Regenerative Medicine Offers Hope For Incurable Diseases

Revolutionary stem cell therapies could replace diseased body tissues, offering enormous promise for patients with incurable conditions such as Parkinson's disease and diabetes. Stem cells are immature cells that can divide into various types of cells that make up the bodies different organs and tissues. Stem cell therapy has been used for over 30 years to cure severe blood disorders such as leukaemia. At the 35th Annual Meeting of the European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT), Prof. Katarina Le Blanc (Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden) chaired a session in which researchers discussed how stem cell therapy could regenerate other body tissues, thereby greatly improving human health and quality of life.

Regenerative medicine aims to treat currently incurable disorders, including neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease a devastating condition affecting around 6.3 million people worldwide. Regenerative medicine may also be used to treat muscular dystrophy and multiple sclerosis, and to repair or replace nerve cells (or 'neurons') damaged by spinal cord injury.

Regenerative medicine also has potential to generate new insulin-producing cells in people with diabetes. Around the world, 180 million people have diabetes and the condition contributes to 1-3 million deaths a year through complications such as heart disease and strokes. People with diabetes are unable to produce sufficient insulin, a hormone that helps control blood sugar levels, because of defects in the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Regeneration of these insulin-producing cells could offer a groundbreaking new approach to diabetes therapy.

Other uses of regenerative medicine include the growth of new cardiac muscle cells for patients who have suffered from heart attacks.

Stem cell therapy may either work by providing new stem cells to the patient or by stimulating growth of the patient's own stem cells. Scientists have recently learned a great deal about how stem cells contribute to the regeneration of tissues in the human body after birth.

Dr Kirsty Spalding and co-workers (Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden) aged brain neurons by measuring levels of radioactive carbon-14, generated by nuclear bomb tests during the Cold War, in people's DNA. Neurons in the brain's cerebral neocortex are as old as the individual, i.e. these cells are only generated around the time of birth and not in adulthood. This means that the body has cannot normally replace these cells if they are damaged or diseased.

Bone marrow 'stromal' stem cells are able to differentiate into various types of tissue that form the skeleton, including bone and cartilage. Prof. Paolo Bianco ("La Sapienza" University, Rome, Italy) and co-workers have shown that stromal cells may be used to reconstruct bone, for example in the reconstruction of the face in with patients with injuries.

Experiments conducted by Prof. Yair Reisner and co-workers (Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel) suggest that it in the future it may be possible to grow new organs such as the liver by transplanting stem cells from one individual to another.

Stem cell research and regenerative medicine are rapidly developing research areas, and considerable hope is placed on the use of stem cells in medicine to repair tissue for diseases that are currently not curable.

About the European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation

Bone marrow or stem cell transplantation is often the only curative treatment for different malignant diseases and is currently performed on more than 50,000 patients worldwide each year. The European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) as the leading non-profit, scientific society representing 527 transplant centres in and outside Europe, promotes all activity aiming to improve stem cell transplantation or cellular therapy. This includes registering all the activity relating to stem cell transplants with a view to improving treatment outcomes for patients. EBMT has set standards for indication and treatment for malignant and non-malignant diseases, along with running training programmes for continual professional development. These are continually audited and updated. EBMT is also responsible for accrediting the transplant centres based on their performance and data reporting.

Source
European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation

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