Scientists discover a new, simpler way to make stem cells

A team of Boston and Japanese researchers stunned the scientific world Wednesday by revealing a remarkably simple and unexpected way to create stem cells able to give rise to any tissue in the body.

To transform mature cells into powerful stem cells that are a biological blank slate, the team simply bathed them in an acid bath for half an hour. The technique appears to be far easier and faster than current methods for creating these cells, which scientists are racing to develop into therapies for a range of diseases.

The result is shocking, astounding, revolutionary, and weird, said scientists not accustomed to using such exuberant words to describe new research findings. The finding has been officially reported only in mice, but human studies are underway. Researchers at Brigham and Womens Hospital said that over the weekend they made what appears to be a human version of the stem cells, although further study and confirmation of that preliminary result is needed.

Its just a wonderful result; its almost like alchemy, said Douglas Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, who was not involved in the research published Wednesday in the journal Nature. It says one has found a way to reveal the hidden potential of cells with a relatively straightforward method.

The discovery less than a decade ago that it was possible to reprogram mature human cells to become stem cells was hailed as a breakthrough and was recognized with a share of the Nobel prize in 2012. It spawned a huge push, funded with hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private money, to devise ways to use the cells to treat diseases in which tissues are injured or lost, such as juvenile diabetes or heart failure.

The new work reveals a potentially cheap, fast, and simple avenue to create the powerful cellsby exposing mature cells to environmental stress instead of having to manipulate the genes inside the cells nucleus. If the finding is replicated by other scientists, it also promises to yield fresh insights into the behavior of cells, and demonstrates that important scientific advances often emerge from unexpected areas of inquiry.

The approach is so simple and so out-of-the-box that it might never have been tried if it hadnt been for the persistence and curiosity of Dr. Charles Vacanti, a Brigham and Womens anesthesiologist working largely outside the field of stem cell science.

Vacanti is best known for his work on the earmouse, the flashy tissue engineering feat of growing a human ear on the back of a mouse that made headlines in 1995. Vacanti wanted to find a better cell type to use on tissue engineering projects and began working with a team including his younger brother, a pathologist, to find one.

In a 2001 study, they reported the discovery of a new kind of stem cell that they isolated with a technique that had been used to isolate neural stem cells: they mashed up mature tissue and passed it through ever-smaller pipettes to sift out a new type of cell they called a spore-like cell.

Our lab was pretty ridiculed, Vacanti recalled, of the scientific response. After that, I kind of kept it to myself.

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Scientists discover a new, simpler way to make stem cells