Stem Cell Treatments

Stem Cell Treatments

Stem-cell therapy is an intervention strategy that introduces new adult stem cells into damaged tissue in order to treat disease or injury. Many medical researchers believe that stem-cell treatments have the potential to change the face of human disease and alleviate suffering. The ability of stem cells to self-renew and give rise to subsequent generations with variable degrees of differentiation capacities, offers significant potential for generation of tissues that can potentially replace diseased and damaged areas in the body, with minimal risk of rejection and side effects.

A number of stem-cell therapies exist, but most are at experimental stages or costly, with the notable exception of bone-marrow transplantation. The closer the embryo is genetically to the recipient, the less likely rejection is to occur. Use of animal embryos in humans or more commonly human embryos in lab rat models can result in transgenic cancers and additional disease transfer between species. Medical researchers anticipate that adult and embryonic stem cells will soon be able to treat cancer, Type 1 diabetes mellitus, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, Celiac disease, cardiac failure, muscle damage and neurological disorders, and many others. Nevertheless, before stem-cell therapeutics can be applied in the clinical setting, more research is necessary to understand stem-cell behavior upon transplantation as well as the mechanisms of stem-cell interaction with the diseased/injured microenvironment.