Turning blood into heart cells


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Whoa...this could be major. Let's hope the follow-on work goes well.

PhysOrg....

'Universal' virus-free method turns blood cells into 'beating' heart cells

Johns Hopkins scientists have developed a simplified, cheaper, all-purpose method they say can be used by scientists around the globe to more safely turn blood cells into heart cells. The method is virus-free and produces heart cells that beat with nearly 100 percent efficiency, they claim.

"We took the recipe for this process from a complex minestrone to a simple miso soup," says Elias Zambidis, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of oncology and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering and the Kimmel Cancer Center.

Zambidis says, "many scientists previously thought that a nonviral method of inducing blood cells to turn into highly functioning cardiac cells was not within reach, but "we've found a way to do it very efficiently and we want other scientists to test the method in their own labs." However, he cautions that the cells are not yet ready for human testing.

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I don't see how plasmid transfection is significantly safer than virus-mediated transduction. In the majority of setups, you have no control over the site of integration, meaning that your exogenous gene could insert anywhere in the genome - in the middle of an existing gene or regulatory site, for example. You also have no control over how many integration events occur per cell, meaning that different transfected cells may have completely different levels of gene expression.

It is only in the latter technique that we have any hope of site-specific integration by hijacking the viral integrase/recombinase and reprogramming its specificity to a desired site.

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I don't see how plasmid transfection is significantly safer than virus-mediated transduction. In the majority of setups, you have no control over the site of integration, meaning that your exogenous gene could insert anywhere in the genome - in the middle of an existing gene or regulatory site, for example. You also have no control over how many integration events occur per cell, meaning that different transfected cells may have completely different levels of gene expression.

It is only in the latter technique that we have any hope of site-specific integration by hijacking the viral integrase/recombinase and reprogramming its specificity to a desired site.

probably so that a piggyBac transposon/transposase system could be used to later remove the new genes in case they become cancerous, after pluripotency is reached you probably need to remove the newly introduced sequences for unlimited self renewal so that the differentiated cells down the line don't proliferate as if they were still stem cells

though i havent seen the specific paper

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I don't see how plasmid transfection is significantly safer than virus-mediated transduction. In the majority of setups, you have no control over the site of integration, meaning that your exogenous gene could insert anywhere in the genome - in the middle of an existing gene or regulatory site, for example. You also have no control over how many integration events occur per cell, meaning that different transfected cells may have completely different levels of gene expression.It is only in the latter technique that we have any hope of site-specific integration by hijacking the viral integrase/recombinase and reprogramming its specificity to a desired site.

probably so that a piggyBac transposon/transposase system could be used to later remove the new genes in case they become cancerous, after pluripotency is reached you probably need to remove the newly introduced sequences for unlimited self renewal so that the differentiated cells down the line don't proliferate as if they were still stem cells though i havent seen the specific paper

I think my head just exploded

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