Posted on: Friday, 10 October 2008, 15:00 CDT By MARK JOHNSON Japanese scientists have demonstrated a new way to reprogram cells without viruses, an important advance toward the goal of one day turning our own cells into a powerful tool to fight a wide range of diseases. The new technique, reported Thursday in the journal Science, appears to be both safer and simpler than previous methods, bypassing the cancer risk associated with using viruses and genes that remain inside a cell. The Japanese team, led by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, delivered the reprogramming genes into mouse cells with plasmids. Plasmids are essentially small, very stable circles of DNA. Just two weeks ago, a team at Harvard showed another way to improve safety by using a different kind of...
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