A team of North American collaborators from both industrial research centers (Biotime Inc, Mandala Biosciences LLC and Sierra Sciences LLC) and academic institutes (Ontario Cancer Institute, Burnham Institute for Medical Research and The Scripps Research Institute) have demonstrated successful reversal of the developmental aging of normal human cells.
Their findings appear as an ahead-of-print research article entitled ‘Spontaneous Reversal of Developmental Aging in Normal Human Cells Following Transcriptional Reprogramming’ published in the peer-reviewed journal Regenerative Medicine. The article can be found at http://www.futuremedicine.com/doi/abs/10.2217/rme.10.21.
Human embryonic stem (hES) cells have considerable potential as sources of new therapies for a host of intractable human conditions in which cells and tissues become dysfunctional and need to be replaced. Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells are similar to hES cells and derived through reprogramming of somatic cells with various combinations of genes. iPS cell technology has excited the scientific community because it has been demonstrated to be a method of transforming adult human cells back to a state very similar to embryonic stem cells (reversing the process of development) without the use of human embryos.
Recent reports have suggested that iPS cells, though very similar to embryonic stem cells in many respects, may not have the normal replicative potential of embryonic stem cells (that is, the iPS cells may be prematurely old) – a problem some regard as the Achilles heel of iPS cell technology. However, a new study has shed new light on the recent controversy over the aged status of iPS cells.