Turning urine into brain cells

Hi there! Wonderful to see you today. Thanks for clicking by. Help yourself to a mug of Arabica juice and a virtual treat. Y'know, it's amazing what scientists get up to, isn't it? Turning poop into poop burgers for example and now Chinese researchers have devised a new technique for reprogramming cells from human urine into brain cells. Not bad for us humans who are only using about 5% of our brains in the first place.

The technique, published today in the journal Nature Methods, could prove useful for studying the cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and for testing the effects of new drugs that are being developed to treat them.

Stem cells offer the hope of treating these debilitating diseases, but obtaining them from human embryos poses an ethical dilemma. We now know that cells taken from the adult human body can be made to revert to a stem cell-like state and then transformed into virtually any other type of cell. This typically involves using genetically engineered viruses that shuttle control genes into the nucleus and inserts them into the chromosomes, whereupon they activate genes that make them pluripotent, or able to re-differentiate into another type of cell.

Last year, Duanqing Pei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his colleagues reported that human urine contains skin-like cells from the lining of the kidney tubules which can be efficiently reprogrammed, via the pluripotent state, into neurons, glia, liver cells and heart muscle cells.

In a new study, they isolated cells from urine samples given by three donors, aged 10, 25 and 37, and converted them directly into neural progenitors. They then grew these cells in Petri dishes and drove them to differentiate into mature neurons that can generate nervous impulses, and also into astrocytes and oligodendrocytes, two types of glial cell found in the human brain. Finally, they transplanted the re-programmed neurons and astrocytes into the brains of newborn rats, and found that the cells had survived when they examined the brains a month later, but it remains to be seen if they can survive for longer, and if they integrate into the existing circuits to be become functional.

The technique also makes the procedure of generating iPSCs far easier and non-invasive, as the cells can be obtained from a urine sample instead of a blood sample or biopsy. The next logical step will be to generate neurons from urine samples obtained from patients with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other neurodegenerative diseases and to determine the extent to which this new non-viral technique damages the DNA.

In my books, this is no piddling discovery, eh. But I’m getting a little peed off at how long it takes to get something like this to the stage where it is available to us common folk…like 20 years maybe. Those science guys (keep giving them grant money, eh!) are coming up with more and more promising discoveries but they are only tantalizing us with things most of us may never see. Urine luck if you live long enough to do so! (Sorry…couldn’t resist that one!)

See ya, eh!

Bob