Reprogrammed Stem Cells Hit a Roadblock

Stem cells hold enormous promise in regenerative medicine, thanks to their ability to regenerate diseased or damaged tissues; the problem is obtaining them. Those that are the true source of life, in the first days of embryonic development, are of course the most highly sought after, but the issue of how to obtain these “pluripotent” cells clearly raises insurmountable ethical questions. “In this regard, the recent discovery of the ‘reprogramming’ phenomenon, by which somatic cells can be induced to convert to a pluripotent state simply by forcing the expression of a few genes, opens a phenomenal number of possibilities in regenerative medicine,” says Didier Trono, Dean of the EPFL School of Life Sciences. But a study that has just been published in the journal Cell Death and Differentiation, to be followed by two articles in the journal Nature, is dampening those hopes. Conducted by the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Geneva and the European Institute of Oncology in Milan, with the participation of Trono’s laboratory, it concludes that these reprogrammed cells exhibit a “genomic instability” that appears to be caused by the process used to return the cells to their embryonic state. Worse, the genetic mutations observed resemble mutations found in cancer cells.

2/21/11, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne