Scientists successfully create blood from skin cells

21 November 2016

Researchers in Singapore have artificially generated new mouse blood and immune cells from skin cells. This is a significant first step towards the eventual goal: the engineering of new human blood cells from skin cells or other artificial sources.

One of the major challenges of regenerative medicine is to manufacture new blood and immune cells for patients in need. This development could lead to a robust source of new blood or immune cells becoming available to treat patients with immune disorders and other such diseases, or those who require blood transfusions.

While there were previous efforts to generate new mouse blood cells from skin cells, the yielded cells could last only two weeks once injected back into mice. In contrast, the artificially skin-derived blood cells in this study can last for multiple months in mice. Published in scientific journal Nature Communications, this study was led by researchers from A*STAR's Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) and Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB).

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