TORONTO — Thanks to a major breakthrough by one of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s most promising researchers, clinical trials based on stem cell research – which could lead to technologies that can repair damaged tissue, treat autoimmune diseases and even grow transplant organs – could be underway within the next 10 years.

Dr. Jacob Hanna was in Toronto last week as the guest of honour at a Weizmann Canada event held at the Beer Academy called “Revealing a Piece of the Stem Cell Puzzle,” where he shared the latest news about his team’s discovery of a protein that makes the process of converting adult stem cells to embryonic stem cells dramatically more efficient and stable.

In an interview with The CJN, Hanna explained that his research builds on the work of Shinya Yamanaka, a Japanese stem-cell researcher who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2012 for his discovery that adult cells can be converted to stem cells.

“He was able to show that we can take a skin cell and by putting in four genes that are normally expressed in the early embryo, we can reprogram, convert the cell all the way back to the start… to what we call the embryonic stem cell state,” said Hanna, a 34-year-old Arab-Israeli from the Galilee who has been working at the Weizmann Institute as an independent scientist since 2011.

Embryonic stem cells are crucially important, because they have yet to be programmed to become a specific type of cell.

Hanna said that while the current process of producing induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells solves a lot of ethical issues, because the process doesn’t require using an egg or fetal material, it’s very inefficient – it can take up to four weeks to produce an iPS cell and the success rate is about 0.1 per cent. Scientists have also found that it’s very difficult to keep iPS cells in their unprimed state.

Because the process is so slow and inefficient, Hanna and his team realized that resetting the cells to their embryonic state wasn’t enough.

In the Sept. 18 issue of Nature, Hanna outlined an important breakthrough discovered by his team to address those issues.

“We identified a protein called MBD3. This protein acts like a brake in a car,” said Hanna, who has won numerous awards and was named one of the top 35 young innovators in 2010 by Technology Review magazine.

Hanna and his team discovered that removing the protein from the adult cells dramatically sped up the process and improved efficiency.

“When we dismantle this brake, we can get up from 0.1 per cent to 100 per cent… in six days,” he said.

“This brings us closer to a vision of a patient who shows up and we need to quickly make cells and they quickly need to be high quality and then we can use them. So, I really think this is a step forward in an important direction,” he said.

“As the population is aging more and people live longer, and we have new diseases, and people want to have a higher quality of life, there is a great need for tissue replacement. The idea is, how do we come up with a reproducible, accessible source of tissues for replacement that will also not be rejected [by the body] – basically, genetically identical to the patient?”

By reprogramming mature, adult stem cells to create iPS cells, which would be grown in the lab to be differentiated into many different cell types, these iPS cells can be used to treat autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and could potentially grow transplant organs.

Because the process requires the use of a patient’s own mature cells, it would drastically reduce the chances of the body rejecting a transplant.

When asked how long it could take for the general public to be able to benefit from this technology, he laughed, saying, “I’m not a prophet. But considering the rapid pace of this field, within the next five to 10 years, we could start seeing valid and serious clinical trials based on these technologies.”

Another important element of Hanna’s research, which was also featured in his recently published paper, is working to understand why mouse embryonic stem cells are easier to preserve in their unprimed state than human ones.

“We are for the first time, able to make mice, animals that are chimeric [composed of two or more kinds of genetically distinct cells]… with human tissue,” he explained.

“You now can have a mouse who has low levels of human liver or human blood cells in that mouse, and I think that is very exciting because it gives us a platform perhaps to look at human tissue formation in a living organism. I think that is one of the next frontiers for our field.”