Converting skin cells to working neurons

This week Nature published the results of a study into the conversion of skin cells to working neurons conducted by a team at Stanford University School of Medicine. (Read the results here)

Interviewed on Nature’s podcast Marius Wernig could hardly believe what his team had achieved. The team’s discovery turns epigenetic regulation on its head.

Traditional thinking around epigenetic regulation saw it as a one-way process: pluripotent embryonic stem cells give rise to all other types of cells in an organism. This idea was thrown out when Dolly the sheep was cloned from adult cells.

The thinking after Dolly was that cells had to be converted into the pluripotent stage and could then be coaxed into transforming into a different type of cell. The Stanford team feel that this is an unnecessary detour on the road to cell conversion.

Wernig’s team took skin cells and actively and directly induced them to become a completely different cell type, in this case, neurons. There was no detection of pre-existing neurons, glia, or neural progenitor cells in the original sample but after twelve days 20% of the cells had developed neuronal morphology. An incredibly fast transformation. Not only this, but when put in a petri dish with original brain cells, these induced neuronal (iN) cells formed fully functioning synapses and integrated into a neural network.

It is the repercussions of this research that really matter. One application could be in implementing these cells in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases where brain cells are destroyed. These results also indicate that we will have the ability to take skin cells from patients with neurological problems and very quickly convert them into brain cells to study them in vitro. Capturing diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s in the petri dish for the first time.