London Researchers have long anticipated that heart cellsthe most sought- after cells in regenerative medicinemay help to repair injured hearts by replacing lost tissue and save millions of lives.
While researchers have spent more
than a decade trying to reprogram cell types in general, changing them into heart cells has so far been a stubborn challenge.
Now, a team at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania is the first to demonstrate the direct conversion of a non- heart cell type into a heart cell by RNA transfer. Working on the idea that the signature of a cell is defined by molecules called messenger RNAs ( mRNAs), which contain the chemical blueprint for how to make a protein, the investigators changed two different cell types, an astrocyte ( a star- shaped brain cell) and a fibroblast ( a skin cell), into a heart cell, using mRNAs.
Whats new about this approach for heart- cell generation is that we directly converted one cell type to another using RNA, without an intermediate step, says James Eberwine, a pharmacology professor at Penn. The team says that reprogramming a patients cells to be heart cells would permit personalized screening for efficacy of drug treatments.
