In the evening of April 13th, the international academic journal "nature" published an important breakthrough in China's stem cell preparation technology. Professor Deng Hongkui, Peking University, has reported for the first time in the world that chemical small molecules are used to change human somatic cells and obtain new generation of stem cell preparation technology, which will be used in treating major diseases such as diabetes, severe liver diseases, and malignant tumors.
In the school of life sciences of Peking University, Professor Deng Hongkui's team dropped several small chemical molecules into the culture medium of human skin cells. After nearly a month of culture, the structure and shape of human skin cells will be completely changed and become a new type of human pluripotent stem cells, also known as the "seed cells" of human life development.
Deng Hongkui, distinguished professor of Boya chair of Peking University and director of stem cell research center of Peking University: pluripotent stem cells are a type of cells that we can obtain from early embryos. Then this cell is characterized by almost unlimited developmental potential. On this basis, it can be made more complex in the future, or even make human organs in vitro. Our new technology first breaks through the first generation (stem cell preparation) technology in the world. It does not need to use human oocytes or destroy human early embryos, which avoids some ethical problems and breaks through the second generation technology. It may have the risk of gene mutation. The breakthrough of this technology has broken through a bottleneck for our country in the field of regeneration and stem cells, and established a new underlying technology.
This new generation of stem cell preparation technology is two chemical combinations obtained by Professor Deng Hongkui's team after ten years of research and development, changing dozens of technical routes and screening from more than 500000 chemical small molecules.
Deng Hongkui, distinguished professor of Boya Chair Professor of Peking University and director of stem cell research center of Peking University: in fact, we established such a technical method on adult cells of mice in 2013. (however) the complexity of human cell development is far more than that of mouse cells, and then it does not respond to the exogenous stimulation of chemical small molecules. Over the past years, we have tried more than 20 different strategies and screened millions of chemical small molecules. Finally, we found a strategy mainly divided into two steps. In the first step, we found an effective combination of six small molecules, which can reorganize human adult cells into intermediate cells with strong plasticity. The first step is particularly difficult, It took six years.
Now, Professor Deng Hongkui's team has used this chemical small molecule to induce new seed stem cells, and has further enhanced the human blood T cells and human islet cells which enhance immunity. Moreover, human pancreatic islet cells have been successfully tested on large animal monkeys, and can be used for treating diabetes in the future.
Juan balmonti, Professor of Salk Institute in the United States: this will be a major breakthrough in the field of regenerative medicine. Because they don't use genes, they use chemical small molecule reprogramming. Now it's like taking an aspirin. It can controllably and efficiently prepare human organs for the treatment of major diseases, speeding up the process of clinical application.
