Page 25 - Revista científica IESBrugulat 2016/17

B I O T E C H N O L O G Y

We think that this discovery is a great progress for the world of biotechnology and science in
general. Not only it allows doctors to heal new illnesses which used to be not treatable, but also

offers limitless amounts of stem cells to scientists and researchers so that they have freedom to
test as much as they want and make up new treatments more easily. This wasn’t possible before

because they were only able to get stem cells from embryos and they had to use the patient’s
own stem cells.

The big disadvantage
Not everything is greatness for induced pluripotent stem cells. Not everyone can receive

anyone’s iPS, it has some limitations. Sort of like it happens with blood, a determinate “kind” of
people can only give iPS to a reduced part of the world population. Unlike it happens with
blood, there are lots of different kinds of iPS types. Shinya Yamanaka estimated that there are

about 100 types in Japan and about 200 in the United States.
Slowly becoming useful

Although all the disadvantages that this practice involves, it has already been tried successfully
with some people, like the operation lead by Dr. Masayo Takahashi and her colleagues at the
Riken Center for Developmental Biology, which used this cells to treat macular degeneration.

How are induced pluripotent stem cells done?
They are made using a transforming technique called “reprogramming”, which, as the name

says, consists of taking a cell that has already been assigned a function, and then taking it back
to its earliest stage, when it was a stem cell.

To do that, they start isolating and culturing donor cells. Then, they insert a previously
prepared virus in the mixture that convert some of the cells into stem cells. The cells that have

been turned into iPS (only 0.01 to 0.1%), are then separated from others and can already be
used. This is a long process, as it lasts 1-2 weeks for animal cells and more than 3 weeks for
human cells.