Breakthrough Stem-Cell Study Reported At Children’s Hospital
Published: June 24, 2005
Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh said Thursday that post-natal stem cells have the same ability as embryonic stem cells to multiply, which indicates that the post-natal cells may play an important therapeutic role.
Not only can adult stem cells make copies of themselves, they can also turn into bone, heart muscle and blood cells, according to Dr. Johnny Huard, who conducted the research with Dr. Bridget Deasy.
“We have done a lot of work in the mouse and rat,” Huard said. “We have isolated cells from skeletal muscles, and those cells are the embryonic stem cells. We can grow millions and millions of them very rapidly.”
Generally, scientists had believed that embryonic stem cells possessed a greater capacity to multiply than post-natal stem cells, making them more desirable a potential treatment.
Huard said the new discovery could ultimately mean that patients can be treated with their own adult cells and not have to worry about rejection from foreign tissue, as they would with embryonic cells.
“We believe you can take muscle biopsy from a patient — from his own arm, his own muscle — and use those cells to repair his bone, repair his heart, repair his cartilage,” Huard said.
For years, scientists worldwide have campaigned for the use of embryonic stem cells because they can keep multiplying and have therapeutic value. But embryonic stem cells come from fetuses, which raises an ethical and moral debate over their use.
Huard has no objection to embryonic stem cells, but he said that if they are ever used, patients will face the same kind of rejection phenomenon that exists with heart, liver and kidney transplantation.
“The beauty of (adult stem cells) is that this is not only a good transplantation, it is a cell from you to you,” Huard said.
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