February 13, 2012

Researchers at the University of Cambridge report that they created cerebral cortex cells from a small sample of human skin.

The new development could pave the way for techniques to explore a wide range of diseases such as autism and Alzheimer’s.

The findings could also enable scientists to study how the human cerebral cortex develops — and how it “wires up” and how that can go wrong.

“This approach gives us the ability to study human brain development and disease in ways that were unimaginable even five years ago,” Dr Rick Livesey of the Gurdon Institute and Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge said in a statement.

During the research, the scientists biopsied skin from patients and then reprogrammed the cells from the skin samples back into stem cells.

These stem cells, along with human embryonic stem cells, were used to generate cerebral cortex cells.

Livesey said they are using this system to help recreate Alzheimer’s disease in the lab, which primarily affects the type of nerve cell the researchers made.

“Dementia is the greatest medical challenge of our time – we urgently need to understand more about the condition and how to stop it,” Dr Simon Ridley, Head of Research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said in a press release. “We hope these findings can move us closer towards this goal.”

Brain cells developed this way could help researchers gain a better understanding of how the brain develops and what goes wrong when it is affected by disease.

Scientists hope the cells could be used to provide healthy tissues, which can be implanted into patients to treat neurodegenerative diseases and brain damage.

The findings were published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

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Source: RedOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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