Pluripotent Stem Cells

his issued the presentation a good streamlined look, which was very easy to read. The lineage of terms was a good introduction. Overall, the diagrams were very helpful. I was able to read the intro for the presentation, the “Imagine if…” This is a good attention grabber for the beginning of a presentation. The term lineage is reverberated in the preface text “Animal and Cellular Reprogramming” by Boiani and José B. Cibelli. The pluripotent cell is close to the holy grail of regneration, and that was recently achieved. Totipotency is a corollary to that observation, where However, problems with unpredicted immunogenicity have been observed. Progress is good though. Skin cells changing to neuronal cells is always beneficial, considering the current problems with neuronal regeneration. The nuclear category for reprogramming has three different courses, and the presentation confirms this notion. Nuclear transfer was the first method developed, and is also te first slide. Viral transuction appears to be the most difficult of the processes, and its consequent later development is probably due to the complexity involved. Due to the time spent on the latter process in the presentation, this is likely the most important aspect of regeneration. Chimeric cellular generation failed at first, but is currently relatively stable. Zhao et al. just showed immunogenicity in 2011. Timeliness was a feature of the last few slides, with new research indicating investigators are on the cusp of a large breakthrough. I was not familiar with the term genetic breach, and read further in the Harvard Gazette on this topic. Non-viral transfer prevents the carrier virus from inducing certain virus-dependent cancers. Some areas for improvement include increasing the yield include using tumor supressing agents with viral induction to prevent the associated cancer risk. It is interesting how mice transfection and human transfection were developed nearly simultaneously. An interesting parallel would be Dolly the sheep without any human cloning in turn. The evolution is similarly diverse. From 2006 on these cells were refined at least 10 times with different selection strategies, with current options focusing on adenoviruses to generate similiar pluripotency to more antiquated methods. Homogeneity is an important key word when large volumes of cells need to be reprogrammed. This is the next step towards industrialization, and the next slide deals with the requisite economic impact. After further investigation, it was only then I realized that stem cells were perfectly synonymous with stem cells. Moving to the images, I navigated to the sites from Harvard etc, which wrote about the stem cell advancements in an accessible manner. The best out of the lot is the University of Michigan’s interactive tutorial. The salient article for this week’s add-on is “Disease modelling using pluripotent stem cells: making sense of disease from bench to bedside” (Hurlbut and Saha, 2011). The article overviews the fruition of cell regeneration in concordance with the presentation. The article focuses on the phrase “disease-in-a-dish”, that is, a tool allowing clinical trials with projected effects in humans to take place in vitro. The review then goes onto to discuss the ethic of stem cells, which was unexpected. This might be the reason this was not published into a top tier journal, it avoids overviewing the wet work involved with cellular reprogramming. It continues to discuss patient involvement, the ethics touched in and its parallels to breakthroughs in AIDS. This article was not deep enough to use for a proper review, so another piece of literature was surveyed. In order to reflect the presentation, a neurological-based review was acquired. In view of the fact that traumatic brain injury is incredibly difficult to treat. “Neurorestorative Treatments for Traumatic Brain Injury” opens with a similar grab to Ms. Cunningham – the cost of brain injury is 56 billion per year over 1.5 million people per year. Clinical trials have yet to find an adequate treatment, so the use of stem cells is discussed. Neurons generate from stem cells, and neurons frequently die, per common wisdom. Further probing dictated that iSPCs are the ethical replacement for so-called embryonic stem cells. It is only until recently that this was a practical replacement. Explicitly, bone marrow cells are an excellent option for neuronal regeneration, and have been proven to be a viable option both in vitro and in vivo (Xiong et al. 2011). Interestingly, this paper also cites Zhao et al. a paper also referenced in Hurlbut and Saha and Wikipedia. It also discusses Yamanaka. Bone Marrow cells are alleged to have embryonic equivalence, however; the reservoir includes progenitor cells. The safety of bone marrow cell regeneration is said to be safe in a very small trial (7 patients) and childrens research is ongoing. Saha, K. and Hurlbut, J.B. Disease Modelling Using Pluripotent Stem cells: Making Sense of Disease from Bench to Bedside. 2011. Swiss Medical Weekly. 141:w13144. Xiong, Y., Mahmood, A., Chopp, M. Neurorestorative Treatments For Traumatic Brain Injury. 2010. Discovery Medicine 10(54):434-42.