After studying stem cell therapy for a period of time, scientists and doctors acknowledged the great benefit of this incredible therapy as it could cure many types of blood disorders, including Leukemia, Thalassaemia, SLE, and more. Unfortunately, a number of patients still lack the opportunities to reach this therapy because it’s prohibitively expensive - around $100,000 to $200,000 per patient.
However, there is the remarkable scientific discovery of “regenerative power of starfish” which enhances stem cell therapy, making it much cheaper, thank to Chemical Professor Kris Noel Dahl and Veronica Hinman, head of CMU’s Department of Biological Sciences.
Generally, stem cells are able to differentiate into any type of cell that are important to the body, including blood cells, muscle cells, skin cells, etc. But when stem cells differentiate themselves into other cells, they cannot change back or de-differentiated. However, we have found that there is a special creature which its cells do not process like that: starfish!
A starfish can regenerate its arms whenever they lose one; this shows that a starfish possess unique cells, which can de-differentiate themselves from skin or muscle cells back into stem cells. With this incredible ability of starfish, Hinman’s preliminary research on stem cell therapy can take a major step forward.
Dahl says, “In the larval state, starfish have a distinctive head that contains their brain. If the head is removed or damaged, the differentiated cells that are definitely not neural cells will de-differentiate, crawl up to the head region, and regrow into neurons. To not only do this in the larval state, but to regrow something as complex as a brain—this is an amazing regenerative capability.”
Thank to the DSF Charitable Foundation who contributes to this project, Hinman and Dahl can study intensively what in starfishes causes their cells to process like this.
Dahl adds, “While regenerative medicine is great, there’s still a lack of understanding of the fundamentals that govern how cells respecify themselves. The hope is that by studying a model organism like the starfish, and combining what we learn with our knowledge of human stem cells, we can use comparative genomics to understand the gene expression that allows starfish cells to respecify their programming.”
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In the experiment, an artificial model of the starfish’s larval system was created in order that Dahl and her team can manipulate the chemical and mechanical factors existing in the starfish embryo. When the cells crawl to their new destination, Dahl blocks them at a time until she find out how exactly these cells de-differentiate back into stem cells, crawl up to the brain region and become neuronal tissue. If this process can be applied to stem cell therapy, the patient's cells are able to de-differentiate and become whatever the patient needs.
This method can considerably transform present therapies because stem cells no longer have to be harvested from a patient, cultured over the days, and reinjected back into the patients.
With this new method, doctors can take stem cells from any part of the body, then the cells de-differentiated back into stem cells, and finally re-differentiated into therapeutic cells. Consequently, stem cell therapy will become much cheaper.
“If you could reduce stem cell therapy from $200,000 to $1,000—it would touch nearly every person’s life,” says Dahl.
