Induced pluripotent stem cells

Anyone working in stem cell research anywhere in the world must have been intrigued by the recent headlines about induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, carried out by Shinya Yamanaka's group at Kyoto University and also by James Thomson's team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Australia's Andrew French has also been in the news with his work at Stemagen in California on SCNT.

"It's encouraging," Tuch says about French's work. "The way I read it is that he's trying to make patient-specific stem cell lines and he has shown that with normal unfertilised eggs he can produce an embryo through somatic cell nuclear transfer. Whether he can make a stem cell line out of that remains to be seen."

On the work of Yamanaka and Thomson, he believes it is a good, complementary approach. "There are some dangers associated with it but the strengths are that [iPS cells] are attractive in terms of concept. The two groups are using a slightly different approach but they are basically genetically modifying somatic cells.

"If you talk to experts in gene therapy - which I am - they will ask how stably transfected are these cells. Is this long term or only short term? There are the obvious safety issues as well. But it is encouraging that this sort of research is occurring. "Will it overcome the need for embryonic stem cell lines? Time will tell."