Canadian scientists turned skin cells into blood.
Mick Bhatia, scientific director of McMaster's Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, and his team of researchers have successfully reprogrammed skin cells to produce blood cells.
The conversion is direct. Making blood from skin does not require the middle step of changing a skin stem cell into a pluripotent stem cell that could make many other types of human cells, then turning it into a blood stem cell.
The discovery was replicated several times over two years using human skin from both young and old people to prove it works for any age of person.
Producing blood from a patient's own skin cells, has the potential of making bone marrow transplant HLA matching and paucity of donors a thing of the past.
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