Via cloning, human stem cells

Oregon Health&Science University

Donor egg held by pipette prior to nuclear extraction.

By Maggie Fox, Senior Writer, NBC News

Researchers say they have finally managed to use cloning technology to make human embryos and grow stem cells from them in the hopes of making perfectly matched grow-your-own tissue transplants.

They used a human egg cell and parts of a human skin cell to grow a very early human embryo, then transformed cells from this ball of cells into beating heart cells and skin cells. The process may eventually help treat a range of diseases, from Parkinsons to rare inherited conditions, they reported Wednesday in the journal Cell.

The researchers, at Oregon Health & Science University, say their embryos almost certainly could not grow into living human babies or even start a pregnancy theyre deficient in a key way. But they admit also that they havent quite overcome ethical qualms about working with human embryos.

However, the work opens another route to treatments using human embryonic stem cells, the bodys master cells. These stem cells are kind of very early unprogrammed cells but they have the capacity to become any other cell type, says Shoukhrat Mitalipov, who led the research.

These cells are very different from so-called adult stem cells, like those taken from bone marrow. Adult stem cells cannot give rise to cells of other tissue types -- blood cells cannot be used to make brain cells, for instance.

Dr. George Daley, a stem cell expert at Harvard Medical School, called it a "beautiful piece of work".

When human embryonic stem cells were first discovered in 1998, scientists immediately dreamed of using cloning technology to help people grow their own organ and tissue transplants, and to use them to study disease. Theyd be perfect genetic matches for each patient, meaning an end to a lifetime of taking dangerous immune-suppressing drugs after an organ transplant.

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Via cloning, human stem cells