Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have transformed cells from human skin into cells that produce insulin, the hormone used to treat diabetes. The breakthrough may one day lead to new treatments for the millions of people affected by the disease, researchers say.
The approach involves reprogramming skin cells into pluripotent stem cells, or cells that can give rise to any other fetal or adult cell type, and then inducing them to differentiate, or transform, into cells that perform a particular function - in this case, secreting insulin. Several recent studies have shown that cells can be returned to pluripotent state using "defined factors" - specific proteins that control which genes are active in a cell - a technique pioneered by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, a professor at Kyoto University in Japan.
"Not only have we shown that we can reprogram skin cells, but we have also demonstrated that these reprogrammed cells can be differentiated into insulin-producing cells which hold great therapeutic potential for diabetes," said Yi Zhang, Ph.D., the study's lead author and professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UNC.
