blood cells from human skin???????

Toronto, Nov 8 (IANS) In a major breakthrough in medical sciences, an Indo-Canadian researcher and his team have successfully transformed human skin into various blood cells.

The breakthrough is likely to pave the way for revolution in the treatment of patients needing blood transfusions and those suffering from blood disorders.

Mike Bhatia and his team at Canada's McMaster University at Hamilton have successfully harnessed human skin to produce red bloods cells, two kinds of immune cells and the cells that produce platelets needed in clotting, the Indian-origin researcher said Sunday.

Bhatia, who heads McMaster University's Stem Cell and cancer Research Institute, told the Canadian Press, 'We have shown this works using human skin. We know how it works and believe we can even improve on the process''

It will also pave the way to produce transplant tissues without ever making the controversial embryonic stem cells first. The breakthrough will also cheer cancer patients whose blood systems (blood cells) are badly affected by chemotherapy.

It also throws up the exciting possibility of brain neurons being harvested in lab from a mere patch of one's own skin to repair damage to brain cased by accidents or diseases.

The new technique will one day lessen the burden on blood banks as this process can reportedly create enough blood from one's own skin for transfusions.

Though blood cells can be derived from embryonic stem cells and what are known as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, this process is far more complicated and time-consuming, the Canadian Press quoted Bhatia as saying.

Moreover, blood cells derived from embryonic cells and iPS cells can be 'fetal' - not mature adult cells - with properties that make them unsuitable for transfusion, said Bhatia.

But the new skin-to-blood cell technique will carry no such dangers.

'Because we were starting out with adult fibroblasts (skin cells), we actually made adult blood, which we are predicting is going to be far more useful.''

Bhatia and his team grew blood cells from skin cells in Petri dishes in their lab, and then transplanted them into specially bred mice to see how they behaved. Tests so far have shown no ill-effects like cancerous growth - a danger with both embryonic and iPS cells.

Interestingly, the age of human skin will be no barrier in producing blood cells from it as Bhatia and his team used skin (cells) from people aged six to over 60 to produce blood vessels.

'What we found was it didn't make a difference. We were able to convert all of the human skin cells to blood independent of how aged the person was,'' Bhatia told the Canadian Press.

The research appeared in the journal Nature Sunday.

source- yahoo news

3D image of melanoma

Melanoma is a rare but deadly skin malignancy(cancer) which has proved to be a difficult task for doctors to know the exact extent for it's complete removal. when it is not removed completely it results in a number of complications and recurrence. Since ages doctors have been excising a large bulk of normal tissue around the melanoma to prevent recurrence.

Two scientists of Washington University in St. Louis have developed imaging technologies to overcome this difficult problem.

Their solution combines an imaging technique developed by Lihong Wang, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and a contrast agent developed by Younan Xia, the James M. McKelvey Professor of Biomedical Engineering.

Together the imaging technique and contrast agent produce images of startling three-dimensional clarity.

The imaging technique is based on the photoacoustic effect discovered by Alexander Graham Bell 100 years ago. Bell exploited the effect in what he considered his greatest invention ever, the photophone, which converted sound to light, transmitted the light and then converted it back to sound at the receiver.

In Bell's effect, the absorption of light heats a material slightly, typically by a matter of millikelvins, and the temperature rise causes thermoelastic expansion.

"Much the same thing happens. when you heat a balloon and it expands," Wang said.

If the light is pulsed at the right frequency, the material will expand and contract, generating a sound wave.

"We detect the sound signal outside the tissue, and from there on, it's a mathematical problem. We use a computer to reconstruct an image. We're essentially listening to a structure instead of looking at it," Wang added.

"Using pure optical imaging, it is hard to look deep into tissues because light is absorbed and scattered. The useful photons run out of juice within one millimeter," he further said.

The technology has been described in the July issue of journal ACS Nano

source- in.news.yahoo.com