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Researchers Turn Human Skin Cells into Blood Cells

One of the dreams of biomedical scientists is to be able to transform adult cells into other kinds of cells. And thus avoid some of the ethical concerns of working with embryonic stem cells. Now a research team from McMaster University in Ontario has announced that they’ve been able to transform human skin cells into blood cells. The work was published online on November 7th by the journal Nature.

生物医学领域的科学家有一个梦想，那就是将成年细胞转化成其他类型的细胞，这就可以避免一些因使用胚胎干细胞引起的伦理问题。如今，安大略省麦克马斯特大学的一个研发小组宣称他们可以将人类皮肤细胞转化成血细胞。这项研究在11月7日由《自然》杂志在网上发表。

Other research in this area has required that cells of one type first be returned to a more generally undifferentiated stem cell state, which can introduce fresh problems. Once there, the cell is then turned into the type of tissue the researchers seek. But in this case, the scientists avoided the middleman cell. The skin was changed directly into what appears to be functional adult human blood cells. The technique involves gene insertion by a virus vector and exposure to numerous regulatory proteins.

此领域的其他研究实验都是先逆分化某种类型的细胞，将其变回一般未分化的干细胞状态，而这过程可能会引起一些新问题。一旦细胞逆分化成干细胞，干细胞就可以分化成某种研究者想要的组织。但马斯特大学研发小组的科学家却没有利用中途转化的干细胞，而是直接将皮肤细胞转化成能发挥功能的成人血细胞。这项技术需要用到植入新基因病毒载体和多种调控蛋白。

The cells have not been tested in humans to see if they’re truly indistinguishable from the home-grown kind. But the research is another step in the effort to create needed cell types from easily available ones.

科学家尚未证实这些细胞在人体内是否自身血细胞没有任何区别，但此次研究在探索简易获取所需细胞的道路上迈出了一步。

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