A team of scientists at the University of Bristol in UK have attained a breakthrough in regenerative medicine by developing a failsafe tool to directly convert regular human body cells into the types they want.
This technology brings regenerative medicine, to growing whole human organs from patients own cells, closer to reality.
Till now, to grow organs, scientists were using stem cells, which are pluripotent cells (meaning that they can attain whatever form needed) either from embryos, or artificially, by a cumborsome process. However, such conversion has not been successful on a repeat basis, and using cells from embryos creates ethical issues.
By the new technology, scientists are now able to ‘transdifferentiate’ cells of one kind into other kinds, making them behave like stem cells, so to speak.
The new technology is called Mogrify, and is a bioinformatics resource, which allows scientists to avoid having to create stem cells alltogether.
