London: Scientists have developed a system that predicts how to transform any human cell type to another directly, a breakthrough that may lead to new treatments for a variety of conditions such as arthritis and heart disease.
"The barrier to progress in this field is the very limited types of cells scientists are able to produce. Our system, Mogrify, is a bioinformatics resource that will allow experimental biologists to bypass the need to create stem cells," said Julian Gough from the University of Bristol.
Pluripotent stem cells - or cells that have not yet 'decided' what to become - can be used to treat many different medical conditions and diseases.
The first human artificial pluripotent stem cells were created by Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka in 2007, through a process of educated trial and error that took a long time. In the nine years since, scientists have only been able to discover further conversions for human cells a handful of times.
"Mogrify predicts how to create any human cell type from any other cell type directly. We tested it on two new human cell conversions, and succeeded first time for both," said Gough. "The speed with which this was achieved suggests Mogrify will enable the creation of a great number of human cell types in the lab," Gough said.
The ability to produce numerous types of human cells will lead directly to tissue therapies of all kinds, to treat conditions from arthritis to macular degeneration, to heart disease, researchers said.
The fuller understanding, at the molecular level of cell production leading on from this, may allow us to grow whole organs from somebody's own cells, they said.
"This represents a significant breakthrough in regenerative medicine, and paves the way for life-changing medical advances within a few years from now, and the possibility in the longer term of improving the quality of longer lives, as well as making them longer," Gough said. To achieve this game-changing result, Gough worked with then-PhD student Owen Rackham, who now works at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, for five years to develop a computational algorithm to predict the cellular factors for cell conversions.
The algorithm was conceived from data collected as a part of the FANTOM international consortium based at RIKEN, Japan.
The algorithm, called Mogrify, has been made available online for other researchers and scientists, so that the field may advance rapidly. The research was published in the journal Nature Genetics.
