Whitehead team devises more efficient way of making stem cells

By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff

Researchers at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge have developed a more efficient technique to reprogram adult cells into an embryonic-stem-cell-like state.

The method, described in a paper published online today in the journal Nature Biotechnology, allows researchers to use a drug to induce large numbers of different kinds of cells to revert to act like embryonic stem cells, capable of developing into nerves, bones, blood, or other kinds of cells.

Instead of the inefficient and unpredictable process of infecting cells with viruses to reprogram them, scientists can cull cells from specially-bred mice and treat them with a drug to induce the change.

That step forward should allow scientists to study how the reprogramming process works. It could also facilitate research aimed at finding a substitute for the cancer-causing viruses currently used to reprogram cells, overcoming a significant safety barrier to using such cells as a potential therapy.

The reprogramming process was riddled with "a lot of vagaries; it was unclear how we can easily study the mechanism," said Rudolf Jaenisch, an author of the study and a member of the Whitehead Institute. "The idea of this paper was to try to eliminate those vagaries and make a system reproducible."