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Category Archives: Cell Medicine

Executive Medicine of Texas Steps into Forefront of Skin Care with International Stem Cell Corporation’s Breakthrough …

Posted: October 28, 2012 at 6:41 am

Top doctors in Texas ink deal to distribute the only skincare line based on human parthenogenetic stem cells.

Dallas, TX (PRWEB) October 25, 2012

Top executives from around the world fly in to meet with Drs. Walter Gaman and Mark Anderson of Executive Medicine of Texas for their innovative and pro-active approach to health care. Voted Best Doctors in Texas by Newsweek Magazine in 2010 and co-authors of the book, Stay Young: 10 Proven Steps to Ultimate Health, the doctors pride themselves on keeping up with the latest technology and weeding out the fads from the real science based products and services.

Dr. Anderson, We are approached almost daily to endorse or support a product. We have no interest in 99.9% of what is brought to us. The irony of Lifeline is that we sought them out.

The duo, who also co-host a nationally syndicated weekly radio program called, The Staying Young Show, with clinical researcher and co-author, Judy Gaman, were first introduced to the Lifeline product when Dr. Elizabeth Hale, a prominent New York dermatologist was a guest on their show and shared her experience with the cream. Once Judy tried it, she and the physicians at Executive Medicine of Texas all agreed that this was nothing short of a miracle cream because Judys skin was changing on a daily basis. It was that personal experience which led the physicians to contact Lifeline and build a relationship.

Donna Queen, President of Lifeline Skin Care adds, Were excited to be working with Dr. Anderson and Dr. Gaman and the Staying Young Show. They have a great understanding of anti-aging medicine, and are established expertslocally, nationally and internationally--on new and innovative treatments for health and wellness.

The unique, patent pending combination of stem cell extracts, vitamins and antioxidants were formulated by a team of ISCOs research scientists in collaboration with cosmetic formulation experts. The serums have been safety tested by independent laboratories, and have been shown to promote firmer, smoother, healthier and younger-looking skin.

Lifeline Skin Care offers consumers the latest advances in biotechnology. These products are game-changers for anti-aging, says Simon Craw, stem cell scientist, International Stem Cell Corporation has developed ethical, potent stem cells that have proved to be a remarkable treatment for aging skin, and we are hopeful these stem cells will someday treat diseases such as Parkinsons disease and diabetes. Today, however, these stem cell extracts are being successfully used for skin rejuvenation. We are reinvesting the profits from the skin care into our research efforts.

Judy Gaman adds, My headshot from less than a year ago doesnt even look like me anymore. If you place that headshot and my new one side by side, it looks like I have turned back the clock ten years. And thats only after using the stem cell cream for six weeks.

The Lifeline collection currently offers two serums, one for day and one for nighttime use, the Defensive Day Moisture Serum SPF 15 and Recovery Night Moisture Serum. In November of 2012 they will launch a multifunctional eye treatment to minimize puffiness and dark circles as well as enhance the firmness of the eye area.

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Research firm reaped stem cell funds despite panel's advice

Posted: October 17, 2012 at 8:15 pm

StemCells Inc. has a history not much different from those of dozens, even hundreds, of biotech companies all around California.

Co-founded by an eminent Stanford research scientist, the Newark, Calif., firm has struggled financially while trying to push its stem cell products through the research-and-development pipeline. It collects about $1 million a year from licensing patents and selling cell cultures but spends well more than $20 million annually on R&D, so it runs deeply in the red.

On the plus side, StemCells Inc. has had rather a charmed relationship with the California stem cell program, that $3-billion taxpayer-backed research fund known formally as the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

The firm ranks first among all corporate recipients of approved funding from CIRM, with some $40 million in awards approved this year. That's more than has gone to such established California nonprofit research centers as Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute.

The record of StemCells is particularly impressive given that one of the two proposals for which the firm received a $20-million funding award, covering a possible Alzheimer's treatment, was actually rejected by CIRM's scientific review panel twice. Nevertheless, the stem cell agency's governing board went ahead and approved it last month.

