Welcome to the modern era of induced pluripotent stem cells. 2012 Nobel Prize With just a little cocktail, usually of transcription factors, you can make one type of cell turn into another. usually, you will convert it to a less differentiated (cells are created in a sort of tree structure where the leaves are more and more specialized) form, which can then be pushed to develop into other specialized forms.
This is really common in the lab now. You can use them to create organoids which are like mini-organs that have a lot of the properties of, say, a lung or a liver or a stomach or a brain, but aren't a full organism. Very useful for making models of mammalian biology.
By the way the discovery that led to this was a huge surprise (at least, that so few factors were required to transform cells) but there is still very little known, IE we can't arbitrarily convert one cell type to another reliably. Culturing mammalian cells is pretty hard.
i'm trying to learn more about this space as i have a few friends working on building brain-like organoids, converting different types of neural / glial cells to other types, etc
seems like this stuff is mostly at the basic science stage, with main applications being better disease models (which in neuro is huge). do you have a sense for how far along these are translationally? do the cultured / expanded cells build up lots of mutations? can you induce specific neural cell types, or at least consistently end up with daughter cells that have the same function as their parents? are these processes scalable beyond the quantities needed for this initial work? are there quality methods in place for determining the identity and function of these cells?
Targeting cancer cells is hard. One of the functions of the immune system is to clear out pre-cancerous disease and error state. Cancer proliferates because it evolves in situ to evade immune regulatory checks.
One of the reasons stem cell technology is moving so slowly is that, apart from mammalian cell culture being hard, we're extremely anxious about messing with the growth pathways. Tripping up the gene expression is what causes cancer in the first place. We're trying to find exploits in the same machinery to induce novel transformations without kicking the cell into unregulated growth. It's going to be a long time before I let something like that into my body.
You make a bunch of solid points, IMHO, but to your last sentence - If I’m facing dying due to a neurodegenerative disease, I’d be willing to roll the dice on the possibility of cancer. Facing death seems like a powerful disinhibitiory driver to me....
This is really common in the lab now. You can use them to create organoids which are like mini-organs that have a lot of the properties of, say, a lung or a liver or a stomach or a brain, but aren't a full organism. Very useful for making models of mammalian biology.
By the way the discovery that led to this was a huge surprise (at least, that so few factors were required to transform cells) but there is still very little known, IE we can't arbitrarily convert one cell type to another reliably. Culturing mammalian cells is pretty hard.