blood vessels
Reprograming Adult Cells to Produce Blood Vessels
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: New network of blood vessels (green) grown from reprogrammed adult human cells (blue: connective tissue, red: red blood cells)
Credit: Reproduced from R. Samuel et al, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013;110:12774-9.
Individuals with heart disease, diabetes, and non-healing ulcers (which can lead to amputation) could all benefit greatly from new blood vessels to replace those that are diseased, damaged, or blocked. But engineering new blood vessels hasn’t yet been possible. Although we’ve learned how to reprogram human skin cells or white blood cells into so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells—which have the potential to develop into different cell types—we haven’t really had the right recipe to nudge those cells down a path toward blood vessel development.
But now NIH-funded researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have taken another step in that direction.
Lighting up the Eyes
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Source: Richard Lang, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, OH
This image may conjure up thoughts of bioluminescent jellyfish, but it actually shows a network of developing blood vessels in the eye of a three day old mouse. A study in Nature last week determined that light regulates the pattern of mouse blood vessels as they develop. Observing the intermediate states of eye development is important because abnormal blood vessel development is a major cause of blindness in premature infants.
Funded by National Eye Institute, NIH.
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