Cell re-education
Scientists have turned skin cells into white blood cells for the first time
Naked Science based on the materials of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies:
Simple method turns human skin cells into immune-fighting white blood cellsAmerican scientists have managed to transform human skin cells into monocytes that fight infections in the body.
The new method of cellular retraining is simple and takes relatively little time, which promises impressive prospects in medicine.
The discovery was made by a team of biologists from the Salk Institute in the USA under the leadership of Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte. They managed to develop and apply a completely new method of functional cell retraining.
The developed method, according to scientists, is quite simple, takes little time and causes fewer complications compared to already common methods involving the transformation of cells into induced pluripotent stem cells.
In particular, the new technique takes only two weeks, does not lead to the development of tumors, and the resulting cells take root better.
– We make skin cells forget what they are, and then we tell them what they should be – in this case, white blood cells. To carry out this process – erasing cellular memory and introducing a new direction of development – only two biomolecules are needed, says Ignacio Sancho-Martinez, one of the first authors of the article, Ignacio Sancho-Martinez, Salk Institute.
The technique is called Indirect Lineage Conversion and has already been tested before – scientists have demonstrated that it can be used to create cells that make up vessels.
First, scientists caused increased expression of SOX2 protein in fibroblasts (connective tissue cells) isolated from human skin, which erased the memory of cells about their primary purpose, turning them into pluripotent cells.
The researchers then used a microRNA molecule known as miR-125b to suggest to the "impersonal cells" that they are monocytes, a type of white blood cell that is involved in the body's fight against infections. Further transformation showed that the new "monocyte-like" cells are capable of phagocytosis (the main function of monocytes to protect the body from foreign and harmful particles), and also take root well during transplantation.
Potentially, this technique can force a cell to retrain into one of more than 200 specialties, which, coupled with the simplicity and comparative speed of the method, can have great prospects in medicine.
At the moment, scientists are preparing for preclinical and clinical trials.
You can read more about the scientists' research in their article published in the journal Stem Cells (Pulecio et al., Conversion of Human Fibroblasts into Monocyte-Like Progenitor Cells).
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