In order to increase our understanding of diseases like Alzheimer’s, we need to be able to work with cells that look and behave like those you would see in older individuals who have developed the disease
- Anna Philpott
A new method of generating mature nerve cells from skin cells could greatly enhance understanding of neurodegenerative diseases, and could accelerate the development of new drugs and stem cell-based regenerative medicine.
The nerve cells generated by this new method show the same functional characteristics as the mature cells found in the body, making them much better models for the study of age-related diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and for the testing of new drugs. Eventually, the technique could also be used to generate mature nerve cells for transplantation into patients with a range of neurodegenerative diseases.
By studying how nerves form in developing tadpoles, researchers from the University of Cambridge were able to identify ways to speed up the cellular processes by which human nerve cells mature. The findings are reported in the May 27th edition of the journal Development.
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Image: Mature nerve cells generated from human cells using enhanced transcription factors
Credit: Fahad Ali
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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