[HN Gopher] Scientists find way to wipe a cell's memory to repro...
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Scientists find way to wipe a cell's memory to reprogram it as a
stem cell
Author : rbanffy
Score : 108 points
Date : 2023-08-27 21:37 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.uwa.edu.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.uwa.edu.au)
| idopmstuff wrote:
| Top of the front page and no comments? I take it this is being
| upvoted by lots of folks like myself that are relative laymen but
| hopeful that this is a meaningful advance. Won't someone explain
| the practical significance?
| dboreham wrote:
| If you have a stem cell then in theory you can program it to
| differentiate into any kind of cell, allowing things like
| tissue regrowth, repair injuries, make a new lung or liver etc.
| eb0la wrote:
| Stem cell research has a lot of controversy due to the fact
| some years ago you could only get stem cells from embryos.
| For some people (like the Catholic Church) that was a huge
| ethical issue. Now it is not.
| vikramkr wrote:
| Tried to provide a rough summary, hopefully it's helpful:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37287128
| qup wrote:
| Layperson here: Stem cells are like clay. They're very useful.
|
| Figuring out all these fine details are likely to lead us to be
| able to reset our bodies and either drastically extend our
| lifetimes, or give us a better body in our later years.
|
| This one step might not be part of your medical treatment
| anytime soon, but we're unlocking fundamental knowledge that we
| will be wielding, and we don't yet know how powerful that will
| be.
|
| I believe this (human aging and longevity, biomed) is the most
| important work.
| gravelc wrote:
| As usual, the manuscript itself is a bit more discrete than the
| press release, but this sentence in the conclusion shows the
| potential benefits - scalable and practical resetting of
| somatic stem cells, which has been a barrier in translation to
| actual therapies:
|
| - "Our work shows that TNT reprogramming is a practical and
| scalable approach to overcome these intrinsic characteristics
| of hiPS cells, which is important for the clinical delivery of
| this technology."
| rolph wrote:
| stem cells are pluripotent, meaning they have more than one
| developmental fate. further on they become putative, meaning
| the possibilities are narrowed to a particular cell type.
|
| stem cell therapies used to involve extensive selection
| processes, to harvest cells that develop according to
| therapeutic goals.
|
| wiping out determined fate, means far less process required,
| and produces an effectively universal [or near so] stem cell
| that will be fate determined by surrounding tissue and
| diffusive signals.
| tchaffee wrote:
| It seems like we are so close to some huge breakthroughs in
| longevity. With stem cells we can do things like this.
|
| "The extent of change caused by a heart attack is too great for
| the heart to repair itself or to prevent further damage from
| occurring. Notably, however, cardiopoietic stem cell therapy
| reversed, either fully or partially, two-thirds of these disease-
| induced changes, such that 85% of all cellular functional
| categories affected by disease responded favorably to treatment,"
| says Andre Terzic, M.D., Ph.D., director of Mayo Clinic's Center
| for Regenerative Medicine.
|
| https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-re...
| hanniabu wrote:
| What are the implications?
| rolph wrote:
| a lot less work to achieve desired outcome. nonsurgical means
| of tissue repair, replacement, or rejuvenation.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Do you just inject stem cells into the affected area?
| rolph wrote:
| [delayed]
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Immortal trillionaires.
| vikramkr wrote:
| Very cool research! The title is poorly worded, so the quick
| summary is that we've known how to create stem cells (induced
| pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs) from non-stem human cells for a
| while, but they aren't as "good" at being stem cells as embryonic
| stem cells (ESCs). So this paper is not presenting a new way of
| making stem cells, but is very cool nonetheless.
|
| Sidequest - epigenetics. You have your DNA that codes for the
| proteins and rnas that do lot sof important life things. But all
| your cells have the same DNA so how is a skin cell and a neuron
| both able to exist with the same DNA? There's a layer of
| regulation on top of the genes that determines what genes are
| expressed, how much, and what forms (you can get different
| proteins from the same DNA sequence, look up exons and introns if
| curious). If these forces of gene regulation are inherited across
| generations of cells (e.g. when a white blood cells divides, it
| makes another white blood cell with all those relevant regulatory
| factors set without having to start again from a stem cells), we
| call that "epigenetics"
|
| This paper looked at the epigenetic factors that result in iPSCs
| not behaving like ESCs and identified differences/aberrations in
| how certain epigenetic patterns (some keywords to Google include
| DNA methylation and histones in epigenetics) develop through the
| process of becoming stem cells/reprogramming. The technique they
| developed resets the aberrations in the iPSCs to make them
| function better.
|
| (Warning - opinion/speculation/I reserve the right to be wrong):
| This is very cool in terms of making better iPSCs for research
| purposes. I'm not sure what impact it would have in using iPSCs
| in medicine. iPSCs are essentially barely controlled cancer cells
| which is not great for putting inside people, and this paper
| doesn't provide a new way of creating stem cells. Maybe better
| reprogramming makes them easier to control and safer/more
| functiononal? But using them therapeutically is a different
| conversation and not every paper needs to solve all the things in
| the universe, even if that would make for a more clickable title.
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(page generated 2023-08-27 23:00 UTC)