Despite fears surrounding the use of stem cells in human patients, a new study led by scientists from the Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) found that creating pluripotent stem cells for clinical use is not likely to lead to the transmission of cancer-causing mutations.
The study focused on the safety of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in human patients. Given their ability to differentiate into any kind of cell in the body, iPSCs are of particular interest in healthcare due to their potential to repair damage stemming from injuries or diseases such as Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis.
"We wanted to know whether reprogramming cells would make the cells prone to mutations," Jeanne Loring, co-leader of the study along with Nicholas Schork, said in a press release. "The answer is 'no.' "
"The safety of patients comes first, and our study is one of the first to address the safety concerns about iPSC-based cell replacement strategies and hopefully will spark further interest," Schork added.
The duo examined three popular methods of iPSC production: integrating retroviral vectors, non-integrating Sendai virus and synthetic mRNAs. In each case, they looked at the potential of each method to cause cancer-causing mutations and althrough they found minor alterations in the iPSCs, none of the methods led to mutations significant enough to be cause for alarm. Furthermore, they repeated the experiments an additional two times and still found no significant risks.
Despite the promise of the results, the team warns that although iPSCs do not accumulate cancer-causing mutations during reprogramming, there is the possibility of such mutations accumulating later on as they multiply in lab cultures. This highlights the importance of analyzing iSPC-based cell replacement strategies for such mutations before integrating them into therapies.
"We need to move on to developing these cells for clinical applications," said Loring. "The quality control we're recommending is to use genomic methods to thoroughly characterize the cells before you put them into people."
The findings were published in the Feb. 19 issue of Nature Communications.
