Stem Cell
Cure for spinal cord injury:
Spinal cord injury often happened to 13.3-45.9 per million of people annually in the U.S. This kind of injury often caused by trauma, like traffic accidents, or sports injuries. Spinal cord received irreversible damages from outside force and these damages can lead to mobility problems or even disabilities. U.S. now has 250,000 patients suffered from spinal cord injury and scientists now found a way might cure this painful injury.
Stem cells often used to repair damage tissues due to their ability to differentiate. In the studies of curing spinal cord injury, scientists now found stem cell therapy can gives an improvement of 25% when comes to curing test animals’ spinal cord injury. Although the data is different between different animals.
Now the scientists are studying about stem cell therapy used on human spinal cord injury. The neural stem cell could soon become the cure for spinal cord injury. [63]
Citation: 63
Cure for cardiovascular diseases:
Cardiovascular diseases are the major cause of death in the United States and many other countries, that makes the curing those diseases the focus in the fields of medicine. Human hearts act differently than other human organs, when cardiovascular diseases deprived the oxygen supply in the human heart and caused damage in it, heart usually can’t heal by itself or it heals with a life-threatening slow rate. Life saving surgeries often caused many pain on the patients.
But the researches in stem cell potential application can now give heart disease patients hope. Research experiment done by Chuck Murry and his team in the University of Washington in Seattle was one example of showing how stem cell could be the future cure of cardiovascular diseases. Dr. Murry and his team used guinea pig as their laboratory animal for the experiment. This kind of pig has a heart rate of 200-250 per minute, which is in the tolerance interval for human stem cell to work.
In order to prove the potential application of stem cell, Dr. Murry and his team need to prove stem cell can be use on restoring damage heart tissues. To do so, the team manmade damage in several guinea pigs’ heart, then injected human embryonic stem cells or other type of cells into the region. Four weeks after the team inserted different cells into guinea pigs’ damage heart, a good result came out, the guinea pig which received human stem cells healed faster than those which didn’t. And another good news was, during the process of healing the heart, human embryonic stem cells did not cause any unusual side effect on guinea pigs’ heart.
This experiment successfully indicated that stem cells’ potential usage on curing cardiovascular disease is worth for scientists to discover. The way of using stem cell on cardiovascular disease patient is still controversial, only a small number of studies have been carried to human. Under the approval of the patients, researchers injected human stem cells in several patients’ damaged heart tissues during their open-heart surgery. Those studies also gave the medicine field good news: human stem cell does help cardiovascular disease patients speed up their healing process, and restoring the damage tissues. [64]
Although a lot of studies need to be done before stem cell can really be use on curing cardiovascular diseases, the large potential of stem cell shows the optimistic future for those patients who suffered from them. [65]
Citation: 64,65
Future Application
[63] nerual stem cells are in red
[62] How atheroma builds up
[59] Human Spinal Cord
[60] Human heart
[61] Structure of human heart
Siddharthan Chandran: Can the damaged brain repair itself?
Liver transplant:
Every year, countless patients who suffered from illness like cirrhosis are waiting for liver transplant surgery to save their lives. There were over 16,000 patients on the national waiting list in October 2012. Due to liver shortage and other factors, more than 1,500 of those patients die annually before they can find a matched liver. [68]
But the researches on human stem cell might bring hope to these patients. Stem cell scientist Takanori Takebe and his team at Yokohama City University in Japan have been focus on stem cell research for a long time. This year, their successfully used human stem cells generated liver buds, transplanted the buds into laboratory mice and protracted the mice life span after the mice livers are disable. Here is how they did it: They extracted stem cells from human skin and reprogrammed them into embryonic-like stem cells. Then combined the new kind of stem cell with two other types of cells and seduced them to form similar structures like inside a real human liver. Since stem cells at embryonic state can be morphing into any type of cell in human body, Dr. Takebe and his team successfully built the human liver buds.
