Stem Cells

Stem Cell Therapy Becomes More Successful

As more information is learned about stem cells, the brighter the future looks for successful stem cell therapies. Scientists feel that stem cells have the potential to cure many diseases, including heart disease, spinal cord damage, some types of cancer, and Parkinson's disease. Stem cells are able to become other types of cells, and this ability, if it can be controlled, may help alleviate or eliminate many diseases.

One of the best known stem cell therapies currently in use is a bone marrow transplant. Bone marrow transplants are used to treat leukemia. The white blood cells in a leukemia patient form improperly and function incorrectly. They no longer fight infection in the body.

To treat leukemia, these abnormal white blood cells are killed. Then, healthy stem cells from a compatible donor are used to replace the cells killed. If the transplant is successful, these donor bone marrow stem cells find their way into the recipient's bone marrow, where they will produce healthy cells.

When it comes to Parkinson's disease, the hope is that stem cell therapy will make a huge difference. In Parkinson's disease, certain cells are damaged or destroyed in the midbrain. These cells produce a chemical called dopamine, which helps the brain function normally.

The hope is that neural stem cells can be used to replace the damaged stem cells in the brains of Parkinson patients. At the moment, monkeys have been tested using stem cells from humans. The monkeys had severe cases of Parkinson's disease. They were injected with healthy human neural stem cells and showed great improvement. What's also interesting is that the monkeys showed no toxic side effects and no tumors were found.

What may slow down the discovery and implementation of stem cell therapies is the controversy surrounding some aspects of stem cell research. For instance, embryonic stem cells are considered the best because they can become any type of cell in the human body. Unfortunately, to gather embryonic stem cells, a human embryo must be destroyed.

Some people feel strongly that this is wrong since they consider a human embryo to be a baby. For this reason, the federal government does not fund any research that involves using embryos unless the embryo was destroyed prior to 2001, when legislation was enacted. Only embryos that were already being used for research in 2001 can be used on these projects. Since federal funds often support groundbreaking discoveries in biomedicine, this restriction may slow the development of stem cell therapies.

Advances, however, still are happening all the time. In 2003, researchers discovered adult stem cells in children's baby teeth. In 2004, California provided funding for research using embryonic stem cells. In 2007, a new type of stem cell was discovered that may be the answer to the ethical problems with embryonic stem cells.

As medical research moves forward, more practical applications are developed. Most researchers feel that in the coming years, stem cell therapies will significantly alter the way many diseases are treated.