5 ms·

Groundbreaking discovery could pave way for use of stem cells in medicine

61 points by kshatrea 13y ago

jds375 13y ago
Not only is this groundbreaking with respect to the potential ease of harvesting stem cells, it could also likely change the 'debate' on stem cells. If all we need to harvest them is some ordinary cells and acid, then the whole 'embryo' debate should no longer be an obstacle.
- berberous 13y ago
  They already have a way of making induced pluripotent stem cells without using embryos. I think it involves using a virus to inject certain genes. My cells were turned into stem cells in this manner and can be ordered online by researchers. If this new technique is cheaper/easier, that's awesome, but the debate should have already shifted past ebryos.
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  There was never a debate on "stem cells", only embryonic stem cells. AFAICT, the same people who have been against embryonic stem cell research have always pushed adult stem cell research as an alternative, which had already produced results at that point. The insistence on embryonic stem cells always seemed pretty stupid to me.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    > The insistence on embryonic stem cells always seemed pretty stupid to me. If embryonic stem cells are the only option for some protocols, due to adult stem cell limitations, then no, the insistence isn't stupid. It's practical.
- JunkDNA 13y ago
  As another poster says, there was not ever a substantive "debate" with regard to ordinary stem cells, only ones derived from fetal tissues and discarded fertilized embryos from IVF. One of the things about the embryonic stem cell debate I always found maddening is that none of the proponents of using them had a solid answer to overcoming immune rejection problem. If you're going to make new organs from someone else's tissue, you have a lot of heavy lifting to do to make sure those things don't cause the recipient to attack the cells/tissues that you've transplanted. This is a massive problem with organ transplants generally, and I see no reason why stem cells wouldn't be in the same category (though I'd love to know if my knowledge is outdated/wrong). Even assuming that there are ways to get around the immune system (e.g. taking anti-rejection meds). It is likely far easier and safer to work with pluripotent cells from an adult who is also both the donor and recipient. Even if there's a genetic defect that needs to be "patched" prior to re-implantation, that is far easier than trying to make a foreign cell look like it's from you or being on meds for the rest of your life so your body doesn't attack that new liver.
  - zspade 13y ago
    Two words, Therapeutic Cloning. From the center for Bioethics and Human Dignity(http://cbhd.org/stem-cell-research/overview http://cbhd.org/stem-cell-research/overview): 6. What is the relationship between embryonic stem cell research and "therapeutic" cloning? Another potential obstacle encountered by researchers engaging in embryonic stem cell research is the possibility that embryonic stem cells would not be immunologically compatible with patients and would therefore be “rejected,” much like a non-compatible kidney would be rejected. A proposed solution to this problem is to create an embryonic clone of a patient and subsequently destroy the clone in order to harvest his or her stem cells. Cloning for this purpose has been termed “therapeutic” cloning—despite the fact that the subject of the research—the clone—is not healed but killed.
mrfusion 13y ago
Offtopic: Just curious why this submission is beating out mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7143500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7143500 Is BBC frowned on, maybe?
- stefantalpalaru 13y ago
  Unlike Reddit, on HN there is no "knights of new" subculture of random people reading and voting new submissions. Most of us only look at the front page and maybe 1-2 more pages (mainly because of the defective pagination). That said, there are 2 ways to get your submission on the front page: - get enough friends to vote it - be the first to submit a popular link and receive automated upvotes each time someone else tries to submit the same link
  - jerf 13y ago
    Errr, watch the "friends" solution; that come become a "voting ring".
    - leobelle 13y ago
      For newly added posts you have to go to the "new" page and upvote from there. If you're passing around a link to the direct post to get upvotes you're assumed to be part of a voting ring and your votes are ignored with respect to being promoted to the home page.
  - gus_massa 13y ago
    It’s possible to reach the front page without “friends” or “trigger happy” submission. My last two “successful” submissions are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7131592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7131592 (214 points, 1 day ago, 181 comments): This was 1 day old when I submitted it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6663013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6663013 (46 points, 87 days ago, 15 comments): This was a week old when I submitted. My previous “successful” submissions follow the same pattern. And I have a lot of “unsuccessful” submissions with 1 or 2 points. It’s a pity because I still think that some of them are very interesting. I think that a very important factor is just to have luck and get a few upvotes in the fist minutes.
superfx 13y ago
In many ways what's most interesting about this from a biological standpoint is that it explains why stem cells have been found all over the body in previous experiments. This "stress-induced" pluripotency suggests a general mechanism that the body uses to deal with stress. In effect cells are made with the intrinsic capability to respond to injury, by simply turning into stem cells.
- mrfusion 13y ago
  So our bodies might produce a low PH environment for 25 minutes in response to stress? (I don't mean that to sound sarcastic but I couldn't seem to get the phrasing right)
  - superfx 13y ago
    Well they've discovered that many stresses can induce this response, including physical stress. So it's not just acidity.
  - fabian2k 13y ago
    From a short glance at the paper it seems that they don't know yet what the mechanism is that triggers the conversion. It might be that it is not triggered specifically by low pH, but by some downstream mechanism that can also be triggered by other kinds of stress.
riggins 13y ago
yes pls ... turn my skin into knee cartilage.
daemonk 13y ago
I am a bioinformatician working on regeneration. Two interesting observations here aside from the primary observation that stem cells can be made from stress: - This only worked with differentiated cells from newly born animals. It didn't work with adults. They should investigate further to see what kind of epigenetic changes occurred throughout the lifetime of the animal to inhibit this stress response. This reminds me a bit of the aneurogenic limb experiments in salamanders. Is this a difference between development and regeneration? - The stem cells can make placental tissue. How did they determine this? Are they suggesting these cells are essentially totipotent?
charlieflowers 13y ago
Did I read it correctly -- that they actually transformed blood cells into an entire mouse fetus??
- refurb 13y ago
  Yeah, that's basically what they did. They took the stem cells they created and put them in a blastocyst (a very early form of a fertilized egg) and a mouse developed. It's actually a pretty impressive discovery. They took a spleen sample, separated out the lymphocytes and exposed them to a pH of 5.7 for 25 min out comes a stem cell!
  - dfjorque 13y ago
    Here's a video of the mouse embryo, with a beating heart and all: http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2014/jan/29/mouse-embryo-beating-heart-stap-cells-video http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2014/jan/29/mouse-e...
mark-r 13y ago
Any reason to believe this is real? It seems slightly impossible, like cold fusion.
- fabian2k 13y ago
  It is published in a very high profile journal, and it looks to be rather easy to replicate these experiments. I would guess that everybody in that field is setting up similar experiments right now. Trying to fake this result would be rather stupid, it would be almost inevitable to be caught. That doesn't prove this is not fake, but I expect that we'll know reasonably soon how well this can be reproduced in other labs.
  - mark-r 13y ago
    Thanks for taking my comment seriously. The lack of technical detail combined with the simplicity of the method just set off my BS detector. "Miracle cures just around the corner" is a constant distraction. Didn't notice that it was being published in Nature.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
yeureka 13y ago
Apparently the scientist responsible for this discovery is a 30 year old Japanese woman that struggled for 5 years to convince her colleagues that she could be right. She was told more than once that what she was proposing was wrong and that she should give up. A young Japanese woman going against the status quo in Japan for 5 years is a very hard thing to do. I congratulate her courage - I might benefit from it one day.
- zackmorris 13y ago
  This might be a totally stupid question but I couldn't find the answer on the web and all the other comments are from yesterday. But are conditions in the womb acidic? I'm just wondering, that if DNA works at all like computer code, then maybe cells have programming to work a certain way in certain conditions and maybe it's not so much that a cell undergoes a permanent change when it matures but that the old programming just doesn't run anymore?

