The Nobel Assembly of high school Karolinska decided on October 8 to award the award Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine jointly to Dr. John Gurdon and Dr. Shinya Yamanaka for their discoveries on pluripotent stem cells. There are still no practical medical applications of these findings, but the near future looks promising.

Fifty years ago now, Dr. Gurdon challenged the paradigm that an organism's cell, as development progresses, irreversibly specializes to become a skin, lung, intestine, or other tissue cell. The cells of a young embryo can move towards very diverse specializations; because of this possibility of giving rise to very diverse results, they are called pluripotent stem cells. It was assumed that they lost this quality when transformed into the target tissue. He demonstrated his thesis by inserting the nucleus of a differentiated cell (in his case, an intestine cell) from an adult frog into a frog egg (a female cell destined to join the male spermatozoon to produce offspring).

According to the then current thesis , the result should have been a collection of gut cells; however, a tadpole developed, with all its variety of tissues: the nucleus transplantation achieved pluripotent cells from genetic material that was supposed to be predetermined to a single goal. This experiment is now a classic reference letter must-have in the study of development.

Dr. Yamanaka, in 2006, at the height of the study of embryonic stem cells, and years after the cloning of Dolly the sheep (1996), discovered a system to transform an adult animal cell into a pluripotent cell. The procedure involved the injection of several genes into the treated cells, which were named iPSCs (induced Pluripotent Stem Cells).

Subsequently, he and his team and other researchers have refined their procedure, so that it is not necessary to insert so many genes, and alternative strategies are being designed to obtain this result, seeking greater simplicity and performance in the transformation of the cells.

While Dr. Gurdon's work has been awarded more for its theoretical interest, which has paved the way for further research, Dr. Yamanaka's is likely to soon become the origin of clinical applications.

As mentioned above, iPSCs have appeared in the midst of the controversy over the employment of human embryonic cells, result of "scrapping" young embryos and taking their pluripotent cells to regenerate (in theory) worn out or damaged tissues of the sick. However, this approach is ethically unacceptable, since it requires the death of human beings in embryonic state, but human beings nonetheless; moreover, it has been surrounded by technical difficulties: just getting these cells to remain in culture without transforming them into various tissues and without losing their pluripotency has been an ordeal for the researchers.

Currently, the only experiment carried out with them on patients has been abandoned halfway through, due to financial problems: investors have been slow to see an application internship starting up and the business has decided to redirect its objectives. Another experiment C by the FDA (US agency in charge of approve drugs and medical treatments) has not yet started.

sample On the other hand, obtaining iPS cells does not require the destruction of human life: a small piece of skin from the patient is enough to generate cells on laboratory that are theoretically compatible and will not be rejected in a transplant to the patient. There is still experimentation to be done, but the speed of the findings with iPSCs suggests clinical applications within a few years, something that cells obtained from killing embryos have not been able to offer after many years of research.