Canadian Scientists Turn Human Skin Into Blood !!!

November 9, 2010 by Nataly in Science

img.source http://images.tvnz.co.nz/

A team of researchers at McMaster University in Canada has succeeded in turning human skin into blood cells. That means that getting a blood transfusion as part of surgery or to treat cancer could be simple like borrowing a patch of skin off your own body.

Making blood from skin doesn’t require the middle step of changing a skin stem cell into a pluripotent stem cell that could make many other types of human cells, then turning it into a blood stem cell. The method turns a person’s skin into blood without using embryonic stem cells

This brilliant research was published in the most recent issue of Nature.

“We have shown this works using human skin. We know how it works and believe we can even improve on the process,” Nature quoted Bhatia,scientific director of McMaster’s Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine. “We’ll now go on to work on developing other types of human cell types from skin, as we already have encouraging evidence,”

This discovery can provide that people in the future might be their own private blood bank, using their skin to create blood when needed.