Rare diseases like ALS and SMA cause damage to motor neurons. Often, these conditions lead to death, in part because muscles in the chest are wasted away and the patient can no longer breathe.

But now, a recent study targeting SMA treatment, offers new hope in regards to regenerative therapies.

Researchers from University of Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis were able to create motor neurons out of healthy adult human skin cells. This opens up quite a few doors:

1. The process they used in the lab skips the stem cell state, which means there shouldn’t be an ethical argument against creating human motor neurons from human skin cells in the lab.
2. It enables scientists to learn more about human motor neurons, as researchers can’t get them easily from living humans, but they can get human skin cells pretty easily.
3. In skipping the stem cell state, it helps scientists preserve the age of the patient and will better inform the researcher about these neurodegenerative conditions that progress over time

This new method could eventually lead to better therapies like regenerative treatment for patients with progressive diseases like ALS and SMA.

So what’s the next step?

Scientists aren’t sure how well of a match the motor neurons created are to an actual patient’s, so they will be reliant upon patients who donate posthumously to ensure these lab-created neurons are a close match to native human motor neurons.

To read more, check out this story in Newswise and Futurism. The original study was published in Cell Stem Cell.

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