What was the company's secret? StemCells says it's addressing "a serious unmet medical need" in Alzheimer's research. But it doesn't hurt that the company also had powerful friends going to bat for it, including two guys who were instrumental in getting CIRM off the ground in the first place.

There's nothing improper about the state stem cell agency funding private enterprise; that's part of its statutory duties, and potentially valuable in advancing the goals of research. In part that's because CIRM is in a good position to help biotech firms leapfrog the "valley of death" the territory between basic research and the much more expensive and speculative process of moving a technology to clinical testing and, hopefully, the marketplace. Unfortunately, that's also the point where outside investment often dries up.

But private enterprise is new territory for CIRM, which has steered almost all its grants thus far to nonprofit institutions. Those efforts haven't been trouble-free: With some 90% of the agency's grants having gone to institutions with representatives on its board, the agency has long been vulnerable to charges of conflicts of interest. The last thing it needed was to show a similar flaw in its dealings with private companies too.

That brings us back to StemCells Inc. First, consider the firm's pedigree. Its co-founder was Irving Weissman, director of Stanford's Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and a stem cell research pioneer. Weissman was one of the most prominent and outspoken supporters of Proposition 71, the 2004 ballot initiative that established the stem cell agency.

He's also been a leading beneficiary of CIRM funding, listed as the principal researcher on three grants worth a total of $24.5 million. The agency also contributed $43.6 million toward the construction of his institute's glittering $200-million research building on the Stanford campus. As of mid-April Weissman was still listed as a shareholder of StemCells, where his wife, Ann Tsukamoto, is an executive. Weissman, who is traveling in Africa, could not get back to me by deadline to talk about his relationship with the company.

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Research firm reaped stem cell funds despite panel's advice

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Research firm reaped stem cell funds despite panel’s advice

Posted: October 17, 2012 at 8:11 am

StemCells Inc. has a history not much different from those of dozens, even hundreds, of biotech companies all around California.

Co-founded by an eminent Stanford research scientist, the Newark, Calif., firm has struggled financially while trying to push its stem cell products through the research-and-development pipeline. It collects about $1 million a year from licensing patents and selling cell cultures but spends well more than $20 million annually on R&D, so it runs deeply in the red.

On the plus side, StemCells Inc. has had rather a charmed relationship with the California stem cell program, that $3-billion taxpayer-backed research fund known formally as the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

The firm ranks first among all corporate recipients of approved funding from CIRM, with some $40 million in awards approved this year. That's more than has gone to such established California nonprofit research centers as Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute.

The record of StemCells is particularly impressive given that one of the two proposals for which the firm received a $20-million funding award, covering a possible Alzheimer's treatment, was actually rejected by CIRM's scientific review panel twice. Nevertheless, the stem cell agency's governing board went ahead and approved it last month.

What was the company's secret? StemCells says it's addressing "a serious unmet medical need" in Alzheimer's research. But it doesn't hurt that the company also had powerful friends going to bat for it, including two guys who were instrumental in getting CIRM off the ground in the first place.

There's nothing improper about the state stem cell agency funding private enterprise; that's part of its statutory duties, and potentially valuable in advancing the goals of research. In part that's because CIRM is in a good position to help biotech firms leapfrog the "valley of death" the territory between basic research and the much more expensive and speculative process of moving a technology to clinical testing and, hopefully, the marketplace. Unfortunately, that's also the point where outside investment often dries up.

But private enterprise is new territory for CIRM, which has steered almost all its grants thus far to nonprofit institutions. Those efforts haven't been trouble-free: With some 90% of the agency's grants having gone to institutions with representatives on its board, the agency has long been vulnerable to charges of conflicts of interest. The last thing it needed was to show a similar flaw in its dealings with private companies too.

That brings us back to StemCells Inc. First, consider the firm's pedigree. Its co-founder was Irving Weissman, director of Stanford's Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and a stem cell research pioneer. Weissman was one of the most prominent and outspoken supporters of Proposition 71, the 2004 ballot initiative that established the stem cell agency.

