Stem Cell Safety

A new technique has been discovered that eliminates a lot of the safety hazards related to the use of stem cells. This would create a more effective environment, making stem cells a more viable and powerful option in medical issues. Ever since stem cells were discovered, researchers have been looking to improve them, trying to get rid of the viruses that come along with them, as well as the increased risk of cancer. In the newly discovered technique, scientists used skin cells of Parkinson’s patients and turned them in to stem cells, but also removed the harmful genes. Then, they used the pluripotent stem cells to make the neurons that were lost in the Parkinson’s patients. Despite the breakthrough, using stem cells for Parkinson’s recovery is still a ways off. However, scientists can now use stem cells to study Parkinson’s outside the body, and compare them to the neurons of healthy patients. The discovery ultimately helps to study the biology of the disease and understand it better. The scientists say that if you leave behind the unnecessary genes, they could “misbehave” and cause cancer. This discovery is waiting to become more public until President Obama reverses some of the restrictions on the federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Opponents of embryonic stem cell research argue that pluripotent stem cells should replace embryonic ones in the research field, but research has shown that embryonic cells are much more effective. The gene activity of the pluripotent cells created with this new technique was the closest they have come to actually using embryonic stem cells. Without removing certain genes, the gene activity of the pluripotent stem cells still differed from embryonic stem cells. Even with this technique however, it is still unknown whether pluripotent can ever be as effective as embryonic, but only time will tell.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2009/03/06/new_technique_boosts_stem_cell_safety/

Brian Carpenter
Section 501