Luck
December 16, 2008 by Ian Clarke
I had a very lucky week; I was hit by a car.
Last Tuesday night I was walking along a busy downtown street. As I crossed the intersection, a car sped around the corner, struck me, and threw me to the ground. Just a moment before I was hit, I saw the headlights of the car only inches from my knee. Amazingly, the Hollywood clichés about time slowing down seem true. As I was hit, many thoughts went through my mind as if the impact was occurring in slow motion. I thought, “but the light isn’t even yellow, why is the car here in the crosswalk”? Then, “boy, it’s lucky this isn’t a big truck with those steel cages on the front”. I even thought, “damn, this is going to hurt”. But, part of my mind was still a stem cell biologist as I thought, “I hope I don’t snap my spine, because stem cell transplants are not ready yet."
As it turned out, I suffered no broken bones, no brain injuries, and no spinal injuries. After the accident, while spending a few hours in the emergency department with my companion who was also hit, I realized that this was one of those moments that can change your life. A split second in time, a few feet in either direction or the car hitting at just a different angle would have altered my life forever.
Many of our lives are terribly busy and we don’t often reflect on how tenuous our happiness, health and even life can be. In one moment, I was very unlucky; I was hit by a car. I had no control over the event and I was doing everything right. At the same instant I was very lucky, I am neither paralyzed nor suffering with severe brain trauma. I don’t need the stem cell therapies that research will soon provide.
As a researcher studying brain stem cells and cancer, I see the names of hundreds of patients who have donated tissue from their own or their children’s brain cancer to our lab. Many of those patients are no longer alive, but the gift of their tissue may someday lead to a treatment that can save someone else. In a fashion that is typically human, I had always assumed these treatments would be for someone else.
In the near future we will likely be able to transplant neural stem cells into damaged spines to allow some recovery of movement after injury. Amazing progress has been achieved in our understanding of how neural stem cells mature into the neurons that could repair a spinal injury. It may even be able to take skin cells from your own body and in the laboratory redirect them into neural stem cells to treat your own spinal injury, or Parkinson’s, even Alzheimer’s disease. These would be your own cells, no chance of your body rejecting the transplant. None of these therapies are ready yet, but I have no doubt that with further research they soon will be. What last Tuesday night reminded me is that we are all just an instant and a little luck away from needing the therapies that thousands researchers are developing right now.
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Rett Syndrome and induced Pluripotent Stem cells goes “Green”
June 17, 2009 by Aaron Cheung
Stem cell researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children have now devised a method, reported in the scientific journal Nature Methods, that will facilitate the generation of induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) cells. I have previously blogged about the promise of iPS cells (see related articles). iPS cells are cells which have been reprogrammed from a differentiated somatic cell (such as your skin cells) to a pluripotent stem cell (like an embryonic stem cell, only that you don’t need to use embryos!). The generation of iPS cells is inherently very rare which occurs at a frequency of about 0.01% meaning you can generate about one iPS cell line out of hundred thousand cells. Out of which, many lines fail to satisfy the different rigorous tests necessary to be given the prestigious name of “iPS cell”.
A group led by Dr. James Ellis, and lead author Dr. Akitsu Hotta, at The Hospital for Sick Children has generated a reporter, named EOS, that will facilitate the generation of iPS cells for both mouse and human. The reporter has DNA elements (called promoters) that will drive the expression of a fluorescent protein (GFP) and an antibiotic resistance gene (puromycin) that will only turn on in pluripotent stem cells, but remain off in differentiated cells. Therefore, scientists can now generate iPS cells from different sources and the iPS cells will literally “light up with a green colour” once reprogramming has been achieved. Furthermore, by adding puromycin to your culture, it will keep the iPS cells in a pluripotent state as iPS cells will normally spontaneously differentiate.
To demonstrate the applicability of EOS, Ellis also derived iPS cells from patients who have a neurodevelopmental disorder called Rett Syndrome. Rett Syndrome is an Autism Spectrum Disorder which affects almost exclusively females at an incidence of 1 in 10,000 and is one of the leading causes of mental retardation in girls. These Rett Syndrome iPS cells were green when placed under a fluorescent microscope and Ellis demonstrated that neurons can be generated from these Rett Syndrome iPS cells, the cell type affected in Rett Syndrome.
In conclusion, the EOS reporter will facilitate the generation of iPS and will be particularly useful for new labs going into this rapidly developing field. Furthermore, Rett Syndrome iPS cells that were also generated in this study will be invaluable for future drug screens that may be beneficial to those with Rett Syndrome.
Article:
Hotta, A. et al. Isolation of human iPS cells using EOS lentiviral vectors to select for pluripotency. Nature Methods 6, 370–376 (2009).
Related articles:
Breakthrough of 2008 – Reprogramming
A New Era for Disease Modeling and Drug Screening
Some of our experts
Stem Cell Origins
Cancer stem cells
Stem Cells and the Nervous System
