Cell Reprogramming: a new success
The placenta was grown directly in a test tube
Anna Govorova, Infox.ru
Bioengineers from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem managed to make an important achievement in the field of regenerative medicine. They grew real trophoblasts from skin cells – cells from which the placenta is formed in the embryo at the earliest stage, Infox reports.
As the authors say, they hope that their research will help in the creation of therapies for various pathologies of the placenta in pregnant women. This is a serious problem that can lead to miscarriage, premature birth, and cause various defects in the development of the child.
Here, according to the authors, methods of regenerative medicine can come to the rescue – a modern trend when cells, pieces of tissue or even organs are grown in the laboratory. Most of these studies are scientific, and their implementation in clinical practice is still far away.
In regenerative medicine, embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are used – cells from a blastocyst that develops on the 2nd-5th day after fertilization. ESCs have a unique ability – pluripotency, that is, they can transform into almost any specialized cells and tissues.
Organs and cells can also be grown from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). iPSCs are obtained from ordinary somatic cells of an adult organism, which scientists return to the "stem" stage of development. Professor Shinya Yamanaka managed to turn the cell development process back to the past in this way for the first time, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012.
Recently, methods have appeared that allow direct reprogramming of somatic adult cells of one type into another without a "stem" stage. These are the so-called direct reprogramming methods.
In their current study, scientists led by Dr. Yosef Buganim (Yosef Buganim) used just this method. Initially, they studied for a long time the process of trophoblast formation in the embryo in mice. As a result, they came to the conclusion that three genes are needed for this – Gata3, Eomes and Tfap2c. When these genes were introduced into skin cells, they surprisingly began to turn into stem cells that form the placenta – trophoblasts.
Trophoblasts are unique cells. They form the outer layer of the embryo at the earliest stage of development. It is the trophoblasts that are involved in the attachment of the embryo to the epithelium of the uterus, and by penetrating into the endometrium, they form the outer shell of the placenta.
Trophoblasts grown in vitro. A picture from the Hebrew University press release Scientists Convert Skin Cells Into Functional Placenta-Generating Cells – VM.
Of course, scientists add, before these methods can be introduced into clinical practice, many more studies are needed.
The authors report on their achievement in the latest issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell (Benchetrit et al., Extensive Nuclear Reprogramming Underlies Lineage Conversion into Functional Trophoblast Stem-like Cells).
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20.10.2015