Directly converting skin cells to brain cells yields 1,000% success

Cooking up a batch of stem cells to treat illness or injury used to involve the ethically hairy practice of harvesting them from embryonic tissue. But in 2006, Japanese scientists identified a way to revert mature cells back into stem cells. From there, these induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) can be coaxed to become whatever cell type is needed for a specific treatment.

However, this Nobel prize-winning discovery isn’t without its own problems. For one, a large portion of the cells can get stuck in the intermediate stages, reducing the efficiency of the technique. In the original study less than 0.1% of cells made it all the way through, although that’s been drastically improved in the almost 20 years since, with some methods closing in on 100%.

Now, scientists at MIT have found a way to cut out the middle man, bypassing the stem cell step and going straight from one cell type to another. Better yet, it boasts an incredible efficiency of over 1,000%. In other words, for every one source cell, you’re getting 10 or more target cells.

For the new study, the researchers experimented with six transcription factors from previous work, trying different combinations to find the fewest that could still be effective. After much trial and error, they identified a combo of three, known as NGN2, ISL1 and LHX3, which could perform the conversion.

Image source: MIT.