Aggregated News
Dolly the Sheep scientist Sir Ian Wilmut exclusively revealed to The Daily Telegraph last year his intention to adopt one new embryo free method and abandon therapeutic human cloning because he is convinced that this new work overcomes key practical and ethical issues in obtaining embryo cells that potentially capable of generating all cell types for treating disease.
advertisement
But that method, pioneered in Japan, required a virus to genetically alter adult cells, such as skin cells, into embyro-like cells and there were safety concerns.
Now a team at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla and the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Germany, reports in the journal Cell Stem Cell that they have used drugs to help turn brain cells from an adult back into embryo like stem cells.
"We are on the way" toward generating such cells without using genetic modification, said Dr Sheng Ding.
His team's work deals with some of the major drawbacks of the technique developed two years ago by Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka and provide a safer, more efficient method to reprogram...
advertisement
But that method, pioneered in Japan, required a virus to genetically alter adult cells, such as skin cells, into embyro-like cells and there were safety concerns.
Now a team at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla and the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Germany, reports in the journal Cell Stem Cell that they have used drugs to help turn brain cells from an adult back into embryo like stem cells.
"We are on the way" toward generating such cells without using genetic modification, said Dr Sheng Ding.
His team's work deals with some of the major drawbacks of the technique developed two years ago by Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka and provide a safer, more efficient method to reprogram...
.jpg){kind=link}