THE age of embryonic stem cells edges closer. Researchers have found a way to create many personalised ESCs from a single embryo, taking us a step closer to doing away with the controversial need for therapeutic cloning.
Personalised ESCs, which can repair damaged or diseased tissue in patients while avoiding tissue rejection, can only be produced with a transient 鈥渆mbryo鈥� made by fusing a patient鈥檚 own cells with human egg cells stripped of their nuclear DNA. But that means destroying a new embryo created for each patient.
Now Kevin Eggan鈥檚 team at Harvard University has dispensed with the egg and replaced it with ESCs from a spare IVF embryo that would have been discarded. To these they fused a man鈥檚 foreskin cells, creating what appear to be new personalised ESCs (Science, vol 309, p 1369).
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The catch is that the new ESCs could not be used for treating the man because they still contained the chromosomes of the original ESCs. But another team, led by Yuri Verlinsky at the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago, claims to have found a way to remove these chromosomes (New 杏吧原创, 28 May, p 8).
