A few weeks ago we posted a report on some amazing breakthroughs in stem cell research. Reader Kyle responds to that post with a link to an article put out by the American Association for the Advancement of Science that elaborates on this theme and catalogs some of the diseases that stem cells have the potential to meliorate or cure:
Here are some of them:
Type 1 Diabetes in Children. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease characterized by destruction of insulin producing cells in the pancreas. Current efforts to treat these patients with human islet transplantation in an effort to restore insulin secretory function are limited severely by the small numbers of donated pancreases available each year combined with the toxicity of immunosuppressive drug treatments required to prevent graft rejection. Pluripotent stem cells, instructed to differentiate into a particular pancreatic cell called a beta cell, could overcome the shortage of therapeutically effective material to transplant. They also afford the opportunity to engineer such cells to effectively resist immune attack as well as graft rejection.
Nervous System Diseases. Many nervous system diseases result from loss of nerve cells. Mature nerve cells cannot divide to replace those that are lost. Thus, without a "new" source of functioning nerve tissue, no therapeutic possibilities exist. In Parkinson's disease, nerve cells that make the chemical dopamine die. In Alzheimer's disease, cells that are responsible for the production of certain neurotransmitters die. In amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the motor nerve cells that activate muscles die. In spinal cord injury, brain trauma, and even stroke, many different types of cells are lost or die. In multiple sclerosis, glia, the cells that protect nerve fibers are lost. Perhaps the only hope for treating such individuals comes from the potential to create new nerve tissue restoring function from pluripotent stem cells.
Cancer. At the present time, bone marrow stem cells, representing a more committed stem cell, are used to rescue patients following high dose chemotherapy. Unfortunately, these recovered cells are limited in their capacity to restore immune function completely in this setting. It is hoped that injections of properly-differentiated stem cells would return the complete repertoire of immune response to patients undergoing bone marrow transplantation. Complete and functional restoration will be required if, for example, immune/vaccine anticancer therapy is to work. More importantly, success would permit use of very toxic (and effective) chemotherapeutic regimens that could not currently be utilized for lack of an ability to restore marrow and immune function.
Kyle adds that:
Much other miraculous potential is being researched as well, not to mention applications that may yet be discovered. The article also mentions that stem cells have the potential to treat almost any immunodeficiency disease. This includes AIDS and many other diseases, where the infected could experience "restoration of immune function and effective normalization of life span and quality of life."
I'm not one to gush about the future, but the current generation of twenty-somethings could well be looking at therapies that will within their lifetimes render many of today's most dread diseases as treatable as antibiotics rendered infection.
RLC
