Question: Is it possible to recreate stem cells artificially?

Alena Pance answered on 9 Jun 2020:

Hi Diego, I wonder what you mean by ‘recreate’. If you mean make stem cells artificially, then absolutely yes. This is called Induced Pluripotent Stem or IPS cells. One still needs cells to start with but these can be terminally differentiated cells, like skin or blood that can be ‘de-differentiated’ back to a stem cell status. The method to do this was devised by Yamanaka, a japanese scientist who won the nobel prize for this in 2012, together with british John Gurdon who in the 60s demonstrated that all cells have the whole genome, ie ever cell no matter what type, has all the genetic material of an individual. Thisis crucial because if that were not the case, then this de-differentiation would not be possible. The way this is done is by introducing into the skin or blood cell specific transcriptiona factors, these are genome regulators that will modify the cellular programme in such a way that stem cell genes are expressed and all the other genes that are specific to tissues are silenced.
Theses cells are great because they allow studying stem cells themselves but also because they can be differentiated into any cell type, they are very sueful to understand tissue specificity. In medicine, they are a crucial tool for gene therapy.