terms of the way they are. The way they are used in terms of the way they are generated is people need to give informed consent if for example they're giving a skin cell or even from a single hair cell now induced polypoten stem cells can be made. So they're not ethical free. They're not in an ethical free zone. We're still researching embryonic stem cells for a number of reasons and one is that we don't really know yet whether under all tests and conditions, IPS cells are exactly the same as human embryonic stem cells. That's actually the focus of one portion of my laboratory that's really carefully looking at that question. Also in any IPS cell research we need something to compare to that we know is truly a polypoten stem cell. So a polypoten cell is a cell that can make any cell in the body. So we need to be able to compare and contrast with human embryonic stem cells and I think it's also a fair point to make that without research into embryonic stem cells we never would have had IPS cells. At the moment we're comparing in a head-to-head fashion through a number of different tests testing whether IPS cells can make certain cell types within the body as well as human embryonic stem cells, checking whether they express all of the same genes and proteins and also really carefully looking at how stable they are and whether or not they form. Tumors when we put them into animal models. I think the potential for IPS cells is really quite huge. I think the jury is still out on whether these cells are going to ever be used to treat somebody directly but the information that we can get from them by using them as a tool to study them, study diseases in a DNA test. These diseases in a dish is limitless. They can also be used in ways by pharmaceutical companies as a screening technology to assess the effects of drugs, to assess whether drugs are toxic, to see whether common compounds we use are toxic on specific human cells that are being made without actually testing animals for example. | ↗ |