Sixteen years after Dolly the sheep was cloned in Edinburgh,
scientists in Scotland have made another startling medical
breakthrough.

Researchers at Edinburgh's Centre for Regenerative Medicine
have created brain tissue from patients suffering mental
illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression.

"A patient's neurones can tell us a great deal about the
psychological conditions that affect them, but you cannot stick
a needle in someone's brain and take out its cells," the
center's director, Professor Charles ffrench-Constant, told the
Guardian.

"However, we have found a way round that. We can take a skin
sample, make stem cells from it and then direct these stem
cells to grow into brain cells. Essentially, we are turning a
person's skin cells into brain."

The scientists hope that studying these manufactured brain
cells will reveal clues to the conditions of patients with
mental illnesses—a task that had been challenging in the past.

"It is very difficult to get primary tissue to study until
after a patient has died," said the Royal Edinburgh Hospital's
Professor Andrew McIntosh, who is collaborating with the center
on the project.

"Even then, that tissue is affected by whatever killed them and
by the impact of the medication they had been taking for their
condition, possibly for several decades. So having access to
living brain cells is a significant development for the
development of drugs for these conditions," McIntosh said.

If successful, the same methods could be used for other organs,
including the liver and heart.

Click here to read more. 

Read more from the original source:
Scientists use skin samples to create human brain cells

Comments are closed.