“This would eliminate the difficult task of finding compatible donors for the transplant and the complications that occur after receiving it, improving the lives of many patients suffering from leukemia, lymphoma and anemia,” says the geneticist Raquel Espin Palazon who coordinated the research.
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The previous study
Researchers led by Espin Palazon had already demonstrated in previous work that some inflammatory signals that stimulate the immune response play a completely different role in the embryo, when the development of the blood and vascular system is still taking place.
The new research
In this new study, the researchers focused in particular on the Nod1 receptor, analyzing public databases of human embryos and observing its effects in zebrafish, an animal model widely used in biology laboratories because it shares approximately 70% of the genome with human beings.
In collaboration with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the scholars have also demonstrated that the inactivation of Nod-1 in induced human pluripotent stem cells, i.e. obtained by reprogramming adult cells in the laboratory, alters blood production, just as happens with zebrafish stem cells . “I believe that our investigations will pave the way for the creation of therapeutic blood stem cells to treat patients suffering from blood diseases,” concludes Espin Palazon.