(From EurekAlert). A privately funded venture claims significant progress towards dedifferentiating blood cells into stem cells and then using them to build tissue. We've heard this before to no great result, but it'll be the real deal sooner rather than later: "The idea is to revert a patient's blood cells to the stem cell stage and then chemically nudge them to re-specialise into particular tissue types that can be implanted to heal damaged tissue. A huge advantage over using donated tissue is that the transplant would be 'autologous' - made of the patient's own cells, thus avoiding immune rejection ... [Pharmafrontiers] now claims to have refined a way to produce stem cells from white blood cells called monocytes and develop them into many different tissue types including, crucially, insulin-producing cells."
Link: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-06/ns-tot062106.php