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Patients Regain Sight After Groundbreaking Trial (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Doctors have taken a major step towards curing the most common form of blindness in the UK -- age-related macular degeneration. Douglas Waters, 86, could not see out of his right eye, but "I can now read the newspaper" with it, he says. He was one of two patients given pioneering stem cell therapy at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. Cells from a human embryo were grown into a patch that was delicately inserted into the back of the eye.
The macula is the part of the eye that allows you to see straight ahead -- whether to recognize faces, watch TV or read a book. The macula is made up of rods and cones that sense light and behind those are a layer of nourishing cells called the retinal pigment epithelium. When this support layer fails, it causes macular degeneration and blindness. Doctors have devised a way of building a new retinal pigment epithelium and surgically implanting it into the eye. The technique, published in Nature Biotechnology, starts with embryonic stem cells. These are a special type of cell that can become any other in the human body. They are converted into the type of cell that makes up the retinal pigment epithelium and embedded into a scaffold to hold them in place. The living patch is only one layer of cells thick -- about 40 microns -- and 6mm long and 4mm wide. It is then placed underneath the rods and cones in the back of the eye. The operation takes up to two hours.
The macula is the part of the eye that allows you to see straight ahead -- whether to recognize faces, watch TV or read a book. The macula is made up of rods and cones that sense light and behind those are a layer of nourishing cells called the retinal pigment epithelium. When this support layer fails, it causes macular degeneration and blindness. Doctors have devised a way of building a new retinal pigment epithelium and surgically implanting it into the eye. The technique, published in Nature Biotechnology, starts with embryonic stem cells. These are a special type of cell that can become any other in the human body. They are converted into the type of cell that makes up the retinal pigment epithelium and embedded into a scaffold to hold them in place. The living patch is only one layer of cells thick -- about 40 microns -- and 6mm long and 4mm wide. It is then placed underneath the rods and cones in the back of the eye. The operation takes up to two hours.
You are aware that embryonic cells can be harvested from the placenta, and mother still delivers colostrum to her living child?
Sorry to burst your drama bubble.
Also, from skin cells making the entire political debate kinda moot. Some people will never bury the hatchet. Once a term is associated with politics, it'll always live under a shadow. Kinda sucks.
Why can't this be done with pluripotent cells, anyhow?
It probably can.
Embryonic stem cells are mainly about figuring out how these things work - and getting farther back toward the simple states than you can with more differentiated lines.
While some initial treatments (especially on tissues isolated from the immune system) have been, and may still be, tried with them, on the model of transfusions and transplants, the target will always be using the patient's own cells, some cell-bank equivalent, or some other mechanism than harvesting them (destructively) from embryos.
For instance, such treatments could work by taking tissue samples from the patient, by inducing them to "back up" (induced pluripotency) and then re-differentiate into the desired target cell line(s). (Indeed, work on that, for instance starting from fat cells, is already being done.)
Using cells from the patient (absent an autoimmune disease) sidesteps rejection issues. Meanwhile, embryonic stem cell treatments tend to produce cancers, as the too-undifferentiated cell lines get confused about what they're supposed to become.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way