Turning Stem Cells Into Tissues

The MIT Technology Review has a good piece on the fundamentals of regenerative medicine: "Biologists dream of the day they can take a stem cell and create any of the body's cell types, producing pancreas or liver tissue that doctors could use to aid a failing organ. ... If we want to take stem cells and convert them into something useful - neurons to treat Parkinson's disease, or insulin-producing cells to treat diabetes - we need to learn a lot about what makes a cell a neuron or a pancreatic cell ... The cell is a machine. Though we know the genes and proteins in a cell, we don't know how the machine works. ... Scientists would ultimately like to create a complete wiring diagram of the stem cell's regulatory circuit."

Link: http://www.technologyreview.com/BioTech-Genomics/wtr_16159,312,p1.html

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