Stem Cell Injections Pioneering Step Forward?

sanspeak writes "Indian Doctors at All India Institute of Medical Sciences have performed a radical new operation of sorts by pioneering the method of stem cell injections. Ishika Gupta, a seven month old girl child who was suffering from cardiac myopathy, was treated by injecting stem cells into her heart from bone in her own leg. AIIMS has marked a global first in pioneering stem cell medicine by the "injection method''." From the article: "There will now be a national stem cell centre at AIIMS which will coordinate the research and its applications. The statistics speak for themselves. After six months, 56% of the affected (dead muscle) area injected with these cells had shown improvement." Additional details on this therapy available from the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel and Medical News Today.

Comments

Not a general solution.....

[BWJones]

The attractive thing about these results to many is that is identifies a built in population of stem cells in adult individuals that could be harvested for some applications which gets around certain issues related to the Bush administrations religiously imposed dogma on science and progress.

The problem with this approach is that often, they really do not know what cells they are injecting. Sure they are harvesting cells from the bone marrow which do contain some stem cell populations. But here is the deal: These cells are already partially differentiated. They are not totipotent. Certainly there will be some applications where you can take partially differentiated cells and inject them into some systems that will show positive results, such as the cardiac improvements observed in these studies. However, this will not be generalizeable to other disorders such as vision loss or other degenerative diseases.