South Korea – Professor Kim Jong-Pil’s Team in the Department of Medical Biotechnology of Dongguk University in Seoul, Korea has developed a technique that can convert a type of cell in the human body into other type of cell.
The developed technology can recover damaged nerves and muscles with cells in the human body, which is a significant contribution to application of this technique to degenerative brain diseases such as Parkinson’s disease.
Stem cells are undifferentiated cells that are capable of differentiation into various types of cells. Various efforts have been made to cure cardiovascular diseases or brain diseases by converting stem cells into myocardial cells or nerve cells. However, contamination problems may occur when stem cells of patients are pulled out and converted followed by re-transplantation.
To overcome this, Professor Kim’s team invented a method that makes cells in the human body differentiated directly into preferred cells. The cell’s direct conversion reprogramming is a technique that induces cells to be converted into preferred cells by controlling the cell’s fate quite freely.
To do this, a new concept of the cell conversion technique based on nanoelectronics has been developed in Korea independently. The nanoelectronics-based cell’s conversion technique was applied to in-vivo direct conversion reprogramming.
The study result was published in Nature Nanotechnology (IF=38.986), which is a prestigious journal in the life science field.
Figure 2. In-vivo dopaminergic neuron cell direct conversion reprogramming of new concept using nanoelectronics technology