Possible Cure For MS Turns Common Skin Cells Into Working Brain Cells 87
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have discovered a way to convert ordinary skin cells into myelinating cells, or brain cells that have been destroyed in patients with multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy and other myelin disorders. The research, published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, may now enable 'on demand' production of myelinating cells, which insulate and protect neurons to facilitate the delivery of brain impulses to the rest of the body."
Re:Cautiously Optimistic (Score:2, Informative)
Untrue. The symptoms of MS are due to demyelination. Current treatments reduce the inflammatory response and therefore further myelin destruction but do nothing to rebuild the destroyed myelin. Remyelinating the neurons is the missing step in MS treatment.
Re:Cautiously Optimistic (Score:4, Informative)
It's easiest to think of MS as mice chewing the insulation off the wiring in your car resulting in short circuits and lost signals. Curing the disease would be getting rid of the mice. This treatment is like taking your car to the shop to have the wiring replaced, but the car is still full of mice that will eat the wiring again. The current treatments for MS just put the mice (mostly) to sleep, but they're still there and could awake at any time and some people's mice are more resistant than others.
Re:Cautiously Optimistic (Score:4, Informative)
It's not going to prevent further damage. This certainly isn't a cure or potential cure for MS, but if it works well it might help fix some of the damage that's been done. Some. Axons die in MS, and this won't replace them. There's good evidence that a lot of the actual damage is due to neuronal damage and not a failure to remyelinate.
Nature Article discussion (Score:4, Informative)
Just a quick walk-through of the first section of the paper:
Cell-based therapies for myelin disorders, such as multiple sclerosis and leukodystrophies, require technologies to generate functional oligodendrocyte progenitor cells. Here we describe direct conversion of mouse embryonic and lung fibroblasts to induced oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (iOPCs) using sets of either eight or three defined transcription factors.
The Slashdot summary and 3rd party source says "skin cells", but the paper indicates the specific cell type used were "mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs)"; specifically, they were MEFs isolated from a transgenic mouse lineage where a specific transactivator had already been engineered into their genome. This transactivator was designed to work together with the introduced Lentivirus vector (a retrovirus, member of the genus to which HIV belongs), carrying the Oligodendrocyte Progenitor Cell (OPC) transcription factors.
In a later section of the paper, they perform a similar process with "mouse lung fibroblasts" (MLFs), and also test several different combinations of transcription factors.
iOPCs exhibit a bipolar morphology and global gene expression profile consistent with bona fide OPCs. They can be expanded in vitro for at least five passages while retaining the ability to differentiate into multiprocessed oligodendrocytes.
Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck. Can be expanded into a flock while still retaining duck-ness.
When transplanted to hypomyelinated mice, iOPCs are capable of ensheathing host axons and generating compact myelin. Lineage conversion of somatic cells to expandable iOPCs provides a strategy to study the molecular control of oligodendrocyte lineage identity and may facilitate neurological disease modeling and autologous remyelinating therapies.
Induced OPC cells integrate into their normal niche, insulating neurons (at least at the cellular level). Didn't see much discussion of whether or not it altered the hypomyelinated ("shiver" mouse) phenotype.