Embryonic stem cells are a huge next step for medicine, but they’re mired in controversy.
So what if you could have all the benefits of regenerative medicine, without the thorny
moral dilemma?
Hello Science Lovers, Julian here for DNews.
There’s been a huge breakthrough in medicine this week; Induced pluripotent stem cells
were used in a tissue transplant for the first time ever.
We did it!
Yeah!!
Oh am I going to need to explain that?
Ok.
First, let’s get everybody up to speed on stem cells.
This is more important to you than you realize because you were at some point nothing more
than 50 to 150 of them.
You probably don’t remember, it was only 4 days after you were conceived.
What makes Embryonic Stem Cells amazing is they are pluripotent, meaning they can become
almost any type of cell.
This means they can be used to replace damaged tissue and may one day be an alternative to
organ transplants.
This is huge.
In the United States an average of 79 people receive an organ transplant every day, but
another 18 people die waiting for a transplant that will never come.
The 79 who do get a donor will have to take medication to prevent transplant rejection
for the rest of their lives, but even then the risk remains.
That problem doesn’t exist with embryonic stem cells.
So we can save thousands of people a year and improve the quality of life and lifespan
of tens of thousands more.
What’s the problem here?
Well the only way to get pluripotent cells is from embryos.
Which are pre-people.
Or current people, depending on where you stand on the issue.
Obviously, there’s a heated controversy there and I’m sure the comments will reflect
that (be nice, guys).
Umbilical cord blood has multipotent stem cells, but they’re more limited.
And we all have adult stem cells but those are even less versatile.
So there are no alternatives.
Until now.
Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University discovered a method to create pluripotent stem cells
from adult cells.
It’s like diet stem cells: all of the flavor with none of the calories.
Though “flavor” in this case means life-changing benefits and “calories” means severe moral
dilemma of using undeveloped humans in medicine.
And for his breakthrough, Yamanaka shared the nobel prize for physiology in 2012.
And now, here we are, September 2014, where on friday, at 2:20 local time, japanese doctors
stopped the macular degeneration of a 70 year-old woman by transplanting a sheet of retinal
pigment epithelium cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells made from reprogrammed
cells of the patient’s own skin!
We did it!
Probably!
Now we wait and see if the procedure checks the macular degeneration without becoming
cancerous or rejected.
By the way the sheet of tissue used was just 3 by 1.3mm.
That’s about that big.
And what a huge step that is.
If you’d like to learn more about how your eye works and why the macula is important
to vision, check out THIS video.
As a bonus, you can stare deep into Trace’s dreamy, dreamy eyes.
Can you think of any creative potential uses for induced pluripotent stem cells *cough*
Wolverine *cough*?
Let us know in the comments.
Hopefully it stems productive discussion.
Remember to subscribe for the latest in science, and I’ll see you next time on DNews.