An electronic chip that can turn skin cells into almost any kind of tissue, including neurons and vital organs, will be tested on humans for the first time next year.
The scientists who invented the device, which has a 98 per cent success rate in experiments involving mice and pigs, say that it could effectively regenerate damaged or ageing body parts.
In one of these dry runs, the results of which are published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, researchers saved a mouse’s injured leg by transforming skin cells into cells that could repair the walls of its blood vessels.
“The concept is very simple,” said L James Lee, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State University in the US and one of the lead investigators on the project.
“As a matter of fact, we were even surprised how it worked so well. In my lab, we have ongoing research trying to understand the mechanism and do even better. So this is the beginning — more to come.”
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The technique is based on a series of spectacular biological discoveries that earned Sir John Gurdon, of the University of Cambridge, and Shinya Yamanaka, of Kyoto University in Japan, the Nobel prize in physiology five years ago.
Sir John showed in 1962 that the DNA in a mature cell taken from an adult contains all the information it needs to develop into any other kind of cell in the body, even an egg or a sperm cell. Professor Yamanaka then demonstrated in 2006 that grown-ups’ skin cells could be reprogrammed into this child-like “pluripotent” state using a chemical bath.
The Ohio researchers have now taken advantage of this knowledge to transmogrify skin cells with a method they call tissue nano-transfection (TNT).
The new programming instructions are coded in DNA and loaded on to a small chip, which is applied to the patient’s skin. The scientists then use a gentle electric current to open channels in the surface of the skin cells through which the code can pass, turning them into neurons and endothelial cells, which line blood vessels.
Chandan Sen, director of the university’s Centre for Regenerative Medicine and Cell-Based Therapies, said one big advantage of the TNT chips was that they did not require patients to take any of the immuno-suppressant drugs that normally accompany transplants. “With this technology we can convert skin cells into elements of any organ with just one touch,” he said. “This process only takes less than a second and is non-invasive, and then you’re off.
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“The chip does not stay with you, and the reprogramming of the cell starts. Our technology keeps the cells in the body under immune surveillance, so immune suppression is not necessary.”