The Road to Low Cost Universal Cells and Tissues, For Transplantation into Any Patient

An area of intense interest in the academic and biotechnology communities is the development of cells that do not provoke an immune response due to mismatch of cell surface receptors. As a general rule, cells from one individual are rejected by any other individual. It is possible to minimize this outcome by eliminating MHC receptors, but there are other complex interactions between cell surface chemistry and portions of the immune system that can still act as a barrier to transplantation. A number of groups have developed approaches to address specific parts of this problem space, but no one winner has yet emerged. At the end of this road can be found universal induced pluripotent stem cells, enabling the generation of cells of any type, as needed. Those cells can then be used to grow tissues and organs, or in more traditional cell therapies, that are compatible with any patient, greatly reducing cost and logistical challenges. The prospects of generating specialized cells in a dish that can be transplanted into patients to treat various diseases are encouraging. However, the immune system would immediately recognize cells that were recovered from another individual and would reject the cells. Hence, some scientists believe that custom cell therapeutics need to be generated from scratch using a blood sample from every individual patient as starting material. Researchers here followed a different approach, using gene editing to create 'universal stem cells' (named HI...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs