The prize-winning achievement is that Professor shinya yamanaka has cultivated "induced pluripotent stem cells", namely iPS cells, from somatic cells such as skin cells. IPS cells can cultivate all kinds of cells, so Professor shinya yamanaka's invention has opened up a brand-new road for regenerative medicine.
Professor shinya yamanaka published his research results in August 2006. He successfully cultivated iPS cells by injecting four genes into somatic cells extracted from mouse tails. In June 2007, he announced that the experiment on human skin cells was also successful.
Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, 65438+February 2 (Reporter Li Bin) Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) have become a research hotspot in the field of stem cells because they can rejuvenate adult cells into stem cells. After years of efforts, researcher Pei Duanqing and associate researcher Chen Jiekai of Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences have cracked an extremely important obstacle in the process of iPS cell induction. The paper was published online on the 2 nd in Nature? Journal of genetics.
20 12, 10 In June, two British and Japanese scientists won the 20 12 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "discovering that mature cells can be reprogrammed into pluripotent stem cells (i.e. induced pluripotent stem cells)", thus making induced pluripotent stem cells more well known.
Although all kinds of research based on iPS cells are in full swing, researchers have been trapped in obstacles such as low induction rate, slow speed and complex composition, and the research efficiency is not high. This, in turn, restricts researchers' understanding of the molecular mechanism of iPS induction process, which leads to the research of iPS technology much faster than the basic research, and the technical research has obviously faced bottlenecks in the past two years.
Pei Duanqing and his team found that a large number of cell clones appeared during the induction of iPS cells, which were similar to stem cells in appearance and growth speed, but did not have the gene expression and function that stem cells should have.
"These cell clones can be said to be well-dressed fakes, which exist in a large number in the classic induction environment and are in a stable state, just like roadblocks in the process of iPS induction. Most cells are blocked outside roadblocks, which seriously hinders researchers from obtaining real iPS cells. " Yan Duanqing said.
After in-depth study, scientists found that the serum used to induce iPS cells is the chief culprit of this "obstacle": BMP protein, a kind of protein in cells, inhibits the reprogramming process.
The researchers further found that these "fakes" similar to stem cells will become real induced pluripotent stem cells under certain induced conditions, such as treatment with vitamin C.
"They are just iPS cells that have not been completely reprogrammed. In other words, they are semi-finished products. " Pei Duanqing explained vividly.
Conrad, a professor at Harvard University's Center for Regenerative Medicine, said that this discovery is a major breakthrough in the study of the molecular mechanism that determines the fate of cells, which will enable researchers to prepare induced pluripotent stem cells with higher efficiency and quality, accelerate the preparation of specific cell lines from patients' diseases, and accelerate the research and development of drugs for diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.