Although use stem cell to form a normal functioning human liver needs tens of thousands of liver buds, this experiment’s success noted a breakthrough on regenerative medicine field. With less than ten years, the more mature techniques will provide liver illness patients generating liver buds. [69]
Citation: 68, 69
[64] Human liver and the biliary tree
[65] Cross-section of the skin, stem cell factors are marked in green.
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Many blindness are caused by human cornea damage in diseases or injuries. If the damage isn’t severe, a small numbers of stem cells exist in the edge of human cornea, the limbal stem cell, could repair the damage within a period of time. But often times, the limbal stem cells are also damage during injuries or disease, in these cases, in order to repair eye sight, patient’s only choice will be the cornea transplantation surgery.
Dependent on the cases, doctors will suggest patients do either full thickness cornea transplant, or the back layer cornea transplant. In most of the cases, patients received healthy corneal tissues from a donor, and replace the healthy tissues with the damaged tissues. Under proper care, patients after cornea plantation have a high percentage to repair their eye sight. But there are only limited number of cornea. More than 10 million patients suffered from corneal diseases worldwide, but only 100,000 cornea transplantations carried out annually. [70] [71]
Studies on stem cells might give these patients more options. Transplantation of limbal stem cells from a healthy donor can also help the patients repair their damage cornea. Doctors will first obtain healthy limbal stem cell from the donor, and inject these cells into the damage tissue, within proper care and time, patients will regain their eyesight. The reason this treatment isn’t widely popular is the risk of the surgery. In the process of limbal stem cell transplantation, both donor and patient need to take high risk, the successful rate of this transplantation is lower than normal cornea transplantation. But recent study on limbal stem cells showed improvement on this kind of transplantation. By using embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells, scientists now can cultivate limbal stem cells in the lab. Reduced the risk need to take by the donors, limbal stem cell transplantation surgery might soon be available to patients who are badly in need of transplantation.
The other option offered by stem cell is artificial cornea. [72] Scientists Charles Hanson and Ulf Stenevi from the University of Gothenburg have already made successful improvement on artificial cornea. Dr. Hanson and his partners found, under proper culture, human stem cells can develop into important cells that maintain a healthy cornea. “If we can establish a routine method for this, the availability of material for patients who need a new cornea will be essentially unlimited. Both the surgical procedures and the aftercare will also become much more simple," says Ulf Stenevi. See the full published article “Transplantation of human embryonic stem cells onto a partially wounded human cornea in vitro” click here for more informations. [73]
Although the stem cell treatment on curing blindness isn’t mature yet, the potential usage of stem cell is proved by multiple studies and experiments. Within the near future, stem cell treatment will become a new star in eye disease field.
Citation: 70, 71, 72, 73
Repairing human cornea:
[66] Human eye structure
[67] Corneal Transplantation
[68] Human eye
Cure for type 1 diabetes:
Type 1diabetes is the kind of diabetes often being found in people under 30 years old. This type of diabetes makes the human immune system attacks the insulin producing cell and the transporting blood vessels, leading to serious unbalance in the human body and eventual death. There is no cure for this disease, millions of people’s lives are depending on their every day insulin injection.
But the research leading by University of Missouri scientist Dr. Habib Zaghouani might change this situation. Dr. Zaghouani and his team have spent the last 12 years tried to find the way to cure diabetes. And they successfully developed a kind of medicine that could stop the human immune system for attacking the insulin producing cells. The only problem was ----- too little number of beta cells survived from the attack to recover the body system. Last year, Dr. Zaghouani found a way to solve this problem. The differential ability of human stem cell comes to use.
The processes went like this: first, the new drug developed by Dr. Zaghouani and his team stops the immune system from attacking the healthy insulin producing cells. Then, Dr. Zaghouani injected adult stem cells into the system and hoped the stem cells will evolve into healthy insulin producing cells. The result was satisfactory, the injected adult stem cell didn’t really evolve directly into beta cells, instead, they help the growth of the blood vessels, where the human body produces health beta cells.
Dr. Zaghouani was very excited about the new combination of drugs and adult stem cells, he believed the new discovery can not only help the type 1 diabetes patients, but can also make process on other diseases research. [66] [67]
Citation: 66,67
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