The scientific community recently welcomed an exciting announcement regarding the ability to coax ordinary skin cells to behave like embryonic stem cells. This achievement, made by Dr. Thomson in Wisconsin and Dr. Yamanaka in Japan, was achieved by infecting skin cells with four genes found in embryonic cells that essentially revert the cells to a more embryonic state. This creates a type of stem cell, called Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (ips cells), which have many of the characteristics of embryonic stem cells yet have been “reprogrammed” from somatic cells.
Cellular reprogramming to create ips cells, and even most recently disease-specific stem cell lines, has expanded rapidly. This promising avenue of research might revolutionize medicine in profound ways. For instance, researchers at Harvard were recently able to create stem cell lines from patients facing disease, in an effort to better understand what gives rise to the disease and what goes wrong to create it. This is a very exciting advance.
After the discovery of ips cells was made, there were some, though, who claimed that this breakthrough would make embryonic stem cell research obsolete and unnecessary, as embryonic stem cells would be derived from this alternative source. This assertion, largely made by the research’s previous opponents, is simply untrue. There are still uncertainties surrounding this approach that need to be better understood. Similarly, this advance would not have ever been made without understanding embryonic stem cells first. It is the strong belief of THE BROOKE ELLISON PROJECT that, though research using Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (ips cells) is expanding and ought to be pursued, it should not and cannot take the place of human embryonic stem cell research.
One avenue of research does not obviate the need for another, and surely, the researchers who made this discovery would not advocate for it to take the place of embryonic research.
Stem cell research, in all its forms, yields different benefits and provides different information for the future of medicine. For this reason, THE BROOKE ELLISON PROJECT believes in the potential in and promotion of all avenues of research currently being pursued. However, as human embryonic stem cell research is considered by field experts to be the most promising, we focus our attention on helping to bring this research to the forefront and to fruition.