Generation of Functional Thyroid Tissue from Stem Cells
Date: 16.10.2012
The generation of functional thyroid tissue from stem cells could allow the treatment of patients, which suffer from thyroid hormone deficiency due to defective function, or abnormal development of the thyroid gland. The team of Sabine Costagliola at the IRIBHM (Université Libre de Bruxelles) recently developed a protocol that allowed for the first time the efficient generation of functional thyroid tissue from stem cells in mice and published the results of their studies in the scientific journal Nature.
By employing a protocol in which two important genes can be transiently induced in undifferentiated stem cells, the researchers at IRIBHM were able to efficiently push the differentiation of stem cells into thyrocytes, the primary cell type responsible for thyroid hormone production in the thyroid gland.
