A DIY Repair Kit for Your Body

It is a scientific milestone as great as the first flight, a medical breakthrough to rival antibiotics.

In simultaneous announcements, both Japan and America said they had discovered how to take an ordinary skin cell and transform it into any other kind of human body cell.

It means that in the not-very-distant future, doctors will take a scraping of your skin and grow you a new heart or liver. Or special insulin-producing cells to end the misery of diabetes.

Or develop any number of treatments for any number of life-threatening or debilitating conditions.

It means scientists are on the way to creating your very own body repair kit. And in the process, it will eliminate the need for controversial embryo cloning.

The technique is simple in theory, complex in practice. Like many great scientific discoveries the new "direct re-programming" technique has involved a race, this one between Professor Shinya Yamanaka, of Kyoto University and Professor James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin.

In the end they reached their stunning conclusions at the same time.

In Britain, Professor Azim Surani, Professor of Physiology and Reproduction, University of Cambridge, told The Mirror: "It's quite amazing when you think about it. We can take an adult body cell and then chemically "re-program" their origins to develop into something else.

Its potential for treating diseases such as Parkinson's, which is caused by the loss of brain cells, is incalculable.

In theory, it could also one day spell the end of transplant surgery, as scientists would be able to regenerate damaged parts of the body without the need for donated organs.

Leading British stem cell researcher Professor Ian Wilmut of the University of Edinburgh, who created Dolly the sheep, has already announced that he is abandoning cloning in favor of the new technique.

"This is extremely exciting," he said. "We can now envisage a time when a simple approach can be take it all the way back and then turn it into any kind of body cell. It is quite incredible what we can now do.

"It is relatively easy to grow an entire plant from a small cutting, something that has seemed inconceivable in humans.

"Yet this study brings us tantalizingly close to using skin cells to grow many different types of human tissues.

"Normally when you grow skin cells in a dish, they just make skin cells. But [these researchers] have re-programmed them into embryonic-like stem cells with the potential of turning into any different cell types."

There is still a long way to go -- only 10 cell clones were obtained from 50,000 skin cells. But in the Japanese laboratory, clumps of skin cells treated to become heart cells started to pulse -- just as heart cells cause the heart to beat.

"It is at a very early stage. But by using different genes we will hope to gain a good insight into how this magic takes place," Professor Surani said.

"What is clearly possible is that we can make cells from any individual with a simple skin biopsy.

"Or we can take cells from someone with a history of heart disease and study them to see how the heart cells are developing. Then we could develop targeted drugs to treat them."

One of the most exciting aspects of the discovery is the simple fact that since the new cells -- or even new organ -- come from your own body, there is very little likelihood of rejection.

Japan's Professor Yamanaka said: "We are still a long way from finding cures or therapies from stem cells and we don't know what processes will be effective. But we are finally in a position to make patient-specific stem cells for therapies without fear of immune rejection."

Professor Yamanaka shocked the scientific world last year by creating stem cells from mouse skin. Now he has used the same chemical cocktail with human skin.

Josephine Quantaville, of the Comment Group on Reproductive Ethics said: "This research makes absolute nonsense of any attempts to try to create hybrids by combining animal/human tissue. Embryo research now looks very out of date in the light of this."

Dr. Robert Lanza, chief science officer of Advanced Cell Technology, said: "This work represents a tremendous scientific milestone -- the biological equivalent of the Wright Brothers' first airplane."

Mike Swain can be reached at m.swain@mirror.co.uk.

Source: Daily Mirror. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. Powered by YellowBrix.