Researchers at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco have turned skin cells into heart cells and brain cells by using a cocktail of chemicals, according to two studies published in Science and Cell Stem Cell. The work could catalyze the creation of pharmaceuticals that could one day be able to regenerate lost or damaged cells.
For the study published in Science, researchers were able to use nine chemicals to change human skin cells into working heart cells. The Gladstone Institutes scientists developed one mixture of chemicals by trial and error that successfully morphed the skin cells into a state approximating multipotent stem cells. Researchers then used a second combination of chemicals to shift those newly morphed stem cells into heart muscle cells. More than 97 percent of the altered cells began beating.
"The ultimate goal in treating heart failure is a robust, reliable way for the heart to create new muscle cells," said Deepak Srivastava, MD, director of cardiovascular and stem cell research at Gladstone. "Reprogramming a patient's own cells could provide the safest and most efficient way to regenerate dying or diseased heart muscle."
For the second study appearing in Cell Stem Cell, researchers again used a chemical cocktail with some overlapping elements from the first study to alter mouse skin cells into neural stem cells. The chemicals altered the identity of the skin cells over a 10-day period, and when they were transplanted into mice as neural stem cells, they developed into three different types of brain cells — neurons, oligodendrocytes and astrocytes.
Sheng Ding, PhD, the senior author of both studies and a scientist at the Roddenberry Center for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine at Gladstone, said, "Our hope is to one day treat diseases like heart failure or Parkinson's disease with drugs that help the heart and brain regenerate damaged areas from their own existing tissue cells. This process is much closer to the natural regeneration that happens in animals like newts and salamanders, which has long fascinated us."
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