Hormone-Producing Thyroid Grown from Embryonic Stem Cells

The achievement is the latest success in the relatively new field of regenerative medicine

By Dan Jones and Nature magazine

WE CAN REBUILD HIM: Regenerative successes in mice are adding up. Image: Nature News

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From Nature magazine

A series of achievements have stoked excitement about the potential of regenerative medicine, which aims to tackle diseases by replacing or regenerating damaged cells, tissues and organs. A paper in Nature today reports another step towards this goal: the generation of working thyroid cells from stem cells.

Sabine Costagliola, a molecular embryologist at the Free University of Brussels, and her team study the development of the thyroid gland, which regulates how the body uses energy and affects sensitivity to other hormones. Their research shows that thyroid function can be re-established even after the gland has been destroyed at least in mice. If the same technique could be applied to humans, it would help the roughly 1 in 3,000 babies born with deficient thyroid activity, or hypothyroidism, which can result in stunted physical and mental development.

The thyroid is the latest in a growing list of body parts that can now be fixed in mice, with the potential to treat diseases from diabetes to Parkinsons (see 'We can rebuild him'). Progress has been very rapid over the past decade, says Charles ffrench-Constant, director of the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, UK. In recent years weve seen a number of very important studies in which mouse stem cells have been converted to a desired cell type that has then been shown to be functional in vivo, and to confer benefits in mouse models of human diseases.

Key ingredient Costagliola and her colleagues first genetically engineered embryonic stem cells to express two proteins NKX2-1 and PAX8 that are expressed together only in the thyroid. When these cells were grown in Petri dishes in the presence of thyroid-stimulating hormone, they turned into thyroid cells.

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Hormone-Producing Thyroid Grown from Embryonic Stem Cells