2012 medicine Nobel honors research on reprogramming adult cells

John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka share this year's prize

Web edition : 6:10 am

Two scientists who have rewritten developmental programming of adult cells share the 2012 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka are being honored for work with frog and mouse cells that demonstrated "that mature cells can be reprogrammed to pluripotency," the Nobel committee announced October 8. Pluripotent cells are capable of becoming nearly any cell in the body.

Although these types of reprogrammed stem cells, which Yamanaka dubbed induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, have not yet been used successfully in the clinic, the researchers? findings "have revolutionized our understanding of how cells and organisms develop," the Nobel committee stated.

Gurdon?s work forever changed the view that adult cells are stuck in their fate. In a series of experiments, he transplanted the nucleus ? the cellular compartment that contains DNA ? from an intestinal cell of an adult frog into a frog egg cell from which the nucleus had been removed. The cell developed into a normal tadpole, demonstrating that DNA contains all the information necessary to make an embryo. He published his discovery in 1962, the same year the medicine Nobel was awarded for the discovery of the structure of DNA. Gurdon is a developmental biologist at the Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge in England. ?

The technique of transferring nuclei from adult cells into developing egg cells to was used to create Dolly the sheep and many other cloned animals. But performing such techniques with human cells is generally considered out of the question.

Yamanaka, of Kyoto University in Japan, changed the debate over stem cells when he created induced pluripotent stem cells in 2006. He was trying to understand what kept stem cells isolated from embryos in their malleable state; many genes seemed to be involved. Yamanaka inserted 24 different genes into adult mouse cells and found that those adult cells could be transformed into ones that resemble embryonic stem cells. Testing subsets of those genes in different combinations revealed that only four are required to turn a mouse skin cell into a stem cell.

Such reprogrammed human cells have not yet been used clinically, but researchers hope to such methods will one day be used to grow replacement cells and tissues for patients. The cells also show promise for studying how diseases develop and for testing drugs.

Found in: Genes & Cells

Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/345620/title/2012_medicine_Nobel_honors_research_on_reprogramming_adult_cells

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