He's also been a leading beneficiary of CIRM funding, listed as the principal researcher on three grants worth a total of $24.5 million. The agency also contributed $43.6 million toward the construction of his institute's glittering $200-million research building on the Stanford campus. As of mid-April Weissman was still listed as a shareholder of StemCells, where his wife, Ann Tsukamoto, is an executive. Weissman, who is traveling in Africa, could not get back to me by deadline to talk about his relationship with the company.

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Research firm reaped stem cell funds despite panel's advice

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Reprogramming cell identity in the pituitary gland – A discovery by IRCM researchers could lead to new treatments for …

Posted: October 15, 2012 at 7:14 pm

MONTREAL, Oct. 15, 2012 /CNW Telbec/ - A team of researchers at the IRCM, supervised by Dr. Jacques Drouin, reprogrammed the identity of cells in the pituitary gland and identified critical mechanisms of epigenetic cell programming. This important discovery, published today by the scientific journal Genes & Development, has implications for reprogramming of stem cells and could eventually lead to new pharmacological targets for the treatment of Cushing's disease.

Dr. Drouin's team studies the pituitary, the master gland located at the base of the skull that secretes hormones to control all other glands of the endocrine system. Disruption of pituitary function has dire consequences on growth, reproduction and metabolism.

Within the pituitary gland, each hormone is produced by cells of a different lineage. Unique cell identities are created by cell-specific genetic programs that are implemented during development. Appropriate cell programming is a critical process that needs to be harnessed in order to exploit the therapeutic benefits of stem cell research.

In their work, the IRCM researchers showed that a transcription factor Pax7 has pioneering ability, meaning that it is able to open the tightly-packed chromatin structure of specific regions of the genome. This unmasking of a subset of the genome's regulatory sequences changes the genome's response to differentiation signals such that different cell types are generated.

"We reprogrammed the identity of pituitary cells by using the Pax7 gene in order to create two different types of cells," says Lionel Budry, former student in Dr. Drouin's laboratory and first author of the article. "This allowed us to show that the Tpit protein produces different cell lineages according to the presence or absence of Pax7, and its impact on chromatin organisation."

Cushing's disease is caused by small tumours of the pituitary gland that produce excessive amounts of hormones. For patients with this disease, the abnormal hormone production can lead to hypertension, obesity, diabetes and osteoporosis. "For approximately 10% of patients suffering from Cushing's disease, we found that the disease-causing tumours contain cells that express the Pax7 protein," explains Dr. Drouin, Director of the Molecular Genetics research unit at the IRCM. "No effective pharmacological treatment currently exists for Cushing's disease. This discovery could ultimately lead to the development of such treatment, based on tumour growth inhibition by hormones, similarly to what is already done for other pituitary tumours like lactotrope adenomas."

About the research project This research project was funded by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) and the Canadian Cancer Society Research Institute. Contributors from Jacques Drouin's laboratory also include Aurlio Balsalobre, Yves Gauthier, Konstantin Khetchoumian, Aurore L'Honor and Sophie Vallette. In addition, IRCM scientists worked in collaboration with researchers from the Universit de la Mditerrane and Hopital La Timone, Marseille in France and Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

For more information on this discovery, please refer to the article summary published online by Genes & Development: http://genesdev.cshlp.org/content/26/20/2299.abstract

About Dr. Jacques Drouin Jacques Drouin obtained his Doctor of Science in Physiology from the Universit Laval. He is IRCM Research Professor and Director of the Molecular Genetics research unit. Dr. Drouin is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the Universit de Montral. He is also associate member of the Department of Medicine (Division of Experimental Medicine), adjunct professor of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, and adjunct member of the Department of Biochemistry at McGill University. In addition, he is an elected member of the Academy of Sciences of the Royal Society of Canada.

About the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montral (IRCM) Founded in 1967, the IRCM (www.ircm.qc.ca) is currently comprised of 37 research units in various fields, namely immunity and viral infections, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, cancer, neurobiology and development, systems biology and medicinal chemistry. It also houses three specialized research clinics, eight core facilities and three research platforms with state-of-the-art equipment. The IRCM employs 425 people and is an independent institution affiliated with the Universit de Montral. The IRCM clinic is associated to the Centre hospitalier de l'Universit de Montral (CHUM). The IRCM also maintains a long-standing association with McGill University.

