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Indian-led team transforms human skin into blood cells
Monday November 08, 2010 01:10:55 PM,
Gurmukh Singh, IANS
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Toronto:
In a major breakthrough in medical sciences, an Indo-Canadian
researcher and his team have successfully transformed human skin
into various blood cells.
The breakthrough is likely to pave the way for revolution in the
treatment of patients needing blood transfusions and those
suffering from blood disorders.
Mike Bhatia and his team at Canada's McMaster University at
Hamilton have successfully harnessed human skin to produce red
bloods cells, two kinds of immune cells and the cells that produce
platelets needed in clotting, the Indian-origin researcher said
Sunday.
Bhatia, who heads McMaster University's Stem Cell and cancer
Research Institute, told the Canadian Press, "We have shown this
works using human skin. We know how it works and believe we can
even improve on the process''
It will also pave the way to produce transplant tissues without
ever making the controversial embryonic stem cells first. The
breakthrough will also cheer cancer patients whose blood systems
(blood cells) are badly affected by chemotherapy.
It also throws up the exciting possibility of brain neurons being
harvested in lab from a mere patch of one's own skin to repair
damage to brain cased by accidents or diseases.
The new technique will one day lessen the burden on blood banks as
this process can reportedly create enough blood from one's own
skin for transfusions.
Though blood cells can be derived from embryonic stem cells and
what are known as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, this
process is far more complicated and time-consuming, the Canadian
Press quoted Bhatia as saying.
Moreover, blood cells derived from embryonic cells and iPS cells
can be 'fetal' - not mature adult cells - with properties that
make them unsuitable for transfusion, said Bhatia.
But the new skin-to-blood cell technique will carry no such
dangers.
"Because we were starting out with adult fibroblasts (skin cells),
we actually made adult blood, which we are predicting is going to
be far more useful.''
Bhatia and his team grew blood cells from skin cells in Petri
dishes in their lab, and then transplanted them into specially
bred mice to see how they behaved. Tests so far have shown no
ill-effects like cancerous growth - a danger with both embryonic
and iPS cells.
Interestingly, the age of human skin will be no barrier in
producing blood cells from it as Bhatia and his team used skin
(cells) from people aged six to over 60 to produce blood vessels.
"What we found was it didn't make a difference. We were able to
convert all of the human skin cells to blood independent of how
aged the person was,'' Bhatia told the Canadian Press.
The research appeared in the journal Nature Sunday.
(Gurmukh Singh
can be contacted at gurmukh.s@ians.in)
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