Researchers make stem cell breakthrough

? A Kyoto University research group has successfully generated a new pluripotent cell out of a mouse skin cell, which resembles an embryonic stem cell, it has been learned.

According to Thursday’s online issue of a U.S. scientific journal, Cell, professor Shinya Yamanaka and assistant professor Kazutoshi Takahashi have succeeded in creating the pluripotent cell, which they named induced pluripotent stem, or iPS, cell. The iPS cell has similar characteristics to ES cells, which can grow into tissues and organs.

Using an embryonic stem cell in medicine is ethically controversial, as it is extracted from an embryo. With iPS cells, there would be no ethical problems as it does not involve an embryo. If human iPS cells can be created, patients undergoing transplants could have new organs with the same genes as their own, clearing the problem of postoperative rejection responses, and without ethical problems.