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Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to Sir John Gurdon, Shinya Yamanaka

Posted: October 15, 2012 at 7:14 pm

Sir John Gurdon (CNN)

(CNN) The 2012 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded Monday to Sir John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka for work that revolutionized the understanding of how cells and organisms develop.

The Nobel Assemblys announcement at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, is the first for what will be a series of prizes announced this week. The Norwegian Nobel committee will announce the most anticipated of the annual honors the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in Oslo, Norway.

Gurdon, 79, of Dippenhall, England, and Yamanaka, 50, of Osaka, Japan, share the prize jointly for their discovery that mature, specialised cells can be reprogrammed to become immature cells capable of developing into all tissues of the body, according to the Nobel Assembly, which consists of 50 professors at the Karolinska Institute.

Gurdon discovered in 1962 that the cells are reversible in an experiment with an egg cell of a frog. Yamanaka discovered more than 40 years later how mature cells in mice could be reprogrammed to become immature stem cells that are able to develop into all types of cells in the body, the assembly said in a statement.

These groundbreaking discoveries have completely changed our view of the development and cellular specialisation. We now understand that the mature cell does not have to be confined forever to its specialised state, the Nobel Assembly said.

Textbooks have been rewritten and new research fields have been established. By reprogramming human cells, scientists have created new opportunities to study diseases and develop methods for diagnosis and therapy.

Separated by more than 40 years, the work of Gurdon and Yamanaka led to a practical medical use for stem cell research that sidesteps the main argument by anti-abortion opponents.

Now embryonic-like stem cells can be created in the laboratory from adult cells of the same organism, rather than using aborted fetuses or embryos, explained Visar Belegu, a stem cell researcher at the Hugo W. Moser Research Institute, part of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore.

Gurdon pioneered cloning through cell reproduction in a tadpole in 1962. In 2006, Yamanaka figured out how to reprogram mature cells so that they revert to their primitive state as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, capable of developing into any part of the body, Belegu said.

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Leading Researchers to Unite at Texas State Capitol for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research

Posted: October 12, 2012 at 11:25 pm

AUSTIN, Texas, Oct. 12th, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Prominent stem cell scientists, physicians, and advocates from leading medical facilities and research institutions across Texas and California will highlight the 3rd Annual Stem Cell Research Symposium: Spotlight on Texas, on October 19, 2012, at the Texas State Capitol.

This free, public symposium, produced and co-hosted by the Austin-based nonprofit Texas Cures Education Foundation (Texas Cures), is designed to educate the public about the exciting stem cell research andclinical trials currently under way in Texas.The event will also include a discussion of recent Texas laws affecting stem cell research, the potential economic impact of stem cell research and highlight the current progress in one of the most promising areas of medicine.

This year, more than a dozen local and national advocacy groups, institutions and foundations showed their support for the efforts of the hosting organizations Texas Cures and Texans for Stem Cell Research including the Genetics Policy Institute, Alliance for Regenerative Medicine and Texans for Advancement of Medical Research.

The symposium begins at 8:30 a.m. in the Capitol Extension Auditorium (E1.004), located at the Texas State Capitol Building. Admission is free and open to the public.Registration is recommended.

This program unites the diverse stem cell research and regenerative medicine community to provide a unified voice for promising science that holds unmatched potential to benefit patients. Leading speakers at the event will include:

For additional details about the program and presentation topics, please visit TexasCures.org.

The 3rd Annual Stem Cell Research Symposium: Spotlight on Texas is an official World Stem Cell Awareness Day Event. Follow @TexasCures and #stemcellday for live Twitter updates and announcements.