61 points by kshatrea 13y ago

Not only is this groundbreaking with respect to the potential ease of harvesting stem cells, it could also likely change the 'debate' on stem cells. If all we need to harvest them is some ordinary cells and acid, then the whole 'embryo' debate should no longer be an obstacle.

berberous 13y ago
They already have a way of making induced pluripotent stem cells without using embryos. I think it involves using a virus to inject certain genes. My cells were turned into stem cells in this manner and can be ordered online by researchers. If this new technique is cheaper/easier, that's awesome, but the debate should have already shifted past ebryos.
andrewflnr 13y ago
There was never a debate on "stem cells", only embryonic stem cells. AFAICT, the same people who have been against embryonic stem cell research have always pushed adult stem cell research as an alternative, which had already produced results at that point. The insistence on embryonic stem cells always seemed pretty stupid to me.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  > The insistence on embryonic stem cells always seemed pretty stupid to me. If embryonic stem cells are the only option for some protocols, due to adult stem cell limitations, then no, the insistence isn't stupid. It's practical.
JunkDNA 13y ago
As another poster says, there was not ever a substantive "debate" with regard to ordinary stem cells, only ones derived from fetal tissues and discarded fertilized embryos from IVF. One of the things about the embryonic stem cell debate I always found maddening is that none of the proponents of using them had a solid answer to overcoming immune rejection problem. If you're going to make new organs from someone else's tissue, you have a lot of heavy lifting to do to make sure those things don't cause the recipient to attack the cells/tissues that you've transplanted. This is a massive problem with organ transplants generally, and I see no reason why stem cells wouldn't be in the same category (though I'd love to know if my knowledge is outdated/wrong). Even assuming that there are ways to get around the immune system (e.g. taking anti-rejection meds). It is likely far easier and safer to work with pluripotent cells from an adult who is also both the donor and recipient. Even if there's a genetic defect that needs to be "patched" prior to re-implantation, that is far easier than trying to make a foreign cell look like it's from you or being on meds for the rest of your life so your body doesn't attack that new liver.
- zspade 13y ago
  Two words, Therapeutic Cloning. From the center for Bioethics and Human Dignity(http://cbhd.org/stem-cell-research/overview http://cbhd.org/stem-cell-research/overview): 6. What is the relationship between embryonic stem cell research and "therapeutic" cloning? Another potential obstacle encountered by researchers engaging in embryonic stem cell research is the possibility that embryonic stem cells would not be immunologically compatible with patients and would therefore be “rejected,” much like a non-compatible kidney would be rejected. A proposed solution to this problem is to create an embryonic clone of a patient and subsequently destroy the clone in order to harvest his or her stem cells. Cloning for this purpose has been termed “therapeutic” cloning—despite the fact that the subject of the research—the clone—is not healed but killed.

