Hitting the Books: How 'universal' stem cells might fix our brains | Tomorrow - Engadget

Andrew Tarantola, Senior Editor at Engadget recommends, All it takes is a bit of genetic manipulation.

3d cells and connections
Photo: enot-poloskun via Getty Images

The impact that stem cell therapies could have on the worst diseases known to humanity is hard to overstate. From debilitating genetic disorders to currently incurable maladies like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease — even the ability to restore mental and physical functions after a stroke — stem cells could one day treat them all. Of course, with the intensity of interest in this rapidly maturing scientific discipline comes grifters, shams, quacks and snake-oil salesmen; like the Florida clinic that nearly blinded three women last year after injecting stem cells into their eyes to treat their Macular Degeneration.

In his latest book, The Future of Brain Repair - A Realist’s Guide to Stem Cell Therapy, neurobiologist Jack Price takes readers on a deep dive of the state of the art in advanced therapies while walking them through the field’s recent advancements, current capabilities and limitations and, in the excerpt below, the potential to directly reprogram mature cells into any other cell-type you need...

Excerpted from The Future of Brain Repair - A Realist’s Guide to Stem Cell Therapy by Jack Price. Reprinted with permission from The MIT PRESS. Copyright 2020.

The work of Gurdon, Thomson, and Yamanaka revealed something quite remarkable: if a cell can be induced to express the appropriate factors, then its fate can be fundamentally transformed. In the case of iPS cells, terminally differentiated cells—from blood, skin, or endothelium—were reprogrammed into pluripotent cells: that is, from cells with the most restricted of fates to cells with the most expansive. This was a shock to conventional embryologists, who had come to consider certain developmental steps irreversible. It was believed by many that once cells had been channeled during early development into one of the three primary germ layers (ectoderm, mesoderm, endoderm) then that step could not be reversed. Reprogramming destroyed that argument, but it raised an even more provocative question: if the correct genetic formula could be found was there any cell transplantation that could not be engineered?
Read more... 

 Recommended Reading

The Future of Brain Repair:
A Realist's Guide to Stem Cell Therapy
(The MIT Press)

Source: Engadget