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Company Claims Cell Reprogramming Without Viruses
PrimeGen Biotech, a biotechnology company in Irvine, California, reported on Tuesday that it has developed a “non-viral” method of reprogramming human adult cells (including kidney, skin, and retina cells) to behave like stem cells. The company claimed (in an announcement coinciding with the Stem Cell Summit this week in New York) that it has used proteins and nucleic acids to do the reprogramming work that previous researchers accomplished with cancer-causing genes carried to the cells in retroviruses. Douglas Melton, a biologist at Harvard University, said “retroviruses are a real limitation to stem cell reprogramming” because they may disrupt desirable cell functions, not just the functions targeted by tissue engineers (hat tip to Andrea Gawrylewski at The Scientist).
New Scientist reports that other scientists are showing caution after the announcement:
“This is fascinating,” says Arnold Kriegstein, head of developmental and stem cell biology at the University of California, San Francisco. “But without more information, it’s hard to know exactly how much they have done.”
“We have got to assess whether these cells are equivalent to classical iPS cells and ES cells,” adds Evan Snyder, a stem cell biologist at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, California.
Why did PrimeGen not publish their results in a journal? Forbes reports that the company is keeping the research under wraps “until the company finalizes an agreement with a corporate partner”:
PrimeGen’s Sundsmo says the company is writing up scientific papers on the method, and plans to release more details at a stem cell scientific meeting later this year. However, he released the news at the industry conference in hopes of finding a corporate partner to help produce cells in large volumes.
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