A team of scientists from the McMaster University of Canada led by Mick Bhatia, and of which the Spanish researcher Ruth M. Risueño is part, has developed a new technique to transform adult skin cells into blood cells . As announced in the journal Nature , the discovery offers the possibility of having an inexhaustible source of blood for transfusions , as well as developing healthy cells for patients with leukemia -blood cancer-, or red blood cells to treat patients with anemia, to starting from a fragment of your skin.
The main novelty of the work is that the conversion is carried out directly. Producing blood from the skin does not require the intermediate step of converting a skin stem cell into an induced pluripotent stem cell – which produces many types of human cells – and then transforming it into a blood stem cell.
The technique has proven to be effective both with cells from newborns and cells from adult and elderly subjects. Clinical trials could begin in 2012 .
