April 29, 2024

Chimera research opens new doors to understanding and treating disease

Nature Biomedical Engineering. at << https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-021-00693-1>Hu, Z. et al. Short-term inhibition of mTOR in human pluripotent stem cells enables robust formation of mouse-human chimeric embryos. Sci Adv 6, eaaz0298 (2020 ). Nishimura, T. et al. Generation of Functional Organs Using a Cell-Competitive Niche in Intra- and Inter-species Rodent Chimeras. Cell Stem Cell 28, 141-149. e3 (2021 ). Tan, T. et al. Chimeric contribution of human extended pluripotent stem cells to monkey embryos ex vivo. Cell 184, 2020-2032. e14 (2021 ). Zheng, C. et al. Cell competitors makes up a barrier for interspecies chimerism. Nature 592, 272– 276 (2021 ). Windrem, M. S. et al. Human iPSC Glial Mouse Chimeras Reveal Glial Contributions to Schizophrenia. Cell Stem Cell 21, 195-208. e6 (2017 ). Revah, O. et al. Maturation and circuit combination of transplanted human cortical organoids. Nature 610, 319– 326 (2022 ). This story was initially published on Drug Discovery News, the leading news publication for researchers in pharma and biotech.

Advances in stem cell research in the 2000s changed the field, opening up brand-new possibilities and new applications for multispecies organism research.In 2007, a team at Kyoto University developed pluripotent stem cells from adult human somatic cells (4 ). During his postdoctoral research study at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Wu explored techniques for making human stem cells more suitable for this task.Jun Wu studies the barriers to interspecies chimerism.CREDIT: UT SOUTHWESTERNBy coaxing human pluripotent stem cells into an intermediate kind, somewhere in between a naïve stem cell and a primed stem cell, Wu, along with other scientists at the Salk Institute, produced the very first human-pig chimeric embryos in 2017 (12 ). Jian Feng develops mouse-human chimeric embryos, like the above mouse embryo at embryonic day 17, with human cells labeled with green fluorescent protein.CREDIT: ZHIXING HUJian Feng, a stem cell scientist at the University at Buffalo, is establishing another strategy to encourage human cells to grow in mouse embryos. When he checked out about the creation of mouse induced pluripotent stem cells, followed soon by the generation of the human variations in the 2000s, he knew right away that he wanted to use these human cells to study this human disease.Studying the cells in culture wasnt always the answer. The glial cells developed unusually, and the mice displayed stress and anxiety, impaired social habits, and disrupted sleep patterns, recommending that glial cells likely play a function in the advancement of schizophrenia, and that these mice could be utilized as enhanced designs for establishing new therapies.More recently in the fall of 2022, scientists at Stanford University transplanted a human stem cell derived cortical organoid into the brain of a newborn rat (20 ).