It is now possible to turn skin into blood. Yes, you read that right! This was the subject of some major hoopla this week when Dr. Mick Bhatia and his team of post-doctoral students from the Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute at McMaster University revealed a process to turn skin cells harvested from humans directly into blood cells.
While most researchers have managed to convert cells from one type to another, the process utilized so far has used a stem-cell intermediate, known as pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). However, this method has almost always resulted in the formation of embryonic cells (which are not useful for most medical processes), not to mention the issues that arise due to this method. For one, the current stem-cell process requires the conversion of these cells. Deriving stem cells from skin cells can take five to six months of labour. Reprogramming the stem cells to produce the desired type of cells also takes additional time even after the creation of the iPS intermediate. Even after all the labour expended to transform these cells, some of the cells created would revert back to embryonic form.
Dr. Bhatia’s research paper is entitled, “Direct conversion of human fibroblasts to multi-lineage blood progenitors.” It describes the use of a virus that contains a gene known as OCT4. The harvested skin fibroblast cells were exposed to the virus, which injected the OCT4 gene into the cells. Once the gene manifested itself in the cells, the gene encoded for a protein functions as a “switch board” for other genes in the cell. The important factor in this mechanism is that the protein created from the OCT4 gene controls the function of other proteins in the cell which decide what the cell should specialize as.
A post-doctoral student, Eva Szabo, noticed the distinctly round structure of blood cells in a Petri dish among long skin cells. The researchers at McMaster University took advantage of this discovery and investigated this appearance thoroughly until they were able to devise the process through which these cells could be transformed. The accomplishment of taking harvested skin cells and transforming them directly into red blood cells was amazing in itself. However, what made people in the field of medicine stand in attention was that the blood cells created were normal, adult-like, functioning cells. In addition, the blood cells created were of all three classes, white blood cells, red blood cells and platelets. Furthermore, they did not revert back to skin cells or the intermediate after an extended period of time.
The applications for this discovery are particularly promising because of this process’ ability to transform cells into any cell type needed with the use of a single transcription factor or molecular signal. This is a huge leap towards the treatment of many diseases, including cancers of the blood. With the ability to turn skin cells of a patient into blood cells of their own genetic makeup, the need for blood donors, transfusions or bone marrow transplants would become obsolete. Also, the time it takes for a person to receive treatment would be severely lessened, since it only takes a couple of weeks to manufacture these cells. Furthermore, with the relative simplicity of the procedure, the cost of treatment would be a fraction of the standard treatment cost for lymphoma or leukemia used today.
Dr. Mick Bhatia’s hopes include extending his research to convert skin fibroblast cells into other cell types and to get his procedure into clinical trials within the next four or five years. The only major issue that he foresees is the need to scale up production of these cells so that they can be useful in many applications. Given the simplicity of the procedure used to transform these cells, this shouldn’t be a cause for major concern since any obstacles can be rectified easily. Another issue that has been foreseen is the unexpected behaviour of the newly created cells, especially if they are more complex than red blood cells. If the procedure used was more complex, this potential issue would become more significant given the increased complexity of the cells created (with an excellent example being brain cells). Personally, I believe this discovery has great potential and is promising when it comes to the procedure being implemented into the health care system. With the news of this breakthrough, my interest in medicinal research has been rekindled, especially when these advances are being made on Canadian soil.
Leave a Reply