University of Georgia stem-cell scientist Steve Stice says his lab likely will experiment with a new way of creating stem cells.
"We definitely will consider it," Stice said. "It's really good work. We see it as a great opportunity."
Scientists in Japan and Wisconsin this week announced they had turned adult human skin cells into stem cells, which have the ability to develop into other types of cells - blood, lungs, neural and so on.
The breakthrough was hailed by opponents of research using a kind of stem cells called embryonic stem cells, which are taken from embryos and which Stice uses in his research at UGA.
The new technique holds the promise that scientists now can create stem cells without embryos, and without the ethical questions raised by opponents of using embryonic stem cells for research. Some believe destroying human embryos to harvest stem cells is wrong because the embryos have the potential of developing into human beings.
In the new technique, the scientists used a retrovirus to insert four genes into the adult cells, which responded by reprogramming themselves into cells that could become any one of more than 200 types of human cell, such as heart, skin or eye.
Stice uses embryonic stem cells in research that has focused in recent years on trying to find medical treatments for people with genetic neurological diseases such as Parkinson's disease. Stice's lab also has been experimenting recently with stem cell types that can develop into bone, muscle and cartilage, he said.
A company Stice helped found, Aruna Biomedical, recently began marketing a technique for mass-producing neural stem cells - stem cells that are not the type that can grow into any kind of human tissue, but only into nerve, brain or spine cells.
Combining the new technology with Stice's technology could change what Aruna does "in a positive way," Stice said.
"It just makes what we're doing here even more powerful," he said.
Stice's research and that of the researchers in Japan and Wisconsin are not in direct competition.
"We are not in the business of making new stem cell lines," Stice said.
But new stem cell lines created by the new cell techniques might become part of Stice's research, he said.
Stem cell lines - families of constantly dividing cells that are descendants of the same parent group of stem cells - created with the new technology possibly could be produced in large quantities for researchers using Aruna's mass-production methods, he said.
The new way of creating stem cells may allow the development of lines of stem cells known to be vulnerable to certain diseases, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, which could help in developing treatments for those conditions, Stice said.
Such lines could be developed by beginning with adult cells from people who suffer with the disease researchers want to investigate.
"What better way than a stem cell from a Huntington's patient to study Huntington's disease?" he asked.
The discovery also may be a step toward one the biggest hopes of stem cell researchers - individualized therapy.
The dream is that one day doctors will be able to use a person's own cells to grow replacement tissues for a diseased lung, liver or other organs. Since the tissues would be genetically identical to the patient's, their patient's immune system would not reject the new tissue.
"Imagine 300 million different stem cell lines," one for every American, Stice said.
But attempts to develop that sort of individualized medical treatment have so far been enormously expensive, and likely will be expensive in the future, even if the new technique fulfills its early promise, he said.
Scientists are a long way from knowing how useful the new stem-cell technique can be.
One drawback of the new technique is that the stem cells created may be prone to develop cancer.
"Many questions remain" to be answered before scientists know how useful the lines of stem cells produced by the new techniques will be, Stice said.
"I think everyone believes it's still a ways off," he said.
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