A Research Study On Regenerative Medicine And Transplantation

These cells come from fetuses which is why stem cells are such a controversial issue. In order to actually use embryonic cells, they must be harvested from an unborn baby that is in the early stages of life. Embryonic cells have the ability to be all 220 types of tissues in the human body. “This makes them ideal for regenerating diseased heart tissue, repairing spinal cords, and replenishing brain cells”, Elizabeth Svoboda, an author in the publicized Popular Science magazine, illustrates in her article about stem cells (60). Embryonic cells have limitless possibilities in medical advancement. These cells can become whatever type of cell a doctor program them to be. With the use of embryonic stem cells, doctors can cure several diseases, as well as curing people who have suffered injuries, but research is being slowed down by the ethical dilemma of aborting a

Organ donation provided a new therapeutic path when new drugs and devices failed to reduce the mortality and morbidity rate of patients with such illnesses as cardiovascular diseases. By replacing damaged organs or tissue with a functioning substitute, organ transplantation offers an immediate cure. Unfortunately, this “cure” is never guaranteed because of the high risk of graft rejection and that’s if a suitable donor can be found. Thus, tissue engineering has been the projected new treatment for these problems. Tissue engineering replaces the diseased or damaged tissue or organs with biofabricated counterparts made using the specifications dictated by the features of the specific tissue or organ.

Infertility is the fundamental lacking of the ability to conceive a baby, and both men and women can have this problem. Dr. Clark, our guest speaker in class pointed out that approximately 30% of men and women are infertile, while 25% of infertility cannot be explain by science yet. Because of that, infertility is no longer considered as a lifestyle problem but a disease instead. According to Dr. Clark, one of the options for the infertility patients today is the use of stem cell therapies to treat infertility, and one of the recent popular stem cell therapies is reproductive cloning. Reproduction cloning is a process to “produce” a next generation of “you” through somatic cell nuclear transfer. In my paper, I will argue that

Due to the increase in medical technology over the years, medical advancements, such as organ transplants, have grown in commonality. This has increased the number of patient who needs such care. The problem with organ transplants arises from the debate on the ethical way to distribute organs and how to combat the issue of a lack of organ donors. An ethical approach to solving these issues is to develop a system of equal access that relies on maximizing benefits as well as respecting the rights of personal property through better patient-physician conversations when trying to increase organ donors.

Stem cells are grown on Petri dishes in a laboratory and are never implanted in a woman’s uterus. These cells can be used to create stem cell lines that can grow indefinitely under optimal conditions (“Stem cells and diseases,” 2011). Embryonic stem cells can be obtained from existing stem cell lines (any group of cells that came from the same original embryo), aborted or miscarried embryos, unused in vitro fertilized embryos, and cloned embryos created from somatic cell nuclear transfer (the nucleus from an unfertilized egg is removed and replaced with a nucleus from an adult stem cell). This technique would be used for therapeutic cloning, which could grow organs or skin grafts for patients. However, the only research that is federally funded are a few embryonic stem cell lines created from unused embryos at in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics before 2001 (Dunn, 2005; “Embryonic & fetal research laws,” 2008; Therapeutic cloning, 2009). These lines are not enough to allow scientists to fully explore and take advantage of potential findings.

The creation of induced pluripotent stem cells by direct reprogramming has allowed for the circumvention of using embryonic stem cells while still leaving the cells with the ability to maintain pluripotency. Instead of ES cells which were originally derived from the epiblast of mouse embryos, IPS cells were generated from mouse embryonic fibroblasts. This eliminated both any ethical concerns for whether those cells were a living being or not and the need to destroy embryos at the blastocyst stage. An advantage of IPS cells is that they are derived from human somatic cells which makes them easy to acquire due to the possibility of using skin or blood cells. They can also be grown and differentiated individually for each person that the sample of somatic cells is taken from which eliminates the possibility of having any immune reaction and rejection to the differentiated cells during transplantation. These characteristics of IPS cells are important because they are what enables us to safely and accurately transform these affected cells from patients cells into neurons and confidently study them.

After having a stroke, who wouldn’t want a way to recover and have movement in your arms and legs. Sonia Olea had a stroke at the age of 32 and had very little movement on the right side of her body (Stories of Hope: Stroke 2014). Her speaking was limited and was hard to do little things like making a phone call. Sonia didn't want to live like this anymore. A year later she got a phone call that changed her life. The doctors asked her if she wanted to do a stem cell-based clinical trial. Her answer was yes! Regenerative Therapy may be a game changer in the future of the medical world. It is necessary to understand what Regenerative Therapy is, the benefits, the economic impact, the risks, and a point

In 1981, scientists began to derive embryonic stem cells from mouse embryos. A decade later a more in depth study was discovered to be able to take human embryonic stem cells and grow them in laboratories. At first, the discovery was used only for in vitro fertilization procedures but until recently, in 2006, scientists made a breakthrough of embryonic stem cells used to be reprogrammed genetically with specialized adult cells. Embryonic stem cells, also known as pluripotent cells, can generate to become about two hundred types of cells in a human body and can specialize to do what they were programmed to do. This is due to the fact that embryonic stem cells can grow in large sums of numbers. Because of their ability to generate into specific