Texas Cures Education Foundation (Texas Cures) TexasCures.orgis a non-partisan, nonprofit 501(c)3] organization based in Austin, Texas. It was founded for the purpose of advancing knowledge of the life-saving work that doctors and researchers perform every day on behalf of patients and their families. Texas Cures facilitates stem cell public education for the betterment of healthcare and the growth of companies, research hospitals, and institutions, charities, and volunteer patient group organizations that include a broad range of regenerative medicine stakeholders. Texas Cures advocates for responsible public policy and encourages legislative and regulatory proposals that expand access to stem cell clinical applications.

SOURCE Texas Cures Education Foundation

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Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine Goes to Stem Cell Researchers

Posted: October 11, 2012 at 2:16 pm

The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was announced on Monday. The award this year went to Sir John B. Gurdon and Dr. Shinya Yamanaka. The two men were awarded the Nobel Prize jointly, for their individual work in cloning and stem cell research.

Monday's recognition marked the awarding of the first Nobel Prize for 2012. The rest of the Nobel Prize recipients will be announced throughout the next two weeks.

Here is some of the key information regarding Gurdon and Yamanaka's work and Monday's Nobel Prize announcement.

* Yamanaka and Gurdon did not work together or present shared research, even though they both concentrate their studies on a similar area of research.

* Gurdon is actually being honored for work he did back in 1962. According to a New York Times report, he was the first person to clone an animal, a frog, opening the door to further research into stem cells and cloning.

* Gurdon was able to produce live tadpoles from the adult cells of a frog, by removing the nucleus of a frog's egg and putting the adult cells in its place.

* This "reprogramming" by Gurdon laid the groundwork for Yamanaka's work four decades later. Yamanaka's work, which dates back only six years, to 2006, focused on the mechanisms behind Gurdon's results.

* According to the Los Angeles Times, Yamanaka was sharply criticized at first for his own work, in which he sought to discover how cells are able to reprogram themselves the way that Gurdon's work first suggested that they could.

* Ultimately, Yamanaka was able to isolate just four cells that were needed in order to be able to reprogram other cells back to an embryonic state, allowing them to be manipulated into developing into any particular kind of cell that was needed. These cells have now been dubbed "induced pluripotent stem cells," or iPS cells, according to reports by CNN and other media outlets.

* Scientists are reproducing Yamanaka's technique in their own labs to be able to replicate disease cells, like those of Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, in order to study them and even to test the effects of potential new treatments.

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Nobel prize winner in medicine warns of rogue ‘stem cell therapies’

Posted: October 10, 2012 at 10:15 pm

Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka warned patients on Tuesday about unproven "stem cell therapies" offered at clinics and hospitals in a growing number of countries, saying they were highly risky.

The Internet is full of advertisements touting stem cell cures for just about any disease -- from diabetes, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, eye problems, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to spinal cord injuries -- in countries such as China, Mexico, India, Turkey and Russia.

Yamanaka, who shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine on Monday with John Gurdon of the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, Britain, called for caution.

"This type of practice is an enormous problem, it is a threat. Many so-called stem cell therapies are being conducted without any data using animals, preclinical safety checks," said Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan.

"Patients should understand that if there are no preclinical data in the efficiency and safety of the procedure that he or she is undergoing ... it could be very dangerous," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Yamanaka and Gurdon shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery that adult cells can be transformed back into embryo-like stem cells that may one day regrow tissue in damaged brains, hearts or other organs.

"I hope patients and lay people can understand there are two kinds of stem cell therapies. One is what we are trying to establish. It is solely based on scientific data. We have been conducting preclinical work, experiments with animals, like rats and monkeys," Yamanaka said.

"Only when we confirm the safety and effectiveness of stem cell therapies with animals will we initiate clinical trials using a small number of patients."

Yamanaka, who calls the master stem cells he created "induced pluripotent stem cells" (iPS), hopes to see the first clinical trials soon.

"There is much promising research going on," he said.

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Stem Cell Scientists Gurdon and Yamanaka Win Nobel Prize in Medicine

Posted: October 9, 2012 at 11:13 am

JUDY WOODRUFF: Next, to the 2012 Nobel Prizes. The first was awarded today for groundbreaking work in reprogramming cells in the body.

