Stem cells instructed to form specific tissues and organs

Arguably, stem cells represent the future of healthcare and medical research. With the potential to unlock possibilities for healing, understanding, and innovation in ways that traditional approaches can’t, they’re a foundation for how diseases could be treated and prevented and the future.

Now, researchers from Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have advanced stem cell development further. Their collaboration has resulted in engineered cells called „synthetic organizers“ that deliver instructions to stem cells, telling them to grow into specific tissues and organs.

“We can use these synthetic organizers to push the stem cells toward making different parts of the early embryo or toward making a heart or other organs,” said Ophir Klein, MD, PhD, a member of the Cedars-Sinai Regenerative Medicine Institute, director of UCSF’s Institute for Human Genetics, and the study’s co-corresponding author.

“This type of synthetic organizer cell platform provides a new way to interface with stem cells and to program what they develop into,” said Wendell Lim, PhD, the study’s other corresponding author and a professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF. “By controlling and reshaping how stem cells differentiate and develop, it might allow us to grow better organs for transplantation of organoids for disease modeling and eventually utilize it to drive tissue regeneration in living patients.”

Zdroj obrázku: UCSF.