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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Here's a dumb question: is it possible to culture stem cells? Or make more of them? Or does every stem cell have to be donated?

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Not a dumb question at all. The difficulty with cells from multicellular organisms is that they are used to be part of a larger organism. Isolating individual cells and keeping them alive is very difficult.

The oldest cultured human cell line are HeLa cells[1] which are derived from cervical cancer cells and they are therefore not normal human cells. Cancer evolves to be resilient and is therefore easier to cultivate than regular well-behaving cells.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

You can build stem cell lines that reproduce stem cells.

You can also "go backwards" from skin stem cells to fully featured stem cells.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584308/

>Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, are a type of pluripotent stem cell derived from adult somatic cells. They have been reprogrammed through inducing genes and factors to be pluripotent. iPS cells are similar to embryonic stem (ES) cells in many aspects.

You can even do it without 100% causing cancer now.

here's a breakdown of the current progress in a chart.

https://www.lifespan.io/wp-content/webp-express/webp-images/...

The process is commonly known as stem cell culture or stem cell expansion. Stem cells have the unique ability to self-renew, meaning they can divide and produce more stem cells while maintaining their undifferentiated state.

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) were a major development by Shinya Yamanaka around 20 years ago. Essentially, you take an adult's cell and induce it to become a stem cell.

I don't know much more about it but that certainly is part of the answer to your question. Hopefully others will chime in ...

Also sounds like you could create a human clone embryo and harvest the stem cells.

There are already surrogate pregnancy outsourcing places in poor parts of the world - if this is viable I expect this to become the new blood boy fad for the rich.

And another one: could we take someone's own stem cells, edit this mutation into them with CRISPR, culture more of them, and then re-implant them?

Yes in theory. However there is a lot of tricky parts that mean we are not doing this in real humans often it at all.

Yes, example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10418799/ although I am not sure if T cells are considered stem cells or derived.

Yes, there are approved treatments that do exactly this with stem cells for some diseases.

you can also collect cord blood just after birth of a baby. The blood contains stem cells that will be compatible with your baby and possibly other people in your family. Might be useful one day

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