Stem cells: protectors of the brain | Tamir Ben-Hur | TEDxJaffa
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Stem cells: protectors of the brain | Tamir Ben-Hur | TEDxJaffa - Video

Researchers have identified a new class of lab-engineered stem cells -- cells capable of transforming into nearly all forms of tissue -- and have dubbed them F-class cells because they cluster together in "fuzzy-looking" colonies.

The discovery, which was described in a series of five papers published Wednesday in the journals Nature and Nature Communications, sheds new light on the process of cell reprogramming and may point the way to more efficient methods of creating stem cells, researchers say.

Due to their extraordinary shape-shifting abilities, so-called pluripotent cells have enormous value to medical researchers. They allow scientists to study the effects of drugs and disease on human cells when experiments on actual people would be impossible, and they have given rise to the field of regenerative medicine, which seeks to restore lost or damaged organs and tissues.

The F-class cells were created using genetically engineered mouse cells, and may not occur naturally outside the lab, according to senior author Andras Nagy, a stem cell researcher at Torontos Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital.

However, the find suggests that there may be other classes of pluripotent cells -- or a spectrum of reprogrammed cells -- yet to be discovered, authors say.

We think that if we have time, and money and hands to do it, we might find additional novel cell lines, Nagy said.

Until now, stem cells have been either obtained from embryos or produced in the lab through a painstaking process called induced pluripotency, whereby a virus is used to alter an adult cells genetic information and return the cell to a pliable, embryonic state.

That process, which was pioneered by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka and recognized with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012, is extremely inefficient, yielding embryonic-stem-cell-like cells just 1% of the time.

Nagy and his colleagues, a consortium of international researchers called Project Grandiose, began their research by looking more closely at the castoffs of that process, or those cells that did not closely match the description of embryonic stem cells.

We looked at it in an unbiased way, Nagy said. Instead of ignoring or discarding those cells that dont look like embryonic stem cells, we thought we might find more than just one alternative cell type.

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Researchers discover new class of stem cells

Lab-grown blood would take enormous pressure off the transfusion service Photograph: Ab Still Ltd/ AB Still Ltd/Science Photo Library/Corbis

In 2007, a team of researchers from the UK and Irish Blood services responded to an oddly specific call from the US military. They wanted scientists to help them build a machine, no bigger than two and a half washing machines, that could be dropped from a helicopter on to a battle field and generate stem-cell-derived blood for injured soldiers.

The teams application was not successful, but they refocused their efforts and set off on a more utopian mission to develop a similar technology to create a limitless supply of clean, laboratory-grown blood for use in clinics around the world. Using blood made from stem cells would unshackle blood services from the limits of human supply, and any risk of infection would be removed.

Theyve been working with embryonic or induced pluripotent stem cells, which, given the right culture conditions, can differentiate into any type of cells. Still at least a year from human testing, the team have tweaked their protocol to select only red blood cells.

Because we make them from human cells they are as nature intended, says Joanne Mountford, of the University of Glasgow, who leads the project along with Marc Turner, the medical director of the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service.

Its the same thing your body makes but were just doing it in a lab.

Lab-grown blood has advantages over blood from a donor. If I take a bag of blood from your arm, some cells would be brand new, she explains.

But some of them would be 110 or 120 days old and about to die. These cells wont do you much good. Using engineered red blood cells from a single batch, the team proposes, will ensure that recipients receive younger, fresher, and potentially more effective blood.

Another advantage is that they are making type-O blood, which can be given to practically all patients including those with rare AB-negative blood. A limitless supply of this type of blood would remove the logistical headache of juggling different types of blood, simplifying global distribution logistics, and allowing the blood to flow more freely to where it is needed.

Ted Bianco, director of Innovations at the Wellcome Trust, which funds the project, speaks excitedly about its potential, but says that challenges exist in translating such research to clinical practice, especially when trying to replace human blood donors as the source of supply for lifesaving transfusions.

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Blood grown from stem cells could transform transfusions