Stem cells created from diabetic foot ulcer cells might yield therapy for chronic wounds

The potential to use a patient's own cells to treat non-healing chronic wounds ? a serious complication of diabetes ? took an important step forward as researchers successfully reprogrammed skin cells taken from diabetic foot ulcers to form induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). The reprogramming technique was similar in efficiency to the results achieved using healthy foot skin from non-diabetic patients. iPSCs have the potential to develop into a variety of cell types and can be used to create disease models to study new therapeutic approaches, such as activating regenerative capabilities that could convert non-healing fibroblasts into skin cells that regain their repair functions. In the study, published early online in Cellular Reprogramming, Behzad Gerami-Naini, Ph.D., and co-authors from the School of Dental Medicine and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences, Tufts University (Boston, Massachusetts), and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University (Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts), present a technique that uses a non-integrating Sendai virus to reprogram fibroblast cell lines. The researchers describe the future therapeutic potential of reprogrammed diabetic foot ulcer-derived cells, which could undergo epigenetic remodeling, a change that may reverse disease processes. Learn more: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-08/mali-fro081016.php DOI: 10.1089/cell.2015.0087