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Skin Stem Cells Used to Mend Spines of Rats
The Toronto Star reports researchers have used adult skin stem cells to heal spinal cord injuries in rats. "Injured rats injected with skin-derived stem cells regained mobility and had better walking co-ordination, according to the study published yesterday in the Journal of Neuroscience. The skin-derived stem cells, injected directly into the injured rats' spinal cords, were able to survive in their new location and set off a flurry of activity, helping to heal the cavity in the cord."
There are process for doing just that. I forget the name.
Needless to say, it is a very complicated issue, and success in rats is a very good thing, but there are many more tests that need to be performed before it is ready for even the most basic human testing.
There have been many treatments and cures for mice that failed for a variety of reason before human testing.
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It has never been a better time to be a rat. no cancer or diabetes and now no paralasys.
Except for the part where they first give you cancer, diabetes, and paralysis.
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Yes, but you would be a tiny part of a semi-formal, well-established, institutionalized breeding program. Your relatives would be your parents, siblings and cousins all at the same time due to inbreeding. You and your fellow rats would have been carefully designed genetically to custom physiological specifications so as to make experimenting easy and meaningful. Like for example, you would have no immune system so that foreign cells can be incubated inside your body without suffering tissue rejection issues. Or you would be genetically predisposed to some congenital disease so that drugs can be tested on you for effectiveness.
I say all this in jest, of course. It is important to realize that success with rats are accomplished only with the benefit of an incredible ammount of control excercised by researchers that translate very poorly to the realistic world human beings are living in. Beyond these initial animal trials, there are still an incredible number of hoops that medical researchers have to jump through before they can come up with something that is injectable into you.
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Federal funding of adult stem cell research already exists. It's the embryonic stem cell research that is forbidden in the United States; and despite being legal in other countries, has yet to achieve even ONE useful cure. Where Adult Stem Cells, like in TFA, are now up to 20 or 30 miracle cures of a variety of injuries from heart attacks to severed spine paralysis. One ASC researcher has even claimed that he can regenerate 30,000 human brains from a single Grey matter stem cell (though, one would suspect that any knowledge the donor had would not be so duplicated- after all growing nervous tissue does not create the connections between those nerves).
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Yes, the nervous systems of animals differ tremendously. For instance, certain types of damage on nerves in humans can render the individual immobile, but barely affect an animal. Even though I don't know about the rats' mystical spine-regeneration ability, it surely is a creature that is expected to get more damage to its spine than us humans.
But I guess the key-point in the summary was _helped_ to recover.
While TFA doesn't specifically give evidence for your anecdote, it does mention that "Injured rats injected with skin-derived stem cells regained mobility and had better walking co-ordination..." which seems to imply that the rats without the stem cell treatment did partially repair themselves, but the rats treated with stem cells healed better.
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And then you're only given a 50% chance of not being in the control group.
And that's still only beneficial if you're in the test group for the particular drug or therapy that actually works!
And even if you are that lucky, there's a more than probable chance that your reward for surviving all of that and getting 'cured', will be to be euthanized shortly thereafter.
Odds...they are not good for a lab rat.
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The other big issue is scarring. Nerves have a really hard time growing through scar tissue. What I was hoping to see in this article is how long the injuries were left untreated. If stem cells were cultivated before the injury and injected before scarring can occur, it's not going to be that helpful in real-life situations.
Somehow, people have gotten a crazy notion into their heads: that adult and embryonic stem cells are mutually exclusive. It's like we can only research one and not the other! How absurd.
I've never heard anyone argue that research on adult stem cells should be halted. Yet more than one reply to this post suggests that it's common to believe that embryonic stem cells are the only useful ones to research. Have the anti-research crowd given up trying to argue logically? Are they now going to beat this "one or the other" straw man to death?
For this reason, it appears that the controversy will not end. Even if the embryonic cells don't come from an embryo, the research will be seen as "evil" because it (supposedly) diverts resources from adult stem cell research. But if they're both promising areas of research then they should both be funded, right? It is this little gem of common sense that has never been successfully refuted. It probably never will be refuted, because the opposition seems to be pretending that it doesn't exist.
And a kidney grown in nutrient solution would also be useless for truly testing efficacy or side effects.
So you're hung up on the container rather than what truly makes us human?
I wouldn't call a body grown without a brain a mutilated human. I'd consider it a body "sans human"
Heck, nothing is cut up so you're technically wrong on phrasing, just using a loaded word.
And, yes, I'm aware of the argument that that the body is critical to being human due to unique input of senses and hormones. I'm also of opinion we'll get to point soon where we'll be able to duplicate those and still have the brain in a jar type thing.
Why can't scientists use BOTH? It's quite possible that embryonic stem cells are better suited in some instances, and adult stem cells are better suited in others. There's no need to use one to the exclusion of the other.
So yes, embryonic stem cells _should_ be opened up to federal funding programs, so that advances can be made w/ either type of stem cell.