I read something about that not too long ago. IIRC there have been some promising breakthroughs in that area as of late. Though it still may be far off....
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I read something about that not too long ago. IIRC there have been some promising breakthroughs in that area as of late. Though it still may be far off....
Yes I had a friend who was working on preliminary research on using haemopoietic stem cells extracted from patient's own blood that were being reprogrammed to differentiate into beta-islet pancreatic cells that produce insulin.
That was the ultimate aim of the research but it was not anywhere near human testing stages.
The early results in animals were very promising. Simply injecting the cells back into the animals after modifying them completely restored insulin function (in the animal models of type 1 diabetes).
This was a few years back but as you know medical research has to go through a long process!
With these sort of treatments (using stem cells in particular) I think the main worry and risk is of cancers - particularly since they are your own cells that have been restored to a near embryonic state.
If something goes wrong there is no easy way to switch them off or eliminate them.
Some sort of master kill switch would be very useful in case of those kind of emergencies.
Further in cases where the original cause is autoimmune some kind of immunosuppression may be necessary in order to prevent the new cells being destroyed and that increases the cancer risk further.
Luckily for me the cause was probably not autoimmune as I had pancreatitis so basically my pancreas digested itself - so I might not need it but in the majority of cases autoimmunity seems to be at least partly responsible.
I'm sure it is only a matter of time though before we get these kind of treatments.
It's tough to get all of the cells to revert to the same correct state or so I was reading. Engineering in a genetic kill switch to the cells might be a good Idea, but that has its own set of ethical concerns attached to it. People are anxious enough about these being in food, I can only imagine the uproar that would occur if it was being done with human cells... being used to treat patients.
Yeah, I truly hope we get stem cell treatments going, all of the literature I have read has been showing basically miraculous recoveries in animal models.
Yes for sure there are lots of problems! I don't remember the specific details of how they were getting around the issue of the correct differentiation state. One way of doing it (though incredibly work and cost intensive) would be to just filter out the types of cells you need but that would not be efficient.
The kill switch thing would definitely be a problem ethically. What if someone used it in a healthy person that wasn't having problems?
It is inevitable because of the potential money to be made. I am sure they will solve the major problems. The big question is when.