Cambridge University

Turning back the clock to make old skin cells young again

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

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Dr. Diljeet Gill, photo courtesy Babraham Institute, Cambridge UK

Sometimes when I am giving public presentations people ask if stem cells are good for the face. I always say that if stem cells could help improve people’s faces would I look like this. It’s a line that gets a laugh but it’s also true. The ads you see touting stem cells as being beneficial for skin are all using plant stem cells. But now some new research has managed to turn back the clock for skin cells, and it might do a lot more than just help skin look younger.

Back in 2007 Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka discovered a way to turn ordinary skin cells back into an embryonic-like state, meaning those cells could then be turned into any other cell in the body. He called these cells induced pluripotent stem cells or iPSCs. Dr. Yamanaka was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for this work.

Using this work as their starting point, a team at Cambridge University in the UK, have developed a technique that can rewind the clock on skin cells but stop it less than a third of the way through, so they have made the cells younger but didn’t erase their identity as skin cells.

The study, published in the journal ELifeSciences, showed the researchers were able to make older skin cells 30 years younger. This wasn’t about restoring a sense of youthful beauty to the skin, instead it was about something far more important, restoring youthful function to the skin.

In a news release, Dr Diljeet Gill, a lead author on the study, said: “Our understanding of ageing on a molecular level has progressed over the last decade, giving rise to techniques that allow researchers to measure age-related biological changes in human cells. We were able to apply this to our experiment to determine the extent of reprogramming our new method achieved.”

The team proved the potential for their work using fibroblasts, the most common kind of cell found in connective tissues such as skin. Fibroblasts are important because they produce collagen which helps provide support and structure to tissues and also helps in healing wounds. When the researchers examined the rejuvenated skin cells they found they were producing more collagen than cells that had not been rejuvenated. They also saw signs that these rejuvenated cells could help heal wounds better than the old cells.

The researchers also noted that this approach had an effect on other genes linked to age-related conditions, such Alzheimer’s disease and the development of cataracts.

The researchers acknowledge that this is all very early on, but the fact that they were able to make the cells behave and act like younger cells, without losing their identity as skin cells, holds tremendous promise not just for conditions affecting the skin, but for regenerative medicine as a whole.

Dr. Diljeet concluded: “Our results represent a big step forward in our understanding of cell reprogramming. We have proved that cells can be rejuvenated without losing their function and that rejuvenation looks to restore some function to old cells. The fact that we also saw a reverse of ageing indicators in genes associated with diseases is particularly promising for the future of this work.”

A step forward in finding a treatment for a deadly neurological disorder

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments

THIS BLOG IS ALSO AVAILABLE AS AN AUDIO CAST

MRI section of a brain affected by ALS with the front section of the brain highlighted

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a nasty disease that steadily attacks nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. It’s pretty much always fatal within a few years. As if that wasn’t bad enough, ALS also can overlap with a condition called frontotemporal dementia (ALS/FTD). Together these conditions cause devastating symptoms of muscle weakness along with changes in memory, behavior and personality.

Now researchers at Cambridge University in the UK have managed to grow groups of cells called “mini-brains” that mimic ALS/FTD and could lead to new approaches to treating this deadly combination.

We have written about these mini-brains before. Basically, they are created, using the iPSC method, that takes skin or blood cells from a patient with a particular condition, in this case ALS/FTD, and turns them into the kind of nerve cells in the brain affected by the disease. Because they came from someone who had ALS/FTD they display many of the characteristics of the disease and this gives researchers a great tool to study the condition.

This kind of approach has been done before and given researchers a glimpse into what is happening in the brains of people with ALS/FTD. But in the past those cells were in a kind of clump, and it wasn’t possible to get enough nutrients to the cells in the middle of the clump for the mini-brain to survive for long.

What is different about the Cambridge team is that they were able to create these mini-brains using thin, slices of cells. That meant all the cells could get enough nutrients to survive a long time, giving the team a better model to understand what is happening in ALS/FTD.

In a news release, Dr András Lakatos, the senior author of the study, said: “Neurodegenerative diseases are very complex disorders that can affect many different cell types and how these cells interact at different times as the diseases progress.

“To come close to capturing this complexity, we need models that are more long-lived and replicate the composition of those human brain cell populations in which disturbances typically occur, and this is what our approach offers. Not only can we see what may happen early on in the disease – long before a patient might experience any symptoms – but we can also begin to see how the disturbances change over time in each cell.”

Thanks to these longer-lived cells the team were able to see changes in the mini-brains at a very early stage, including damage to DNA and cell stress, changes that affected other cells which play a role in muscle movements and behavior.

Because the cells developed using the iPSC method are from a patient with ALS/FTD, the researchers were able to use them to screen many different medications to see if any had potential as a therapy. They identified one, GSK2606414, that seemed to help in reducing the build-up of toxic proteins, reduced cell stress and the loss of nerve cells.

The team acknowledge that these results are promising but also preliminary and will require much more research to verify them.

CIRM has funded three clinical trials targeting ALS. You can read about that work here.

Stories that caught our eye: FDA grants orphan drug status to CIRM-funded therapy; stunning discovery upends ideas of cell formation; and how tadpoles grow new tails

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

Gut busting discovery

Intestinal stem cells: Photo courtesy Klaus Kaestner, Penn Institute for Regenerative Medicine

It’s not often you read the word “sensational” in a news release about stem cells. But this week researchers at the University of Copenhagen released findings that are overturning long-held ideas about the development of cells in our stomachs. So perhaps calling it “sensational” is not too big a stretch.

