Woman Receives First Stem Cell Therapy Using Her Own Skin Cells
By Alice Park,
Time
| 09. 12. 2014
Untitled Document
Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Japan surgically transplanted a sheet of retinal pigment cells into the eye of a 70-year old woman on Friday.
The cells are the first induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, given to a human patient. They were made by Masayo Takahashi, who grew them from the patient’s own skin cells, which were treated with four genetic factors to revert back to an embryonic-like state. Takahashi then soaked the cells with the appropriate growth factors and other compounds so they developed into retinal pigment cells.
The patient was losing her sight due to macular degeneration, because her retinal pigment endothelial cells were damaged by an overgrowth of blood vessels. Replacing them with a new population of cells can restore her sight.
Stem cell scientists are starting to test their treatments in eye-related diseases, because parts of the eye are protected from the body’s immune system, which could recognize the introduced cells as foreign and destroy them. That’s not a problem with the iPS cells, since they are made from...
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