The following news item was written at the end of January 2014, before hearing a report published by a committee of the Japanese institute in April 2014 that acknowledges that “two sets of images used in these articles were either manipulated or modified by the person who led the study, Dr. Haruko Obokata. “
In 2012, the Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka led an unprecedented advance in regenerative medicine by regressing human adult cells to their embryonic state through the insertion of four genes into them. A year later, a team of Spanish scientists from the National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) used this method to reach another important milestone: rejuvenating cells within the adult organism itself (in mice) without the need to resort to in vitro culture. A new work published today in the journal Nature revolutionizes the field of biomedicine once again by returning adult cells to 5 days of age simply by immersing them in an acid preparation .
The work, carried out by a Japanese-American team, has shown that introducing an adult mouse cell in a very acidic solution (with a very low pH) causes it to return to a state very similar to the embryonic one. This is the first evidence that an external stimulus, in this case environmental stress, can reprogram mammalian somatic cells and enable them to create new plant-imitating tissues, which can generate new shoots from cuttings.
The inventor of this procedure, Haruko Obokata, has taken five years to obtain definitive results. In his experiment, he took blood cells from mice and exposed them to a multitude of hostile environments: lack of oxygen, acidic pH … The results showed that, when the culture was immersed in an acid solution, the resulting cells had characteristics similar to those of embryonic cells, since, when transplanted later into a mouse embryo, they infiltrated all the tissues of the new organism . These were even incorporated into the layers of the placenta, something unlike ordinary embryonic stem cells and which reveals their infinite regenerative potential.
By not requiring genetic manipulation of the cell, this reprogramming technique stands as the cheapest, safest, simplest and fastest devised to date, which could soon make it a medical reality. However, some regenerative medicine specialists are still skeptical that Yamanaka’s award-winning method will be superseded.
