Peering into the future of stem cell biology
Remarkable progress in understanding how stem cell biology works has been reported by a team of leading scientists, directed by experts at UC Santa Barbara…
Stem cell biology is making waves around the world with great hope for the eventual repair of parts of the body. While many scientists see these breakthroughs as viable, there are hurdles that must be overcome, including the worrisome potential for introducing cancer when making a repair to an organ…
An important concept in this research is pluripotency –– the ability of the human embryonic stem cell to differentiate or become almost any cell in the body, explained senior author Kenneth S. Kosik…”The beauty and elegance of stem cells is that they have these dual properties,” said Kosik. “On the one hand, they can proliferate –– they can divide and renew. On the other hand, they can also transform themselves into any tissue in the body, any type of cell in the body.”
Kosik said that scientists have learned that many cells in the body have the potential to become pluripotent cells. “The big engines of change are the transcription factors,” said Kosik. “They drive the laboratory procedure by which we can reverse the progression during development from stem cell to differentiated cell and use differentiated cells from our skin to make stem cells…”
Pluripotent stem cells have some similarity to cancer cells. They are immortal. They self-renew. Tumors keep dividing. So do pluripotent stem cells. “That’s their property, self-renewal, proliferation,” said Kosik. “And that’s what cancer does. How can it be that pluripotent stem cells can self-renew and are not cancer, but cancer cells self-renew and are cancer? Cancer lacks any control over itself. What’s the difference?”
The singular point of their research – at this point in time – is that they have no answer to that question: What’s the difference?
All the more reason to direct efforts at resolving the two distinct directions, divergent results.