Imagine being told you will never be able to have a child. For many women this is the case. Nearly 4500 newborn girls are born with ovaries, but no uterus. This can be very detrimental news for any women with hopes of eventually having a family. Eventually, women with this syndrome, will never have to hear that they are incapable of having a child of their own. Doctors from the Cleveland Clinic hospital in Weston, Florida are working to be the first in the United States to successfully transplant a uterus from a donor to a live women. The transplanted uterus will be taken from organ donors, as the surgery is too vigorous for a live person, though it has been done in Sweden. The uterus of a donor can survive up to eight hours outside of the body if it is kept cold. The eligible recipients of the transplant are women who are born without a uterus, had it removed or have uterine damage.

Traumatic acute events leading to tendon losses as well as ruptures related to degenerative tendinopathy require a replacement of the damaged tissue. Yet in these cases, the healing process does not efficiently restore the native tendon structure and function, despite the surgical intervention with a high rate of re-tear (Sharma and Maffulli, 2006; Andarawis-Puri et al. 2015). Nowadays, tendon autografts are the common choice to reconstruct the tendon integrity, despite their limited supply, high donor-site morbidity, and poor functional outcomes ( Gazdag et al., 1995; Lovati et al., 2016). To overcome these limitations, tissue engineering widely investigated the generation of cell seeded scaffolds to promote regeneration and implant-tissue

Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent cells produced from the inner cell mass and can differentiate into any of the three primary germ layers. However, the use of embryonic stem cells remains controversial, as ethical concerns exist regarding the harvest of cells from live embryos. Moreover, the potential for immune rejection and neoplastic conversion remain viable concerns. As a result, researchers have redirected attention to the adult stem cell populations as an alternative source (Ko et al.,

The human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) have defined by Bryant and Schwartz (2008) is in the mammalian embryo, there are several cell divisions that take place after the fertilization of the sperm and the egg in the uterus. There is no growth in the total volume of the cell, so the cells that are known as blastomeres get progressively smaller. Then, they are rearranging into a hollow ball known as blastocyst and surround the blastocoel which is a fluid-filled cavity. The blastocyts and then segregate into an outer layer called tropoblast and an inner cell mass (ICM). The tropoblast will form the placenta to the fetus while the inner cell mass that contains human embryonic stem cell will form the tissues of the fetus. According to Sandel and Phil (2004), the hESCs can cure and provide treatment for many kinds of disease such as Parkinson, Alzheimer, diabetes and spinal cord injury. But, ethical issues of hESCs research, therefore, overlap with those of the embryo research. On top of that, De Wert and Mummery (2003) commented that the research of hESCs has high political and ethical agenda in many countries. Their use in the treatment of disease remains controversial regardless of their potential benefit. This is because their derivation from the early embryo. As Fischbach, Fischbach and others (2004) observe:

The best breakthrough in the next decade would be the development of regenerative medicine. A person that suffered a spinal cord injury and can’t move his or her legs would be able to control them again since the stem cells can regenerate tissue. In the same way, brain cells don’t naturally regenerate and where Alzheimer's disease would cause the people to lose their memory, stem cells could specialize to regenerate the neurons. Even genetic defects that limit the individual’s life expectancy can be countered with this discovery. It could solve a tremendous amount of lifelong diseases and injuries, such as diabetes, severe burns, and Parkinson's. A multitude of cancer types would also be trumped since stem cells would be able to replace the

Human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are pluripotent cells isolated from blastocysts, and are highly useful in studying human development (Itzkovitz-Eldor et al., 2000 p. 88). Although the National Institute of Health states that “it is not known if iPSCs and embryonic stem cells differ in clinically significant ways”, iPSCs are already being used to achieve the same results as ESCs in some applications without the use of embryos, removing the ethical concern associated with ESCs (National Institutes of Health, 2009). ESCs are capable of differentiating into all cell types, and can be used as a source of differentiated cells. In the report by Itskovitz-Eldor et al., they discuss the induced differentiation of ESCs in suspension into embryoid bodies, including the three embryonic germ layers. The authors state that “the ability to induce formation of human embryoid bodies that contain cells of neuronal, hematopoietic and cardiac origins will be useful in studying early human embryonic development” (Itzkovitz-Eldor et al., 2000 p. 88).

Pluripotent cells are all types of somatic cells and germ cells of an adult organism. They appear for a short period of mammalian embryonic development (Nikolic et. al., 2015). Pluripotent stem cell lines were derived from mammalian embryos and adult tissues using different techniques and from different sources-inner cell mass of the blastocyst, primordial germ cells, parthenogenetic oocytes, and mature spermatogonia- as well as by transgenic modification of various adult somatic cells (Mullen and Rosales, 2010). The inner