Blood breakthrough at Mac
Wade Hemsworth
http://www.thespec.com/feature/article/273991--blood-breakthrough-at-mac
Scientists at McMaster’s stem cell research institute have found a way to create blood from skin, a significant breakthrough that could have broad implications for medicine, for the university and for Hamilton.
Their findings, released Sunday after months of secrecy, are published in the influential scientific journal Nature, and are drawing interest from around the world.
Mick Bhatia, scientific director of McMaster’s Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute, said the discovery should eventually allow cancer, anemia and other patients to receive healthy, perfectly matched blood products grown from a patch of their own skin.
Among the first applications McMaster will pursue is to eliminate the need for bone-marrow registries that seek to match cancer patients to donors against very long odds. Instead, the new process could turn patients into their own ideal donors, said McMaster vice-president and dean of health sciences John Kelton, himself a hematologist.
He described the discovery as the most significant of his three decades at McMaster, calling Bhatia, “our Wayne Gretzky”.
Kelton said the publication ends a “white-knuckle” period in which McMaster raced to confirm the discovery and protect it with patents before the secret got out or someone else beat the researchers to it.
The director of Canada’s Stem Cell Network said the McMaster discovery is significant and could soon lead to what called “personalized blood cells”.
It is also important because it suggests skin cells can be converted into other types of cells, such as muscle or pancreatic cells, said Michael Rudnicki.
“This is really a fabulous contribution and underscores Canada’s leadership in stem cell research,” said Rudnicki, a former McMaster scientist who now leads the Ottawa network that acts as a catalyst for advancing stem cell science in Canada by conducting, funding and connecting research.
Rudnicki said the timing of the discovery is auspicious, coming nearly 50 years after two other Canadian scientists, Ernest McCulloch and James Till, became the first to identify the stem cell, a finding they published in Nature in 1963, becoming the fathers of one of what is now one of science’s fastest-growing fields.
“Stem cell research really is an area of huge strength in Canada across the board, so it’s not surprising that these discoveries would be occurring in Canada,” Rudnicki said.
Bhatia said that publishing his team’s new research gives other scientists the opportunity to build on McMaster’s work, just as his team built on others’ discoveries that skin can be grown outside the body and that skin cells are capable of becoming stem cells—mother cells that can become any other kind of cell.
While making stem cells from skin has helped researchers steer around complex ethical issues connected to using cells derived from human embryos, it still required turning skin cells back to stem cells before they could be coaxed in any specific new direction.
There was no easy way to direct their differentiation from there, Bhatia explained in an interview before the paper was published.
The new discovery skips that middle stage by producing blood cells directly from skin cells.
“We don’t really want stem cells,” Bhatia said. “We want what stem cells make.”
The scientists experimented by following the process for teasing skin cells into becoming stem cells within a bath of proteins that promote the growth and survival of blood cells. For months, they tried variations on the environment and timing until they found what Bhatia calls the “sweet spot” where they could reliably coax the skin cells into converting to blood cells. He said it was the perseverance of his teammates that produced the discovery.
The new process causes a much higher proportion of the skin cells to participate in the conversion process, when compared to a more laborious and far less productive method. What previously took nearly a year is now possible in about a month, Bhatia said.
The new process also solves other problems with creating healthy new blood. The painstaking work of making blood cells using the old recipe still only yielded fetal blood cells, which were of little use in treating adult patients.
Furthermore, since the new blood comes from a clean genetic source – the skin – it is not subject to the original blood-cell mutations that cause a patient to become ill in the first place, Bhatia said.
He said he has been deluged with requests for interviews with news outlets across the globe, far more than with his lab’s previous discoveries.
Bhatia, who did his undergraduate studies at McMaster and returned to direct the network in 2006, credits the team of researchers on the project for being both creative and patient. His co-authors on the paper are Eva Szabo, Shravanti Rampalli, Ruth M. Risueno, Angelique Schnerch, Ryan Mitchell, Aline Fiebig-Comyn and Marilyne Levadoux-Martin.
Getting the new McMaster discovery from the lab and into common use is still a matter of years in the future, though Bhatia said clinical trials could begin as early as 2012, barring unforeseen complications.
From there, regulatory clearance and commercial development would require multiple partners, Bhatia said, but the idea is to see to it that the economic benefits remain in Hamilton, where the discovery was made.
Kelton said the discovery is a product not only of hard work by talented scientists, but a direct outcome of the philanthropic investments by Michael DeGroote and David Braley, who together have contributed more than $150 million to the university, directing the lion’s share of their donations toward medical research.
“Both of them had very simple instructions for me: use these donations to help people,” Kelton said. “We’ve had lots and lots of small advances. This is a sudden, big jump and this is gratifying.”
The goal of those investments is twofold, Kelton said: to advance medical science for the good of all, and to commercialize discoveries for the redevelopment of the local economy.
“This is the next step on the staircase to creating prosperity in Hamilton on a university-and a health-based economy,” he said.
Prev
Linear Mode