mrfusion 13y ago

Offtopic: Just curious why this submission is beating out mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7143500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7143500 Is BBC frowned on, maybe?

stefantalpalaru 13y ago
Unlike Reddit, on HN there is no "knights of new" subculture of random people reading and voting new submissions. Most of us only look at the front page and maybe 1-2 more pages (mainly because of the defective pagination). That said, there are 2 ways to get your submission on the front page: - get enough friends to vote it - be the first to submit a popular link and receive automated upvotes each time someone else tries to submit the same link
- jerf 13y ago
  Errr, watch the "friends" solution; that come become a "voting ring".
  - leobelle 13y ago
    For newly added posts you have to go to the "new" page and upvote from there. If you're passing around a link to the direct post to get upvotes you're assumed to be part of a voting ring and your votes are ignored with respect to being promoted to the home page.
- gus_massa 13y ago
  It’s possible to reach the front page without “friends” or “trigger happy” submission. My last two “successful” submissions are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7131592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7131592 (214 points, 1 day ago, 181 comments): This was 1 day old when I submitted it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6663013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6663013 (46 points, 87 days ago, 15 comments): This was a week old when I submitted. My previous “successful” submissions follow the same pattern. And I have a lot of “unsuccessful” submissions with 1 or 2 points. It’s a pity because I still think that some of them are very interesting. I think that a very important factor is just to have luck and get a few upvotes in the fist minutes.

superfx 13y ago

In many ways what's most interesting about this from a biological standpoint is that it explains why stem cells have been found all over the body in previous experiments. This "stress-induced" pluripotency suggests a general mechanism that the body uses to deal with stress. In effect cells are made with the intrinsic capability to respond to injury, by simply turning into stem cells.

mrfusion 13y ago
So our bodies might produce a low PH environment for 25 minutes in response to stress? (I don't mean that to sound sarcastic but I couldn't seem to get the phrasing right)
- superfx 13y ago
  Well they've discovered that many stresses can induce this response, including physical stress. So it's not just acidity.
- fabian2k 13y ago
  From a short glance at the paper it seems that they don't know yet what the mechanism is that triggers the conversion. It might be that it is not triggered specifically by low pH, but by some downstream mechanism that can also be triggered by other kinds of stress.

riggins 13y ago

yes pls ... turn my skin into knee cartilage.

daemonk 13y ago

I am a bioinformatician working on regeneration. Two interesting observations here aside from the primary observation that stem cells can be made from stress: - This only worked with differentiated cells from newly born animals. It didn't work with adults. They should investigate further to see what kind of epigenetic changes occurred throughout the lifetime of the animal to inhibit this stress response. This reminds me a bit of the aneurogenic limb experiments in salamanders. Is this a difference between development and regeneration? - The stem cells can make placental tissue. How did they determine this? Are they suggesting these cells are essentially totipotent?

charlieflowers 13y ago

Did I read it correctly -- that they actually transformed blood cells into an entire mouse fetus??

refurb 13y ago
Yeah, that's basically what they did. They took the stem cells they created and put them in a blastocyst (a very early form of a fertilized egg) and a mouse developed. It's actually a pretty impressive discovery. They took a spleen sample, separated out the lymphocytes and exposed them to a pH of 5.7 for 25 min out comes a stem cell!
- dfjorque 13y ago
  Here's a video of the mouse embryo, with a beating heart and all: http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2014/jan/29/mouse-embryo-beating-heart-stap-cells-video http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2014/jan/29/mouse-e...

mark-r 13y ago

Any reason to believe this is real? It seems slightly impossible, like cold fusion.

fabian2k 13y ago
It is published in a very high profile journal, and it looks to be rather easy to replicate these experiments. I would guess that everybody in that field is setting up similar experiments right now. Trying to fake this result would be rather stupid, it would be almost inevitable to be caught. That doesn't prove this is not fake, but I expect that we'll know reasonably soon how well this can be reproduced in other labs.
- mark-r 13y ago
  Thanks for taking my comment seriously. The lack of technical detail combined with the simplicity of the method just set off my BS detector. "Miracle cures just around the corner" is a constant distraction. Didn't notice that it was being published in Nature.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

yeureka 13y ago

Apparently the scientist responsible for this discovery is a 30 year old Japanese woman that struggled for 5 years to convince her colleagues that she could be right. She was told more than once that what she was proposing was wrong and that she should give up. A young Japanese woman going against the status quo in Japan for 5 years is a very hard thing to do. I congratulate her courage - I might benefit from it one day.

zackmorris 13y ago
This might be a totally stupid question but I couldn't find the answer on the web and all the other comments are from yesterday. But are conditions in the womb acidic? I'm just wondering, that if DNA works at all like computer code, then maybe cells have programming to work a certain way in certain conditions and maybe it's not so much that a cell undergoes a permanent change when it matures but that the old programming just doesn't run anymore?