A team of scientists from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (USA) has succeeded in converting human skin cells into a specific type of brain cell without using stem cells in the process . The work has been published in the journal Neuron .
For their experiment, the scientists used laboratory mice for which they produced a type of brain cells called medium spiny neurons, key in controlling the movement of the body and the first to be affected by Huntington’s disease, a constant neurodegenerative disorder and progressive of genetic character whose end is fatal.
Patients who suffer from this disease have involuntary movements of the muscles of the body and cognitive deterioration, symptoms that get worse over the years. The researchers used adult human skin cells to reprogram them , placing them in an environment that mimicked the environment of brain cells.
What happened was that this introduced genetic material made possible the expression of the genes that regulate the development and function of neurons, transforming skin cells into natural cells of the brain . The researchers showed that these converted cells survived for at least six months after engraftment in the brain of the mice.
“These transplanted cells have not only survived in the mouse brain, but have also shown functional properties similar to those of native cells ,” explains Andrew S. Yoo, leader of the study.
Regarding future therapies for humans , scientists are convinced that the possibility of converting adult human cells could facilitate the use of a patient’s own skin cells to fight disorders such as the aforementioned Huntington’s disease.
