Australia masters stem cell advance

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Australia masters stem cell advance
Adam Cresswell, Health editor
February 03, 2009
The Australian

SCIENTISTS have created Australia's first stem cell batches, using a technique that avoids the need to destroy embryos.

The feat should speed up research into treatments for diseases such as Parkinson's and Type 1 diabetes.

Using fully developed human skin cells, the team from the Monash Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne injected genes to reprogram them to behave like embryonic stem cells, which have the potential to develop into any cell in the body.

Such cells are believed to hold promise for a wide range of potential treatments and research projects, but embryonic research has been held back because of ethical concerns.

The new technique of reprogramming adult cells - first developed by scientists in Japan and the US - could allow scientists to churn out induced pluripotent stem cells - IPS cells - without facing that moral objection.

The technology was hailed in December as the "breakthrough of the year" by Science magazine in the US. The magazine said cellular reprogramming "opened a new field of biology almost overnight and holds out hope of life-saving medical advances".

Paul Verma, leader of the Monash research program, said mastery of the technology here was important because previously Australian researchers had been dependent on being sent batches, or lines, of IPS cells from their colleagues in Japan or the US.

This slowed research through limited availability, and meant experts here could not study the significance of the slight differences the Monash researchers had noticed between different IPS cell lines derived from the same adult, Dr Verma said.

"Another reason why we wanted to produce these cells ourselves was that if you want to study IPS cells from a patient with a particular disease, you were limited to those that already existed," he said.

"We can now go and look at whatever disease we would like to look at ... it gives you a very powerful tool to study a number of different diseases that we had no way of studying earlier."

Parkinson's disease is likely to be an early candidate. Scientists may now be able to take a skin cell from an adult who is known to have the disease, reset it to behave like an embryonic stem cell, and then use that line of cells to test new treatments toslow or halt the progression of Parkinson's.

A joint project involving the Monash team and NSW researchers will generate IPS cells from adults with Type 1 diabetes in a bid to develop better drugs to combat the disease.

Dr Verma said that for the time being the IPS technique would complement, rather than replace, research involving unwanted human embryos created for IVF purposes, because it was still unclear why the IPS cell lines differed slightly from one another.

Dr Verma's work was partly funded by grants totalling $455,000 from the NSW and Victorian governments.

Stem cell expert Melissa Little, National Health and Medical Research Council principal research fellow at the University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience, said the Monash announcement was a "big deal" because of the promise it held for better treatments.

"It's really essential that Australia picks up this technique, otherwise we will be left behind," she said.