Ray Suarez looks at those achievements.

MAN: The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute has today decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine,2012 jointly to John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka.

RAY SUAREZ: The two scientists are from two different generations and celebrated today's announcement half-a-world apart.

But today they were celebrated together for their research that led to a groundbreaking understanding of how cells work.

Sir John Gurdon of CambridgeUniversity was awarded for his work in 1962. He was able to use specialized cells of frogs, like skin or intestinal cells, to generate new tadpoles and show DNA could drive the formation of all cells in the body.

Forty years later, Dr. Yamanaka built on that and went further. He was able to turn mature cells back into their earliest form as primitive cells. Those cells are in many ways the equivalent of embryonic stem cells, because they have the potential to develop into specialized cells for heart, liver and other organs.

Dr. Shinya Yamanaka is currently working at KyotoUniversity. Embryonic stem cells have had to be harvested from human embryos, a source of debate and considerable controversy.

For Gurdon, the prize had special meaning. At a news conference in London, he recalled one schoolteacher's reaction to his desire to study science.

JOHN GURDON, co-winner, Nobel Prize For Medicine or Physiology: It was a completely ridiculous idea because there was no hope whatever of my doing science, and any time spent on it would be a total waste of time, both on my part and the part of the person having to teach him. So that terminated my completely -- completely terminated my science at school.

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Cell rewind wins medicine Nobel

Posted: October 9, 2012 at 11:13 am

John Gurdon (left) and Shinya Yamanaka showed how to reprogram cells into their embryonic states.

J. Player/Rex Features; Aflo/Rex Features

The discovery that cells can be reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state has won this years Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for two leading lights of stem-cell research: John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka.

Reprogrammed cells regain pluripotency, the potential to differentiate into many mature cell types. Many researchers hope that cells created in this way will eventually be used in regenerative medicine, providing replacement tissue for damaged or diseased organs. The field has become one of the hottest in biology, but the prizewinners discoveries were not without controversy when they were made.

Gurdon, who is based at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, UK, was the first person to demonstrate that cells could be reprogrammed, in work published 50years ago1. At the time, scientists believed that cellular specialization was a one-way process that could not be reversed. Gurdon overturned that dogma by removing the nucleus from a frog egg cell and replacing it with the nucleus from a tadpoles intestinal cell. Remarkably, the process was able to turn back the cellular clock of the substitute nucleus. Although it had already committed to specialization, inside the egg cell it acted like an eggs nucleus and directed the development of a normal tadpole.

Gurdon was a graduate student at the University of Oxford, UK, when he did the work. He received his doctorate in 1960 and went on to do a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, leaving his frogs in Europe. He did not publish the research until two years after he got his PhD, once he was sure that the animals had matured healthily. I was a graduate student flying in the face of [established] knowledge, he says. There was a lot of scepticism.

Mammalian cells did not prove as amenable to this process, known as cloning by nuclear transfer, as frog cells. It was nearly 35years before the first cloned mammal Dolly the sheep was born, in 1996. Dolly was the only live birth from 277 attempts, and mammalian cloning remained a hit-and-miss affair.

Scientists were desperate to improve the efficiency of the system and to understand the exact molecular process involved. That is where Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, Japan, made his mark. Yamanaka who was born the year that Gurdon published his formative paper used cultured mouse cells to identify the genes that kept embryonic cells immature, and then tested whether any of these genes could reprogram mature cells to make them pluripotent.

In the mid-2000s, the stem-cell community knew that Yamanaka was close. I remember when he presented the data at a 2006 Keystone symposium, says Cdric Blanpain, a stem-cell biologist at the Free University of Brussels. At that time he didnt name them and everyone was betting what these magic factors could be.

A few months later, attendees at the 2006 meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Toronto, Canada, packed out Yamanakas lecture. The audience waited in silence before he announced his surprisingly simple recipe: activating just four genes was enough to turn adult cells called fibroblasts back into pluripotent stem cells2. Such induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells could then be coaxed into different types of mature cell types, including nerve and heart cells.

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