Scientists were able to make adult cells go back in time to their most primitive stem-cell state.
Stem cell research could lead to cures for ailments such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and diabetes; but the problem is they have extremely short lives and don't exist in adult specimens, a Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) press release reported.
Researchers were on their way to creating in vitro embryonic cells in 2006, when researcher Shinya Yamanaka used a "cocktail" of four genes to generate them from adult cells.
Now, a research team has taken another step, but with some improvements. The scientists were able to produce the cells within the same organism (a mouse) and without passing them through an in vitro culture dish. This brings medical researchers even closer to achieving regenerative medicine.
"This change in development has never been observed in nature. We have demonstrated that we can also obtain embryonic stem cells in adult organism and not only in the laboratory," lead author and a researcher in the study María Abad, said.
The cells showed "totipotent" characteristics, which have never been created in a lab before and are similar to what would be seen in a human embryo 72-hours after conception.
"We can now start to think about methods for inducing regeneration locally and in a transitory manner for a particularly damaged tissue," group leader Manuel Serrano, said.
The researchers were also able to produce three "layers" of pseudo-embryonic structures in the rodents' thoracic and abdominal cavities.
"This data tells us that our stem cells are much more versatile than Yamanaka's in vitro iPSCs, whose potency generates the different layers of the embryo but never tissues that sustain the development of a new embryo like the placenta," Serrano said.
Routine regenerative medicine is still a long way off, but researchers believe this finding could take the stem-cell journey in a new direction.
"Our stem cells also survived outside of mice, in a culture, so we can also manipulate them in a laboratory," Abad said. "The next step is studying if these new stem cells are capable of efficiently generating different tissues such as that of the pancreas, liver, or kidney."
