Could cellular reprogramming solve PCOS? #95
A complicated but beautiful future awaits for us
Hi there,
How is your October going? This is a gentle reminder to start taking your Vitamin D supplements if you are located in the Northern Hemisphere. We have discussed the impact of Vitamin D deficiency here and here. Vitamin D deficiency can significantly impact our symptoms; ideally, we want to avoid that this winter.
Top three insights from this article:
1️⃣ Human development starts from a single cell, multiplying and specialising to form a complete person with trillions of cells.
2️⃣ Scientists can now manipulate this single cell, including cloning and creating stem-like cells. This could potentially revolutionize disease treatment by creating new cells from scratch in a lab. Imagine injecting new brain cells into an Alzheimer’s patient.
3️⃣ Future research may identify specific cells (e.g., testosterone receptors) that could help PCOS. However, the complexity of our condition makes this very unlikely at the moment.
Today, I want to discuss gene therapy and its potential for disease treatment. Genetics is a fascinating subject; I believe it will be our future.
Where we come from
You and I, with our beautiful eyes, skin, and hair, come from ONE CELL - the zygote. This cell forms when the sperm from the father meats the mother's egg. This one cell starts replicating and differentiating into specialised cells whilst in the womb. Some cells will become muscle, heart, or skin cells until they form a whole human. How crazy is this? From ONE cell to 30 trillion cells - an entire human. I don’t know about you, but I find this incredible, and it gives me so much respect for nature and what it creates. Be that God or the Big Bang, it’s genuinely fascinating.
Because we come from ONE CELL, this cell is extremely powerful as it can replicate in any cell we need.
Scientists are a brilliant bunch, and they figured that if they could replicate a zygote (the initial cell we all come from) in a lab, they could clone people. You just need those starting cells. Guess what? They managed. Not quite people, but they cloned frogs and then the famous Dolly sheep, which you can see in Edinburgh at the National Museum of Scotland.
Can we clone people?
Not yet. Partly because it’s illegal and partially because attempts at cloning things often end up in less healthy offspring. Also, why would we want to clone people? There are enough of us on earth.
However, what is interesting to us is the ability to replicate cells we might need. In a heart attack, the heart cells die when they lack oxygen. Imagine a world where we can take skin cells, revert them to zygote-like cells and create heart cells from them. Another example would be Alzheimer’s, where brain cells die off slowly, or type 1 diabetes, where insulin-producing cells die.
Well, we are on the way to doing that. In 2012, Shinya Yamanaka received the Nobel Prize for discovering how to turn any cell type into zygote-like cells that can be used to create specialised cells.
Since then, scientists have used this methodology to investigate its relevance in Parkinson's, heart failure, spinal cord injury, etc. Imagine someone with a spinal cord injury being able to walk again because we managed to take their cells, revert them back to create new nerve cells, and inject them with them. We are not there yet, but I assume we will soon get there.
Could this ever work for PCOS?
Every time I read about these advancements in our ability to treat disease, I get incredibly excited about our condition.
This discovery seems to help those diseases in which certain cells die, leading to disease. As mentioned in Alzhameir, brain cells die, and in heart failure, heart cells die. As far as we know, no cells truly die in our condition.
What makes PCOS extremely hard to treat is that no one knows why it happens. It’s such a complex intertwined condition that it is tough to pinpoint what goes wrong.
❓ Will we, in the future, be able to identify specific genetic variations that lead to our condition?
Yes, we already have an idea.
❓ Can we manipulate those genetic variations in a lab to correct some of the ways our bodies behave?
I hope this will be possible, but it’s most likely a distant one. I am imagining creating testosterone receptor cells and adding them to our body to increase our ability to deal with excess testosterone. This is a very wild thought, but our ability to evolve as humans has always started with crazy thoughts turned into reality. Of course, the other way to look at it is that we can change the cells producing too much testosterone, AND this is becoming possible 👇🏼.
❓ Can we influence those genetic variations to correct how they behave?
Yes, the world of epigenetics is investigating this. I will write a lot more about it in future newsletters.
See you next Sunday,
Francesca
References
Carey, N. (2012). The epigenetics revolution: How modern biology is rewriting our understanding of genetics, disease and inheritance. Icon Books.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2012. (n.d.). Nobelprize.org. Retrieved 15 October 2024, from https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2012/yamanaka/facts/
Yamanaka, S. (2020). Pluripotent stem cell-based cell therapy—promise and challenges. Cell Stem Cell, 27(4), 523–531. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stem.2020.09.014
Ye, L., Swingen, C., & Zhang, J. (2013). Induced pluripotent stem cells and their potential for basic and clinical sciences. Current Cardiology Reviews, 9(1), 63–72. https://doi.org/10.2174/157340313805076278
We are all unique in our ways, so this information is for educational purposes only. In my communications, I summarise research data and bring my experience. This shouldn’t be viewed as medical advice at any point. Please further consult your healthcare provider about your health needs.
Excited for the future!