Breakthrough: Australia Creates its First 'Artificial' Embryonic Stem Cells from Skin Cells |
No longer reliant on Japan and the United States |
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Editors published 2/2/2009 9:30:00 AM
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Australian scientists have produced their nation's first human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells - cells that act like embryonic stem cells but instead were made from adult skin cells.
They now join the club of nations, Japan and the United States, that can skirt around the ethical issues of obtaining stem cells from embryos.
Dr Paul Verma, Program Leader for Stem Cell Biology at the Monash Institute of Medical Research, said Australian institutes had previously been reliant on importing iPS stem cell lines from the United States or Japan.
Stem cells are hailed as the new frontier in medical research and the treatment of disease, given their remarkable ability to develop into many different cell types in the body.
Future possibilities include:
creating iPS cells from an adult with Type 1 diabetes, with the results expected to provide new insights into how the illness progresses.
Similar work is also hoped to point to possible new treatments for conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, cancers, heart disease and spinal cord injury.
"If you take cells from a patient with Parkinson's and then you induce them to form iPS cells ... in the lab you can differentiate them to form the nerves that get degenerated in the patient," Dr Verma said.
Australian provincial governments contributed AUS $455,000 to the AUS $1 million project, with the remainder coming from Sydney IVF Limited and the Australian Stem Cell Centre.
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