Vitamins’ promise revealed

The powerful combination of two vitamins could be a hidden key to curing human diseases through regenerative medicine.

A new study, co-authored by Otago University scientist Dr Tim Hore, has found how vitamins A and C can enhance success in the challenging process of converting adult cells into stem cells. The two vitamins were discovered to complement each other in erasing “memory” associated with DNA — an important effect for improving technologies geared towards regenerative medicine and stem-cell therapy.

The researchers showed how ordinary adult cells could be artificially coerced in a culture dish to resemble embryos.

Hore said there had been much interest in using induced embryonic stem cells to cure human disease.

“However, hampering these efforts is the reality that adult cells are resistant to changes in their identity, partly because of chemical alterations to their DNA.”

These alterations, known as “DNA methylation”, provide a form of cellular memory. Removal of this memory was critical to create a developmentally potent stem cell, or to change one kind of adult cell to another. Hore determined that adding vitamins A and C to culture dishes removed DNA methylation from embryonic stem cells.

“We found that both vitamins affect the same family of enzymes which actively remove DNA methylation; it turns out that vitamin A increases the number of these enzymes within the cell, and vitamin C enhances their activity.”