Safety: Reducing The Risk of Teratoma and Other Cancers As A Side Effect
- The major concern with the possible transplantation of ESC into patients as therapies is their ability to form tumors including teratoma. Safety issues prompted the FDA to place a hold on the first ESC clinical trial (see below), however no tumors were observed.
- The main strategy to enhance the safety of ESC for potential clinical use is to differentiate the ESC into specific cell types (e.g. neurons, muscle, liver cells) that have reduced or eliminated ability to cause tumors. Following differentiation, the cells are subjected to sorting by flow cytometry for further purification. ESC are predicted to be inherently safer than IPS cells because they are not genetically modified with genes such as c-Myc that are linked to cancer. Nonetheless, ESC express very high levels of the iPS inducing genes and these genes including Myc are essential for ESC self-renewal and pluripotency, and potential strategies to improve safety by eliminating Myc expression are unlikely to preserve the cells' "stemness".
Read more about this topic: Embryonic Stem Cell
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