Ancient alchemists were said to be able to transform straw into gold. Now modern Canadian scientists are transforming adult skin into blood.
A four-by-three centimetre patch of skin is all that Dr. Mick Bhatia and his team of researchers at McMaster University need to grow enough blood to transfuse an adult human being.
Dr. Eva Szabo, lead author of the research team’s paper, said the team is now trying to improve the process. “This is how much skin we need right now … to transfuse a normal individual, [meaning] a 60-kilogram person,” Szabo said.
“We are hoping that we can increase the efficiency [of the process] and make it even less than that,” she explained. Szabo said she is confident they will be able to do this, as they are still trying to understand the process, having stumbled upon it in petri dish completely by accident.
While working with human skin in a process called iPS cell work, Bhatia’s team unexpectedly found what looked like round, red blood cells amongst the flat skin cells, explained Szabo.
“We were wondering, well, what is happening?” she said. “We realized that we stumbled upon something pretty cool.”
Without knowing it, the team had created red blood cells without first having to perform the middle step of turning skin into iPS cells, a kind of stem cells. Now they can create almost all the cells present in human blood, Szabo said.
Normally, to accomplish this, scientists have to induce adult cells into the early stages of growth that mimic stem cells harvested from human embryos, explained Zubin Master, a bioethicist and research associate at the Health Law Institute of the University of Alberta.These cells, called “pluripotent” cells, can create “any cell type of the adult human body,” when manipulated by scientists, Master said.
This system, called induced pluripotent stem cell work (iPS cell work) came about in part due to ethical issues concerning the moral rights of embryos and the potential harm in harvesting eggs from women which, in rare cases, can cause death. Because iPS cell work doesn’t use embryos, these issues are avoided, Master explained.
However, Bhatia and Szabo’s team has managed to bypass even this latest process with one of their own that takes half the time, results in better blood cells, and still avoids these ethical issues, according to their research paper.
The breakthrough has made them minor celebrities in the science world. “I don’t think it has sunk in totally for any of us. We are reading all the newspapers and all the stories on TV and we are just starting to realize how neat it is,” Szabo said. Szabo said more work is needed before the team’s skin-grown blood can be used in medical procedures, but the impact of their discovery promises to reverberate through the scientific community for a while to come.
“With Mickie [Bhatia]’s paper coming out right now, I think that this will be something that a lot of scientists . . . will jump on,” Master said.