Major Step Forward In Cell Reprogramming, Researchers Report
A team of Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers has made a major advance toward producing induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, that are safe enough to use in treating diseases in patients.
“This demonstrates that we’re halfway home, and remarkably we got halfway home with just one chemical,” said Kevin Eggan, an HSCI principal faculty member who is the senior author of the paper being published online today by the journal Cell Stem Cell.
“There are four genes that do this, and with just one chemical we replaced half the genes,” said Eggan, who is also an assistant professor in Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. “The one chemical replaces those two genes in different ways at different times in the experiment. The experiments we performed not only led to discovery of the chemical, but they also explained how it works,” he said.
Lee Rubin, director of translational medicine at HSCI and the other senior author on the research team, said that "our goals were to try to as discretely and specifically as possible guide the cells through the deprogramming process" from the adult state to the embryonic-like state. (Credit: Photograph by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer)
“This demonstrates that we’re halfway home, and remarkably we got halfway home with just one chemical,” said Kevin Eggan, an HSCI principal faculty member who is the senior author of the paper being published online today by the journal Cell Stem Cell.
“There are four genes that do this, and with just one chemical we replaced half the genes,” said Eggan, who is also an assistant professor in Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. “The one chemical replaces those two genes in different ways at different times in the experiment. The experiments we performed not only led to discovery of the chemical, but they also explained how it works,” he said.
