Despite their dormancy, they apparently retain the ability to grow, divide, and differentiate into other cell types expressing characteristics appropriate to the tissue environment from which they were initially isolated, if some external stimulus should prompt them to do so.
Spore-like cells were said to remain viable in unprepared tissue (using no special preservation techniques), frozen at -86 °C and then thawed, or heated to 85 °C for more than 30 minutes.
Charles Vacanti continued to work on these cells when he moved to Harvard, including with thoracic surgeon Koji Kojima who identified them in lung tissue.
[3] Working with a graduate student Haruko Obokata in his lab at Harvard from 2008, Vacanti later refined this theory to suggest that stress or injury could actually trigger the development of pluripotency in somatic cells.
[4] Vacanti presented these results in July 2012 at the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists conference,[5] and then in January 2014 the journal Nature published two articles suggesting that a simple acid treatment could cause mouse blood cells to become pluripotent.