Cellular Reprogramming In Treatment of Multiple Sclerosis, Cerebral Palsy and other Myelin Disorders.

Researchers have successfully converted fibroblasts (a structural cell) into oligodendrocytes which could regenerate new myelin coatings around nerves. This treatment can be used in myelin related disorders such as multiple sclerosis and cerebral palsy.

Cellular Reprogramming is a technique that allows the conversion of one type of cell into another. Although it shares a similar concept with stem cell technolgy, unlike stem cell therapy, cellular reprogramming utilizes direct manipulation of the cell at a genetic level to convert it into another type of cell.

Stem cells naturally differentiate into another type of cell. In 2012, Doctor Shinya Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on generating induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) through cellular reprogramming. iPS cells are pluripotent stem cells that are artificially derived from normal cells.

MIT News: New Process in Deforming Cells for Efficient Delivery of Large Molecules

As cells squeeze through a narrow channel, tiny holes open in their membranes, allowing large molecules such as RNA to pass through.
Image: Armon Sharei and Emily Jackson

Living cells are surrounded by a membrane that tightly regulates what gets in and out of the cell. This barrier is necessary for cells to control their internal environment, but it makes it more difficult for scientists to deliver large molecules such as nanoparticles for imaging, or proteins that can reprogram them into pluripotent stem cells.

Researchers from MIT have now found a safe and efficient way to get large molecules through the cell membrane, by squeezing the cells through a narrow constriction that opens up tiny, temporary holes in the membrane. Any large molecules floating outside the cell — such as RNA, proteins or nanoparticles — can slide through the membrane during this disruption.

Using this technique, the researchers were able to deliver reprogramming proteins and generate induced pluripotent stem cells with a success rate 10 to 100 times better than any existing method. They also used it to deliver nanoparticles, including carbon nanotubes and quantum dots, which can be used to image cells and monitor what’s happening inside them.

MIT News: Tissue Implants Made Of Engineered Cells Depends On Scaffold Grown

Principle of tissue engineering

Success of engineered tissue depends on where it’s grown

Tissue implants made of cells grown on a sponge-like scaffold have been shown in clinical trials to help heal arteries scarred by atherosclerosis and other vascular diseases. However, it has been unclear why some implants work better than others.

MIT researchers led by Elazer Edelman, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, have now shown that implanted cells’ therapeutic properties depend on their shape, which is determined by the type of scaffold on which they are grown. The work could allow scientists to develop even more effective implants and also target many other diseases, including cancer.

“The goal is to design a material that can engineer the cells to release whatever we think is most appropriate to fight a specific disease. Then we can implant the cells and use them as an incubator,” says Laura Indolfi, a postdoc in Edelman’s lab and lead author of a paper on the research recently published online in the journal Biomaterials.

Aaron Baker, a former postdoc in Edelman’s lab and now an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, is also an author of the paper.

Shape matters

For the past 20 years, Edelman has been working on using endothelial cells grown on scaffolds made of collagen as implantable devices to treat blood vessel damage. Endothelial cells line the blood vessels and regulate important process such as tissue repair and inflammation by releasing molecules such as chemokines, small proteins that carry messages between cells.

Several of the devices have been tested in clinical trials to treat blood vessel damage; in the new Biomaterials study, Edelman and Indolfi set out to determine what makes one such tissue scaffold more effective than another. In particular, they were interested in comparing endothelial cells grown on flat surfaces and those grown on more porous, three-dimensional scaffolds. The cells grown on 3-D structures tended to be more effective at repairing damage and suppressing inflammation.

The researchers found that cells grown on a flat surface take on a round shape in which the cells’ structural components form a ring around the perimeter of the cell. However, when cells are grown on a scaffold with surfaces of contact whose dimensions are similar in size to the cells, they mold to the curved surfaces, assuming a more elongated shape. In those cells, the structural elements — made of bundles of the protein actin — run parallel to each other.