Using human waste as a rich source of cells needed for medical studies can solve some of the problems of using stem cells.
Some of the wastes that humans excrete every day can be used as a source of cells that are used to study diseases, and there is even hope that the cells obtained from this method will one day Used to treat neurodegenerative diseases.
The research group led by Duanging Pi at the Guangzhou Institute of Health and Medicine recently developed a method that can be used without the use of stem cells and only by extracting the cells left in human waste and turning them into progenitor cells. The neuron instrument solved part of the problems of studying neurological diseases with the help of stem cells, such as the risk of tumorigenesis of cells after transplantation. The precursor cells that are prepared with the help of this method provide researchers with the possibility to provide suitable cells for their patients with a greater speed and volume than the current methods.
In current common methods, often skin and blood cells are transformed into induced pluripotent cells or iPS cells with the help of transferring specific genes and reprogramming their genomes, and then iPS cells can differentiate into other body cells. find Compared to the current methods of using human waste as a cell source, it is considered a more accessible source.
Another advantage of this method is the non-use of retroviruses to transfer genes inducing the ability to target cells, because the use of retroviruses can lead to drastic changes in the genetic structure of cells and thus reduce the level of predictability. lead to cells.
On the other hand, Pi’s group and his colleagues used vectors that do not enter the host cell’s genome to transfer genes.
The results of this group’s studies indicate that the cells in this method become iPS cells in almost half the time of today’s common methods. According to the results announced by this research group, progenitor cells differentiated into neuronal cells after being transferred to the appropriate culture medium and no evidence of tumor formation was observed after being transplanted into the brain of a mouse model.
This could definitely speed things up, says Jamesie Ellis, a medical genetics researcher at Children’s Hospital Toronto in Ontario, Canada, who produces patient-specific iPS cells to study autism spectrum disorders.
According to Mark Leyland, a researcher at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington, Canada, the advantage of preparing cells this way is that urine can be obtained from almost any patient. In particular, if we want to take samples from children, taking a urine sample is much easier than getting them to give a blood sample.
Translated by Amir Hossein Mansouri
Source: Nature
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