What Disease Can Stem Cell Cure

Stem cell treatments are a type of genetic medicine that introduce new cells into damaged tissue in order to treat a 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 that can differentiate offers a large potential to culture tissues that can replace diseased and damaged tissues in the body, without the risk of rejection and side effects.

A number of stem cell treatments exist, although most are still experimental and/or costly, with the notable exception of bone marrow transplantation. Medical researchers anticipate one day being able to use technologies derived from adult and embryonic stem cell research to treat cancer, Type 1 diabetes mellitus, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease,Celiac Disease, cardiac failure, muscle damage and neurological disorders, along with many others.

More research is needed concerning both stem cell behavior and the mechanisms of the diseases they could be used to treat before most of these experimental treatments become realities.

Current treatments

Further information: Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation

For over 30 years, bone marrow, and more recently, umbilical cord blood stem cells have been used to treat cancer patients with conditions such as leukemia and lymphoma. During chemotherapy, most growing cells are killed by the cytotoxic agents. These agents not only kill the leukemia or neoplastic cells, but also the haematopoietic stem cells within the bone marrow. It is this side effect of the chemotherapy that the stem cell transplant attempts to reverse; the donor's healthy bone marrow reintroduces functional stem cells to replace those lost in the treatment.

Potential treatments

Brain damage

Stroke and traumatic brain injury lead to cell death, characterized by a loss of neurons and oligodendrocytes within the brain. Healthy adult brains contain neural stem cells which divide and to maintain general stem cell numbers, or become progenitor cells. In healthy adult animals, progenitor cells migrate within the brain and function primarily to maintain neuron populations for olfaction (the sense of smell). Interestingly, in pregnancy and after injury, this system appears to be regulated by growth factors and can increase the rate at which new brain matter is formed. In the case of brain injury, although the reparative process appears to initiate, substantial recovery is rarely observed in adults, suggesting a lack of robustness.

Stem cells may also be used to treat brain degeneration, such as in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.

Cancer

Research injecting neural (adult) stem cells into the brains of dogs has shown to be very successful in treating cancerous tumors. With traditional techniques brain cancer is almost impossible to treat because it spreads so rapidly. Researchers at the Harvard Medical School induced intracranial tumours in rodents. Then, they injected human neural stem cells. Within days the cells had migrated into the cancerous area and produced cytosine deaminase, an enzyme that converts a non-toxic pro-drug into a chemotheraputic agent. As a result, the injected substance was able to reduce tumor mass by 81 percent. The stem cells neither differentiated nor turned tumorigenic. Some researchers believe that the key to finding a cure for cancer is to inhibit cancer stem cells, where the cancer tumor originates. Currently, cancer treatments are designed to kill all cancer cells, but through this method, researchers would be able to develop drugs to specifically target these stem cells.

Spinal cord injury

A team of Korean researchers reported on November 25, 2003, that they had transplanted multipotent adult stem cells from an umbilical cord blood to a patient suffering from a spinal cord injury and that she can now walk on her own, without difficulty. The patient had not been able to stand up for roughly 19 years. For the unprecedented clinical test, the scientists isolated adult stem cells from umbilical cord blood and then injected them into the damaged part of the spinal cord.

According to the October 7, 2005 issue of The Week , University of California researchers injected human embryonic stem cells into paralyzed mice, which resulted in the mice regaining the ability to move and walk four months later. The researchers discovered upon dissecting the mice that the stem cells regenerated not only the neurons, but also the cells of the myelin sheath, a layer of cells which insulates neural impulses and speeds them up, facilitating communication with the brain (damage to which is often the cause of neurological injury in humans).

In January 2005, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison differentiated human blastocyst stem cells into neural stem cells, then into the beginnings of motor neurons, and finally into spinal motor neuron cells, the cell type that, in the human body, transmits messages from the brain to the spinal cord. The newly generated motor neurons exhibited electrical activity, the signature action of neurons. Lead researcher Su-Chun Zhang described the process as "you need to teach the blastocyst stem cells to change step by step, where each step has different conditions and a strict window of time."

Transforming blastocyst stem cells into motor neurons had eluded researchers for decades. The next step will be to test if the newly generated neurons can communicate with other cells when transplanted into a living animal; the first test will be in chicken embryos. Su-Chun said their trial-and-error study helped them learn how motor neuron cells, which are key to the nervous system, develop in the first place. The new cells could be used to treat diseases like Lou Gehrig's disease, muscular dystrophy, and spinal cord injuries.

Heart damage

Several clinical trials targeting heart disease have shown that adult stem cell therapy is safe and effective, and is equally efficient in old as well as recent infarcts. Adult stem cell therapy for heart disease was commercially available on at least five continents at the last count (2007).

Possible mechanisms are:

  • Generation of heart muscle cells
  • Stimulation of growth of new blood vessels that repopulate the heart tissue
  • Secretion of growth factors, rather than actually incorporating into the heart
  • Assistance via some other mechanism

It may be possible to have adult bone marrow cells differentiate into heart muscle cells.

Haematopoiesis (blood cell formation)

The specificity of the human immune cell repertoire is what allows the human body to defend itself from rapidly adapting antigens. However, this system is a hot spot for degradation upon the pathogenesis of disease, and because of the critical role that it plays in organismal defense, its degradation is often fatal to the system as a whole. Diseases of hematopoietic cells are called hematopathology. The specificity of the immune cells is what allows them to recognize foreign antigens, causing further challenges in the treatment of immune disease. Identical matches between donor and recipient must be made for successful transplantation treatments, while matches are uncommon, even between first-degree relatives. Research using both hematopoietic adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells has contributed great insight into possible mechanisms and methods of treatment for many of these ailments.

Fully mature human red blood cells may be generated ex vivo by hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), which are precursors of red blood cells. In this process, HSCs are grown together with stromal cells, creating an environment that mimics the conditions of bone marrow, the natural site of red blood cell growth. Erythropoietin, a growth factor, is added, coaxing the stem cells to complete terminal differentiation into red blood cells. Further research into this technique should have potential benefits to gene therapy, blood transfusion, and topical medicine.

Baldness

Hair follicles also contain stem cells, and some researchers predict research on these follicle stem cells may lead to successes in treating baldness through "hair multiplication", also known as "hair cloning". This treatment is expected to work through taking stem cells from existing follicles, multiplying them in cultures, and implanting the new follicles into the scalp. Later treatments may be able to simply signal follicle stem cells to give off chemical signals to nearby follicle cells which have shrunk during the aging process, which in turn respond to these signals by regenerating and once again making healthy hair.

Missing teeth

In 2004, scientists at King's College London discovered a way to cultivate a complete tooth in mice and were able to grow them stand-alone in the laboratory. Researchers are confident that this technology can be used to grow live teeth in human patients.

In theory, stem cells taken from the patient could be coaxed in the lab into turning into a tooth bud which, when implanted in the gums, will give rise to a new tooth, which would be expected to take two months to grow. It will fuse with the jawbone and release chemicals that encourage nerves and blood vessels to connect with it. The process is similar to what happens when humans grow their original adult teeth.

Many challenges remain, however, before stem cells could be a c

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