IT WOULD be the ultimate in tissue therapy. Simply supply a bag of your blood and come back two weeks later to find it turned into cells from other tissues, ranging from brain and liver cells to the insulin-producing beta islet cells of the pancreas.
The idea is to revert a patient’s blood cells to the stem cell stage and then chemically nudge them to re-specialise into particular tissue types that can be implanted to heal damaged tissue. A huge advantage over using donated tissue is that the transplant would be “autologous” – made of the patient’s own cells, thus avoiding immune rejection.…
