Recently, in a research paper published in the international journal Stem Cells, researchers from the Salk Institute successfully converted human skin cells into transplantable white blood cells for the first time through research. It is well known that white blood cells are the body’s immune system. "Warrior", which can protect the body against infection and foreign invaders.
Researcher Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmont said that this research may provide new ideas and hope for the development of new therapies to introduce new white blood cells to the body to treat cancer and other diseases. At present, researchers have found that the process of transforming into leukocytes is very fast and safe in mice. This method bypasses long-standing research obstacles and provides new clues for the development of recombinant regenerative therapy for human cells.
Blood cells produced by induced pluripotent stem cells often cannot be transplanted into organs or bone marrow, and they may also cause tumors; and the new technology called indirect lineage transformation developed by the researchers in this study takes only two weeks , And will not produce additional tumor tissue; the researchers said that we will make skin cells "forget" their own properties, and then let them transform into the cell type we need, in this research we let it succeed Transformed into white blood cells.
The indirect lineage transformation technology developed by researcher Belmont can be used to make human vascular cells. This technology uses a molecule called SOX2 to make it plastic, that is, to lose the memory of transforming into a special cell type, and then The researchers let a genetic factor called miRNA125b induce cells to turn into white blood cells. The research in this article allows researchers to take another step towards successful stem cell transplantation to treat human diseases in the future.