It was not the first study to create stem cells in this way, but it was the first to use cells sourced from a diseased adult person with the aim of producing therapy-specific cells.
FEATURE
Scientists said yesterday they had used cloning technology to make embryonic stem cells that carry a diabetic womans genes, and turned them into insulin-producing beta cells that may one day cure her disease.
The team reported clearing an important hurdle in the quest to make personalised stem cells for use in disease therapy, but a bioethicist said the breakthrough also highlighted the need for better regulation of lab-grown embryos.
We are now one step closer to being able to treat diabetic patients with their own insulin-producing cells, said Dieter Egli of the New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF), who led the study published in the journal Nature.
Egli and a team had transplanted the nuclei of cells taken from the womans skin into human eggs to create stem cells, which they could then coax into becoming beta cells a shortage of which causes insulin deficiency and high blood-sugar in diabetics.
In doing so, the team confirmed a potentially important source for future cell-replacement therapy.
It was not the first study to create stem cells in this way, but it was the first to use cells sourced from a diseased adult person with the aim of producing therapy-specific cells.
Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist from the Case Western Reserve Universitys school of medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, said the research, the latest to produce embryonic stem cells that carry the genomes of living people, raised red flags.
This repeated cloning of embryos and generation of stem cells, now using cells collected from adults, increases the likelihood that human embryos will be produced to generate therapy for a specific individual, he wrote in a comment carried by Nature.
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Cloning: Scientists make insulin-producing cells