In the past it was believed that the development of immature cells in our stomachs, before a baby is born, was predetermined, that the cells had some kind of innate sense of what they were going to become and when. Turns out that’s not the case. The researchers say it’s the cells’ environment that determines what they will become and that all cells in the fetus’ gut have the potential to turn into stem cells.

In the “sensational” news release lead author, Kim Jensen, says this finding could help in the development of new therapies.

“We used to believe that a cell’s potential for becoming a stem cell was predetermined, but our new results show that all immature cells have the same probability for becoming stem cells in the fully developed organ. In principle, it is simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Here signals from the cells’ surroundings determine their fate. If we are able to identify the signals that are necessary for the immature cell to develop into a stem cell, it will be easier for us to manipulate cells in the wanted direction’.

The study is published in the journal Nature.                             

A tale of a tail

African clawed frog tadpole: Photo courtesy Gary Nafis

It’s long been known that some lizards and other mammals can regrow severed limbs, but it hasn’t been clear how. Now scientists at the University of Cambridge in the UK have figured out what’s going on.

Using single-cell genomics the scientists were able to track which genes are turned on and off at particular times, allowing them to watch what happens inside the tail of the African clawed frog tadpole as it regenerates the damaged limb.

They found that the response was orchestrated by a group of skin cells they called Regeneration-Organizing Cells, or ROCs. Can Aztekin, one of the lead authors of the study in the journal Science, says seeing how ROCs work could lead to new ideas on how to stimulate similar regeneration in other mammals.

“It’s an astonishing process to watch unfold. After tail amputation, ROCs migrate from the body to the wound and secrete a cocktail of growth factors that coordinate the response of tissue precursor cells. These cells then work together to regenerate a tail of the right size, pattern and cell composition.”

Orphan Drug Designation for CIRM-funded therapy

Poseida Therapeutics got some good news recently about their CIRM-funded therapy for multiple myeloma. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted them orphan drug designation.

Orphan drug designation is given to therapies targeting rare diseases or disorders that affect fewer than 200,000 people in the U.S. It means the company may be eligible for grant funding toward clinical trial costs, tax advantages, FDA user-fee benefits and seven years of market exclusivity in the United States following marketing approval by the FDA.

CIRM’s President and CEO, Dr. Maria Millan, says the company is using a gene-modified cell therapy approach to help people who are not responding to traditional approaches.

“Poseida’s technology is seeking to destroy these cancerous myeloma cells with an immunotherapy approach that uses the patient’s own engineered immune system T cells to seek and destroy the myeloma cells.”

Poseida’s CEO, Eric Ostertag, said the designation is an important milestone for the company therapy which “has demonstrated outstanding potency, with strikingly low rates of toxicity in our phase 1 clinical trial. In fact, the FDA has approved fully outpatient dosing in our Phase 2 trial starting in the second quarter of 2019.”

Organoids revolutionize approach to studying a variety of diseases

/ Yimy Villa / Leave a comment
Organoids

There are limitations to studying cells under a microscope. To understand some of the more complex processes, it is critical to see how these cells behave in an environment that is similar to conditions in the body. The production of organoids has revolutionized this approach.

Organoids are three-dimensional structures derived from stem cells that have similar characteristics of an actual organ. There have been several studies recently published that have used this approach to understand a wide scope of different areas.

In one such instance, researchers at The University of Cambridge were able to grow a “mini-brain” from human stem cells. To demonstrate that this organoid had functional capabilities similar to that of an actual brain, the researchers hooked it up to a mouse spinal cord and surrounding muscle. What they found was remarkable– the “mini-brain” sent electrial signals to the spinal cord that made the surrounding muscles twitch. This model could pave the way for studying neurodegenerative diseases such as spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Spinal muscular atrophy

Speaking of SMA, researchers in Singapore have used organoids to come up with some findings that might be able to help people battling the condition.

SMA is a neurodegenerative disease caused by a protein deficiency that results in nerve degeneration, paralysis and even premature death. The fact that it mainly affects children makes it even worse. Not much is known how SMA develops and even less how to treat or prevent it.

That’s where the research from the A*STAR’s Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) comes in. Using the iPSC method they turned tissue samples from healthy people and people with SMA into spinal organoids.

They then compared the way the cells developed in the organoids and found that the motor nerve cells from healthy people were fully formed by day 35. However, the cells from people with SMA started to degenerate before they got to that point.

They also found that the protein problem that causes SMA to develop did so by causing the motor nerve cells to divide, something they don’t normally do. So, by blocking the mechanism that caused the cells to divide they were able to prevent the cells from dying.

In an article in Science and Technology Research News lead researcher Shi-Yan Ng said this approach could help unlock clues to other diseases such as ALS.

“We are one of the first labs to report the formation of spinal organoids. Our study presents a new method for culturing human spinal-cord-like tissues that could be crucial for future research.”

Just yesterday the CIRM Board awarded almost $4 million to Ankasa Regenerative Therapeutics to try and develop a treatment for another debilitating back problem called degenerative spondylolisthesis.

And finally, organoid modeling was used to better understand and study an infectious disease. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin created fallopian tube organoids from normal human cells. Fallopian tubes are the pair of tubes found inside women along which the eggs travel from the ovaries to the uterus. The scientists observed the effects of chronic infections of Chlamydia, a sexually transmittable infection. It was discovered that chronic infections lead to permanent changes at the DNA level as the cells age. These changes to DNA are permanent even after the infection is cleared, and could be indicative of the increased risk of cervical cancer observed in women with Chlamydia or those that have contracted it in the past.