Comment Re:Have their findings been independently reproduc (Score 1) 43
It's not a complete departure from previous stuff, though it looks like it is a new technique, so it will need to be independently replicated. Induced pluripotent stem cells took over a year to be reproduced, so there's that.
The next steps are longer, making sure it's safe, and finding a way to harness it.
Clinical trials for stem cell therapies are underway, but I'm not aware of anything so far that is a stunning success, where you put in stem cells and get a regenerated heart, liver, whatever, so we're not quite ready to hit the ground running. Of course, a lot of that was held back by the lack of stem cells which the host's immune system wouldn't reject, so theyr'e a lot closer now. Work on ESC or IPSC advanced being able to harness it, but I don't think there are any clear-cut treatments we know of that were simply waiting on a good source of cells. Spinal cord injuries in mice, I know they're not there yet, you inject cells you've directed somewhat to differentiate into neurons and the recovery rates in mice are nothing miraculous yet. They're improved, but there's the added complication that mice tend to recover from spinal cord injuries better than humans: they're a lot younger than us and can naturally recover better than we can. So it doesn't look like this immediately opens doors to treatments in humans, though it definitely speeds it up a lot. (And I could be wrong about there not being treatments ready to go in humans right now).
On safety, cancer is always an issue with pluripotent cells. Injecting pluripotent stem cells, which can make anything, makes teratomas, which are tumors of mixed cell populations. That's actually a test of stem cells: inject it into a mouse, if you get tumors that have several types of cells in them, you know you've actually got pluripotent stem cells. Teratomas can be complicated to treat though, so injecting pluripotent stem cells into a patient is a terrible idea.
Induced pluripotent stem cells have the additional hazard that you're explicitly turning on cancer-causing genes in the cells to make them that way. They appear to be turned back off, but it's still a concern. Furthermore, there have been suggestions that reverting cells back to a pluripotent state increases the likelihood of mutations. Obviously if the rate of mutation during the process is too high, that can also cause cancer. I haven't been following that literature, so I don't know if that's been discarded with IPSC. And I don't think it's been done with this new technique, though I haven't read the paper.
So there's no clear timeline, which is disappointing, but whatever the timing was going to be, it's shorter now, so yay.