Liposuction fat produces embryonic stem cells better: Study

According to this study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, these cells can further morph into a wide range of cells called the induced pluripotent stem cells and may help in treating the damaged tissues of the human body.

The induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells are made out of skin cells over a matter of weeks. But the team based at Stanford University’s School of Medicine in California has found that the adipose fat cells are much more efficient at turning into iPS cells.

The iPS cells have the ability to treat the damaged heart, bone or muscle tissue. This prompted the researchers to look for an alternative in the skin’s fibroblast cells, which were examined for their ability to culture the usable iPS cells.

Dr. Joseph Wu, a co-author of a study on this process and assistant professor of medicine at Stanford, said, "Not only can we start with a lot of cells, we can reprogram them much more efficiently. Fibroblasts, or skin cells, must be grown in the lab for three weeks or more before they can be reprogrammed. But these stem cells from fat are ready to go right away."

Lab experiment for reprogramming the cells
The procedure of reprogramming the fat cells into iPS cells relies on genetically engineered viruses that can be dangerous for the human body, so its clinical application has yet not started. But for the purpose of the study, a lab experiment was carried out by the Stanford team.

Stanford University plastic surgeon Michael Longaker’s liposuction patients donated three liters of fat for the purpose of research. To reprogram the fat into stem cells, the scientists injected Trojan horse-like viruses into the smooth muscle cells found in fat.

Once getting cultured with the muscle cells, the viruses introduced genes that reprogrammed the cells taking them back to a more immature or embryonic stage resulting which the cells grew into multiple forms. The cells were mainly distinguished into three main tissue types of the body, including neurons, muscle and lining of the gut.

Researchers found that the fat technique adopted to produce stem cells is much faster and 20 times more efficient than the previous techniques which used ordinary skin cells to derive the stem cells grown in a culture dish with nutrients from the mouse cells.

Procedure to be targeted only for the obese
The Stanford team hopes to begin the clinical application of the process only for the most efficient and only obese candidates.

"If these are a so-called chicken soup of [cell] population, we don’t know if it's one type of cell or five," said Longaker who co-authored the study.

"We would like to identify which sub-population is most easily reprogrammable—and reprogram it in a way the FDA would approve of."

Longaker termed the fat as ‘liquid gold’ and said human fat is "an abundant natural resource and a renewable one".

"Even if you're in great shape, there is still enough fat to be harvested from the vast majority of patients," added Longaker.