science-toys-people:

From the Toronto Star:

In a transformative study released Thursday, the 45-year-old biologist presents a new method to create embryonic stem cells from adult skin cells.

Indeed, in one fell swoop, the former Agincourt kid has surmounted the four major hurdles that have plagued the creation and usefulness of such cells since the ability to make them was announced to the world five years ago.

“All scientists that hear this story get excited about (it),” Rossi says.

“Now we have an experimental (method) for generating patient specific (stem) cells, highly efficiently and safely and also taking those cells towards clinically useful cell types,” he said in a teleconference interview.

The study is being published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

From the full article Highly Efficient Reprogramming to Pluripotency and Directed Differentiation of Human Cells with Synthetic Modified mRNA in Cell - Stem Cell:

Clinical application of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) is limited by the low efficiency of iPSC derivation and the fact that most protocols modify the genome to effect cellular reprogramming. Moreover, safe and effective means of directing the fate of patient-specific iPSCs toward clinically useful cell types are lacking. Here we describe a simple, nonintegrating strategy for reprogramming cell fate based on administration of synthetic mRNA modified to overcome innate antiviral responses. We show that this approach can reprogram multiple human cell types to pluripotency with efficiencies that greatly surpass established protocols. We further show that the same technology can be used to efficiently direct the differentiation of RNA-induced pluripotent stem cells (RiPSCs) into terminally differentiated myogenic cells. This technology represents a safe, efficient strategy for somatic cell reprogramming and directing cell fate that has broad applicability for basic research, disease modeling, and regenerative medicine.