PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

1-Dec-2014

Contact: Cara Martinez cara.martinez@cshs.org 310-423-7798 Cedars-Sinai Medical Center @cedarssinai

LOS ANGELES (Dec. 1, 2014) - Research scientists have developed a novel method to re-create brain and intestinal stem cells from patients who died decades ago, using DNA from stored blood samples to study the potential causes of debilitating illnesses such as inflammatory bowel disease.

The lab research, published in the journal STEM CELLS Translational Medicine, could yield new therapies for people who suffer from aggressive motor-neuron and gut-related conditions that proved fatal to the deceased patients who long-ago volunteered their blood samples.

"The potential implications of this research are vast," said Dhruv Sareen, PhD, the study's lead author, and assistant professor and director of the David and Janet Polak Foundation Stem Cell Core Laboratory in the Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute.

By using a deceased patient's stored blood samples, Sareen and his colleagues found that they can develop stem cells known as iPSCs in a petri dish - essentially reanimating diseased cells from patients long after they have died.

This approach allows researchers to connect the dots between a deceased patient's symptoms, genetic information contained in DNA and the behavior of stem cells in the lab. This, in turn, enables investigators to study the biological mechanisms behind diseases and potentially design new therapies.

The technique also allows physicians to replace invasive biopsy procedures typically required of living patients to create iPSC cells.

"These novel developments allow us to create new lines of stem cells from literally millions of patient samples stored in large repositories," said Clive Svendsen, PhD, director of the Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute. "Some of these deceased patients were diagnosed with rare and important diseases."

Read the original:
Researchers recreate stem cells from deceased patients to study present-day illnesses