Reprogamming Cells Could Eliminate Dangers of Side Effects in Medicine

Human skin fibroblast cells under professional fluorescent microscope.

Recent drugs that have been created can help treat some of the toughest diseases out therefrom Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to all types of cancers. The only problem: They kill some people. But new breakthroughs in cell engineering might usher in a new era of personalized medicine where drugs can be tested for side effects without having to test the drug in humans.

Scientists at San Francisco's Gladstone Institutes announced Thursday that they've successfully reprogrammed human skin cells into brain cells, and recently, a team turned skin cells into working heart cells.

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The idea, according to Yadong Huang, head of the Gladstone study, is to scrape cells from an Alzheimer's patient's skin, turn it into a brain cell, and try out different therapies on the newly-created cells. If there's an adverse reaction, doctors will know not to give that drug to the patient.

"There are some drugs that can't be put on the market because some patients respond badly to a drug. If the drug kills 5 percent of the patients, the FDA won't approve it," Huang says. Instead of risking side effects, which range from pesky to deadly, doctors will know with better certainty if a drug is suited to a patient.

Because Huang's method would use a patient's cells, the newly-programmed cells would have the patient's DNA.

"If we make reprogrammed cells from an individual patient, we can test different types of drugs on those cells. A patient might not respond well to drug A, but will respond to drug B."

Huang's method also lets doctors dream of a day when they could regrow functioning organsbut that's much farther off.

"Hopefully someday, we can transplant those cells back into a patient," Huang says. But he says there are many hurdles to clear, such as figuring out how to functionally integrate new cells into the brain.

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Reprogamming Cells Could Eliminate Dangers of Side Effects in Medicine