Stem Cells Remember Tissues’ Past Injuries | Hacker News Reader

Stem Cells Remember Tissues’ Past Injuries

quantamagazine.org

62 pointshourislate9 comments

I have ulcerative colitis, which is a disease that falls under the category of IBD. My story is similar to many other IBD testimonials. I was a perfectly healthy young individual who contracted a severe infection that landed me in the hospital. I was treated with antibiotics and steroids, and made a full recovery. After a follow up colonoscopy, I was diagnosed with IBD.

I had an idea, albeit without any real proof, that my disease was onset by my infection by somehow "reprogramming" my immune system. This was how I rationalised going from a healthy to diseased status so rapidly. That idea trivialises much of what goes on behind the scenes in our bodies, but it seems to be more or less what this research is pointing towards.

Based on a quick check at Mayo Clinic, it appears that IBD can be an autoimmune problem, but isn't necessarily. Another possibility is that antibiotics took out some important species of your gut bacteria. Based on other things I've seen, it seems possible that a fecal transplant could restore them if that's the case.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/irritable-bow...

Mayoclinic isn't really a cite-able source, but I agree on the rhetoric that antibiotics can cause a microbe imbalance. Unfortunately there hasn't been any research (that I have seen) that has found a causation between Ulcertive Colitis and the microbiome of the colon. There is definitely a correlation between gut health and it's microbiome ([research paper][https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5757125/]), but it doesn't seem to bear causation for the underlying disease.

Autoimmune diseases (and the immune system as a whole) are still a mystery to doctors/researchers, so the best approach we have to treating it is empirical instead of deterministic. The stem cell article is the type of research that I hope for, as it attempts to permeate the opaqueness of such a system.

Stem cells don’t remember anything, especially not injuries. No way. That’s so ridiculous, and whatever Alex actually found is probably meaningless.

Single cell sequencing can statistically correlate with anything. It practically can explain anything. It’s a veritable paper factory system, not a path towards credible medical therapies (the only thing that people really care about).

Hacker News, Y Combinator possibly specifically, and VC generally is being overrun with a dodgy zeitgeist: the dot com bulge of nutritional-supplement-quality “science” masquerading as biotech.

I mean seriously. These posts are always overrun with personal andecdotes of hack “I know enough” biology. Can’t we see the red flags?

Interesting, care to elaborate?

I don't think we understand biology well enough, yet, to be so dismissive based on purely structural grounds.

We don't even understand the role of mRNA's fully or how they might be used as a memory mechanism... it seems perfectly plausible that injuries result in transcription of some sort of mRNA that yields this sort of behavior. You seem excessively dismissive without giving any real specific evidence as to why.

Yeah that is starting to look like woo but not from the headline. I mean I could see say remaining scar tissues causing problems even if stem cells caused regrowth at the sight for example. That is actually plausible given mice studies seem to show senescent cells cause aging related deformations.

The use of generic "inflammation" as an evil is a major red flag.

I would agree with "that's a pretty bold conclusion, I would need to see independent confirmation", but not with "we know enough about stem cells to say this is impossible".

Could you go into more detail as to why it's doubtful that their findings point to stem cell memory? I'm genuinely curious as stem cell jargon is foreign to me.

Do they actually remember the injuries? Or can they read information about them from their environment?

It's an important distiction, especially when it comes time to find ways to exploit (or prevent) this effect.

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