Its not just Hollywood that needs stem cells. Anyone alive today can potentially benefit from therapies now in our medical arsenal. For diseases like age-related macular degeneration, skin cells can be harvested from a patient and coaxed through complex chemical treatments into a form that can be injected into the eye to repair it. The problem is that even when these protocols work, they still take over 10 months, and are also very expensive. A series of papers just published in Nature describes a simple procedure for shocking cells back into an embryonic state where they can be quickly retrained to become virtually any cell type in the body.
Engineers have applied unmatched imaginative power to bend and crumple our most powerful hardware to fit entirely in or around an eye. While these devices are often able to restore some semblance of vision, they still leave much to be desired. Meanwhile, biologists have been slowly hammering away at techniques to reprogram cells to either replace lost tissue, or nourish damaged tissue back to a state of health. While the engineer can understand everything about the tools they use, the biologist is left to fumble with tinyblack boxes, each a million components strong and too small to ever really know. What the new research here has done is provide a special shake, if you will, that blanks a cell back to a pristine state.
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