Rare find
As debilitating as disease can be, sometimes it acts as a teacher. Researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine have found that by mimicking a rare genetic disorder in a dish they can rewind the internal clock of a mature cell and drive it back into an adult stem-cell stage. This new “stem cell” can then branch out into a variety of differentiated cell types, both in culture and in animal models. “This certainly has implications for personalized medicine, especially in the area of tissue engineering,” says Bjorn Olsen, the Hersey Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School and dean of research at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. These findings appear online in Nature Medicine on Nov. 21. Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva (FOP), which affects fewer than 1,000 people worldwide, is a horrific genetic disease in which acute inflammation causes soft tissue to morph into cartilage and bone....