Scientists in Canada have overcome a key research hurdle to
developing regenerative treatments for diabetes and liver
disease with a technique to produce medically useful amounts of
endoderm cells from human pluripotent stem cells. The research,
published in Biotechnology and Bioengineering, can be
transferred to other areas of stem cell research helping
scientists to navigate the route to clinical use known as the
'valley of death'. "One million people suffer from type 1
diabetes in the United States, while liver disease accounts for
45,000 deaths a year," said Dr Mark Ungrin from the University
of Toronto. "This makes stem cells, and the potential for
regenerative treatments, hugely interesting to scientists.
Laboratory techniques can produce thousands, or even millions,
of these cells, but generating them in the numbers and quality
needed for medicine has long been a challenge." The research
focused on the process of using pluripotent stem cells (PSC) to
generate endoderm cells, one of the three primary ge