Guest blogger Alan Trounson — March’s stem cell research highlights

Each month CIRM President Alan Trounson gives his perspective on recently published papers he thinks will be valuable in moving the field of stem cell research forward. This month’s report, along with an archive of past reports, is available on the CIRM website.

This month’s report discusses a couple very pragmatic but elegant riffs on scientific methods that could make creation of two types of stem cells more practical. One laid out a path to nuclear transfer, or therapeutic cloning, that eliminates the need for donor eggs, something that has always put the brakes on creating stem cells via this route. The Oregon team that first reported success with nuclear transfer in humans developed the new method, which I won’t go into here in detail, but I do spell it out in my full report.

The other practical advance yielded a method to create iPS type reprogrammed stem cells from as little as a drop of blood instead of the table spoon generally needed by other methods. I find this worthy of highlighting in my monthly blog because it has such potential to make it feasible for the various stem cell banks around the world to include a broadly diverse set of cell lines that come closer to representing the population as a whole.

Requiring a tablespoon of blood means the donation needs to be drawn by a healthcare professional, which does not make it easy to extend creation of iPS cells lines to remote settings or to populations fearful of the procedure. Reducing the amount of blood required to less than a milliliter makes a simple finger prick sufficient to collect the sample. The Singapore team adjusted a number of kits readily available from research supply companies to create this protocol that seems to be at least as efficient in creating stem cells lines as other current techniques using blood samples.

This method could be ideally used with umbilical cord blood banking where a small aliquot could be retained for iPS cell development without significantly reducing the amount of cord blood available for immune or blood disease therapies.

This new method has potential to make it easier to fulfill the goals of an international network I helped to found. A group of us published an article in Cell Stem Cell last October in which we laid out the possibility of creating libraries of stem cell lines with sufficiently varied samples that 90 percent of the world’s population could find repair cells from the banks that reasonable matched their immune system. This would reduce the chances of complications from the donor tissue. A colleague wrote about the effort to create this international bank in this blog last fall.

My full report is available online, along with links to my reports from previous months.

A.T.