Here are the stem cell stories that caught our eye this week.
Cool Stem Cell Photo: Kidneys in the spotlight
At an early stage, a nephron forming in the human kidney generates an S-shaped structure. Green cells will generate the kidneys’ filtering device, and blue and red cells are responsible for distinct nephron activities. (Image/Stacy Moroz and Tracy Tran, Andrew McMahon Lab, USC Stem Cell)
I had to take a second look at this picture when I first saw it. I honestly thought it was someone’s scientific interpretation of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night. What this picture actually represents is a nephron. Your kidney has over a million nephrons packed inside it. These tiny structures filter our blood and remove waste products by producing urine.
Scientists at USC Stem Cell are studying kidney development in animals and humans in hopes of gaining new insights that could lead to improved stem cell-based technologies that more accurately model human kidneys (by coincidence, we blogged about another human kidney study on Tuesday). Yesterday, these scientists published a series of articles in the Journal of American Society of Nephrology that outlines a new, open-source kidney atlas they created. The atlas contains a catalog of high resolution images of different structures representing the developing human kidney.
CIRM-funded researcher Andrew McMahon summed it up nicely in a USC news release:
“Our research bridges a critical gap between animal models and human applications. The data we collected and analyzed creates a knowledge-base that will accelerate stem cell-based technologies to produce mini-kidneys that accurately represent human kidneys for biomedical screening and replacement therapies.”
And here’s a cool video of a developing kidney kindly provided by the authors of this study.
Video Caption: Kidney development begins with a population of “progenitor cells” (green), which are similar to stem cells. Some progenitor cells (red) stream out and aggregate into a ball, the renal vesicle (gold). As each renal vesicle grows, it radically morphs into a series of shapes — can you spot the two S-shaped bodies (green-orange-pink structures)? – and finally forms a nephron. Each human kidney contains one million mature nephrons, which form an expansive tubular network (white) that filters the blood, ensuring a constant environment for all of our body’s functions. (Video courtesy of Nils Lindstorm, Andy McMahon, Seth Ruffins and the Microscopy Core Facility at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at the Keck School of Medicine of USC)
Lab-grown hamburgers coming to a McDonald’s near you…
“Lab-grown meat is coming, whether you like it or not” sure makes a splashy headline! This week, Wired magazine featured two Bay Area startup companies, Just For All and Finless Foods, dedicated to making meat-in-a-dish in hopes of one day reducing our dependence on livestock. The methods behind their products aren’t exactly known. Just For All is engineering “clean meat” from cells. On the menu currently are cultured chorizo, nuggets, and foie gras. I bet you already guessed what Finless Foods specialty is. The company is isolating stem-like muscle progenitor cells from fish meat in hopes of identifying a cell that will robustly create the cell types found in fish meat.
Just’s tacos made with lab-grown chorizo. (Wired)
I find the Wired article particularly interesting because of the questions and issues Wired author Matt Simon raises. Are clean meat companies really more environmentally sustainable than raising livestock? Currently, there isn’t enough data to prove this is the case, he argues. And what about the feasibility of convincing populations that depend on raising livestock for a living to go “clean”? And what about flavor and texture? Will people be willing to eat a hamburger that doesn’t taste and ooze in just the right way?
As clean meat technologies continue to advance and become more affordable, I’ll be interested to see what impact they will have on our eating habits in the future.
Induced pluripotent stem cells could be the next cancer vaccine
Our last story is about a new Cell Stem Cell study that suggests induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) could be developed into a vaccine against cancer. CIRM-funded scientist Joseph Wu and his team at Stanford University School of Medicine found that injecting iPSCs into mice that were transplanted with breast cancer cells reduced the formation of tumors.
The team dug deeper and discovered that iPSCs shared similarities with cancer cells with respect to the panel of genes they express and the types of proteins they carry on their cell surface. This wasn’t surprising to them as both cells represent an immature development stage. Because of these similarities, injecting iPSCs primed the mouse’s immune system to recognize and reject similar cells like cancer cells.
The team will next test their approach on human cancer cells in the lab. Joseph Wu commented on the potential future of iPSC-based vaccines for cancer in a Stanford news release:
“Although much research remains to be done, the concept itself is pretty simple. We would take your blood, make iPS cells and then inject the cells to prevent future cancers. I’m very excited about the future possibilities.”
iPSCs (Kathrin Plath, University of California, Los Angeles)
The Stem Cellar 