Disease-Specific Stem Cell Lines Developed

THURSDAY, Aug. 7 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers in Massachusetts have succeeded in generating several disease-specific stem cell lines which should advance both research and, one day, treatment.

The lines will be made available to researchers around the world through a Harvard Stem Cell Institute "core" facility being established at Massachusetts General Hospital, institute co-director Doug Melton said during a Wednesday teleconference.

The new lab is already up and running and is prepared to start shipping lines as soon as a new paper is published in the Aug. 6 online edition of Cell, added Dr. George Daley, senior author of the paper and a principal faculty member at the institute.

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"This is a broader and more important collection of degenerative diseases for which there are no good treatments and, more importantly, no good animal models," Melton said. "The cells will allow researchers access for the first time to cell types of interest, to watch the disease progress in a dish, to watch what goes right or wrong. . . We'll see in the years ahead that this opens the door to a new way of treating degenerative disease."

The cell lines will be distributed "virtually free," Melton said, with a nominal fee to cover costs.

Last week, another team of scientists from the institute announced that they had transformed skin cells from patients with Lou Gehrig's disease into motor neurons that are genetically identical to the patients' own neurons. This will enable them to create unlimited numbers of cells to study the disease process better.

Those scientists had originally planned to use somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) or "therapeutic cloning" for the feat. That process involves removing the genetic material from a donated human oocyte and replacing it with genetic material from the skin cells of patients. But the approach has been hindered by political, ethical and other obstacles.

Instead, those researchers took adult skin cells from two elderly sisters with Lou Gehrig's disease and reprogrammed them into cells resembling embryonic stem cells using a technique called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Those stem cells were then transformed into motor neurons.