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New Stem Cell Source - Your Bone Marrow
BoogieChile writes "ABC News is reporting that a team of researchers from Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles, lead by Dr John Yu, are aiming to extract renewable stem cells from bone marrow - extracted from the patient him/herself - for a source of neural stem cells for treatment of brain cancers, Alzheimers and other neurological disorders.
Problem solved! Yipee!
New spinal column, anyone?" 'Course the story has no details - post anything else you can find below.
Unfortunately, the article goes into very little details such as:
Is extracting stem cells for bone marrow just as good as from fetuses? Can it be taken for a living patient? I have a big ethical problem with taking stem cells from an unborn baby, simply because a baby does not have the ability to consent to such a procedure.
I will be one of the first in line to donate bone marrow but will probably get rejected. Unfortunately, since I've lived in two countries no bloodbank will take my donation, even though I have no health problems. Hopefully, the law will be changed one day.
You are correct, and this is currently being used to treat a variety of patients with "bone marrow failure" from illnesses not necessarily limited to leukemias. The big jump here is that they're hoping they can trick the bone marrow stem cells into thinking they can become neural cells, something not in the original game plan. Of course even if that is possible, whether or not we can actually harness this power to treat disease is left to be discovered. Given the possibilities, however, it's something I'd keep my fingers crossed on.
-The Doc
There is already a replacement to the embryonic stem cells: stem cells from the blood in Umbilical (Sp?) cords. If the goverment or a group of hospitals came together and saved the blood from the umbilical cords of all babies born, there wouldn't be a need form embryonic stem cell research. There are a couple of companies already storing cord blood, one of them is cryo-cell
What's moral and ethical in 'research' constantly evolves.
Back in university, I did a pretty thorough study and report on Frederick Banting and how he discovered insulin. I took a little field trip down to the University of Toronto and thumbed through some of his actual research logs.
Quick backstory:
He expirimented on dogs, basically trying to figure out what the (at the time unknown) internal secretion of the pancreas was, what it did, and how to extract it. His expiriments were to basically remove a big chunk of the pancreas, leaving only the cells that produce the digestive juices, and see what happened. The dogs got diabetic. He figured a way to extract the juice (insulin) from the pancreas, gave it to the now diabetic dogs, and they lived.
Anyhow. His logs are full of really shaky, obvious stuff. He was either an amazing scientist, or he was cooking the books. One test animal starts off as a cocker spaniel, and is later a german shepherd, for instance.
It's pretty much known that he and some assistants would scour the streets at night, abducting stray animals for their expiriments.
Now, back on topic. His behaviours were highly unethical in many ways by todays standards. I don't see any university letting you dognap animals to test out theories on them, let alone replacing a test animal because another died in surgery and not making any sort of note of that.
But, he discovered insulin. If we could go back and stop his unethical research, perhaps millions would still be dying of what is now a managable disease because of his work. Do the ends justify the means?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
This is exactly the problem. The stem cells at this point are already specialized, and they essentially know how old they are. Hence the reason to use fetal stem cells that have not been programmed as to their task.
I find it strange that this is something new. My friends who are working with stem cells have known about research of this type for some time, and know the inherent weaknesses in these methods.