Cancer Detour

The regular drip drip of news stories telling how scientists have yet again turned stem cells into heart, kidney, or nerve cells makes you wonder why doctors are still not prescribing stem cell therapies. Amid the fanfare heralding these amazing feats lurks the danger of cancer as the new cells can unpredictably develop without an ‘off-switch’. This happens during an intermediate stage of their development when cells are known as progenitors, which proliferate. But in independent, promising studies, scientists have entirely by-passed this risky stage, when they turned mouse (right) and human skin cells directly into neurons (yellow in the left-hand image), by bathing the cells in a chemical cocktail of seven different molecules that gently modified the activity of the cells’ genes, coaxing them to turn into neurons. This technique could offer a less aggressive alternative to traditional transcription factor approaches that push cells to become harder-to-control progenitors.

Written by Tristan Farrow

Tristan Farrow

Writer

British Science Association Media Fellow. He holds a degree in quantum physics from the University of Cambridge and a Research Fellowship in quantum effects in biology.

• Left-hand image of human cells courtesy of Gang Pei and Jian Zhao. Right-hand image of mouse cells courtesy of HongKui Deng.
• Published in Cell Stem Cell, August 2015 (Hu and colleagues on human cells)
• Image copyright held by original authors
• Published in Cell Stem Cell, August 2015 (Li and colleagues on mouse cells)