28
Jun
2005
Towards Cellular Programming
Permalink | View Comments (0) | Post Comment | Posted by Reason

A nice piece of news from Nature:

On 24 June, Kevin Eggan of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute told an international scientific meeting that his lab has fused a human embryonic stem cell to an adult skin cell. Eggan showed that the embryonic stem cell 'reprogrammed' the skin cell's nucleus, causing the skin cell to start behaving like a youthful, embryonic stem cell.

The fused cell can't be used for much - but it is a proof of principle for the future of tools that can change the state of cells. Our cells appear to be finite state machines on a level that scientists are beginning to be able to manipulate. Arrangements of genes and proteins determine how a cell behaves - whether it is a stem cell or a normal cell, for example. As biotechnology and medicine advances, scientists will be able to create stem cells - or any other type of cell required for regenerative therapies - as needed. This is a very worthwhile goal, the development of technologies to form a comprehensive biological repair kit capable of tackling a range of age-related disease and damage.

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