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Skin cells to tackle spinal muscular atrophy

London: In a major breakthrough which offers hope for sufferers of the fatal muscle-wasting disease, scientists have created nerve cells from skin cells.

An international team, led by University of Wisconsin- Madison, used a new technique which produces stem cells from skin to achieve the breakthrough, which now opens the way for treatments for spinal muscular atrophy.

Spinal muscular atrophy, an inherited disease for which there is no cure, affects the nerves in an area of the spinal cord, breaking the link between brain and the muscles, meaning they can’t be used and become wasted or atrophied. In their research, the team members took cells from a boy sufferer’s skin and turned them into stem cells — which have the power to grow into any kind of tissue in the body — and then into nerve cells, the Daily Mail reported.

The scientists used chemicals to coax the stem cells made from the skin of the boy with the disease to turn into nerve cells. When these were grown in the lab, they quickly started to die, they found.

However, a team lead by Prof. Clive Svendsen said that further study into such cells could give vital insights into the progression of the illness. “When scientists study diseases in humans, they can normally only look at the tissues affected after death and then try to work out — how did that disease happen? Now you can replay the human disease over and over in the dish and ask what are the early steps that began the process. It’s an incredibly powerful new tool,” he wrote in Nature journal. Added co-researcher Dr. Allison Ebert: “If we start to understand more of the mechanism of why the motor neurons specifically affected in the disease are dying, then therapies can be developed to intervene early.”— PTI

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