The Future Of Medicine : Stem Cell Therapy

Written By: Pallavi Vivekanand Kolhar, Class of 2025

This blog helps us understand the importance of stem cell therapy , it's procedures and reasons to why it's still not acceptable in some clinical practices.

What is a stem cell ?

Stem cell is the raw material of body from which all cells with important functions are generated. Under suitable environment in the laboratory or body stem cells generate to develop more cell being known as daughter cell. These cells develop either as specialised cell or new stem cells like erythrocytes, cardiomyocytes, osteocytes etc. Such stem cell is used in experiments focused for better understanding of disease and creating new treatments for disease.

Know about stem cell therapy and how to implement?

Stem cell therapy also called as regenerative therapy or medicine, promotes repair, injury to tissues using stem cells or its precursors. Researchers grow the cells in laboratory and are manipulated to specialised cell types. Such specialised cell can be transferred into a person’s body for improvement.

Are stem cells used in treating any diseases ?

Yes, doctors have carried out stem cell transplants also called as transplants of bone marrow. Regenerative cells replace damaged cells by chemotherapy or any disease or a method or path for the donor’s immune system to fight types of blood related cancer such as leukaemia, neuroblastoma.

Such transplants utilise adult stem cells or cells of umbilical cord blood . Degenerative diseases in various organs are the main goal of stem cell therapy. Neurodegenerative diseases for example musculoskeletal diseases like osteoarthriti, Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular diseases like shunts and diseases of blood cells for an example leukemia are the conditions that have benefited from advancements in stem cell therapy. One of the challenging parts of this process is to transfer or to implant stem cells into various clinical advancing practices is controlling its differentiation potential. Frequently its potential for continuous differentiation growth will make such cells tumorigenic in nature.

What is the potential harm utilising stem cells of embryonic ?

Embryonic stem cell these are derived from epiblast tissue of the blastocyst in which it is basically aligned in blastocyst. Embryonic stem cells may develop irregularly or become specialised in different cell types spontaneously. Embryonic stem cell might also activate an immune response in which recipient body attacks stem cells acting as a foreign antigen or simply it might fail to function expectedly. Researchers are still discovering the method or a way for embryonic stem cell to become a particular specialised stem cel .

Therapeutic cloning and what benefits might it offer?

Therapeutic cloning also referred to as somatic nuclear transfer which determines a technique to develop n number of functional stem cell independent of egg which is fertilized . In this procedure a nucleus is extracted from a non fertilized one . That nucleus comprises of the genetic material. The nucleus is being extracted from the cell of a donor.

The donor nucleus is then being injected into an egg while switching the nucleus which was earlier extracted this process is called as a nuclear transfer. The egg is then allowed to differentiate and which soon becomes a blastocyst and this process makes a way to a queue of stem cells which are genetically identical in nature to the donor cell in an essence of a clone.

Some researchers understands that stem cells which are usually formed from therapeutic cloning that may give some benefits over these from the fertilized eggs because clone cell is less rates or chances to be rejected when once transplanted to the donor and which allows researchers to evaluate how exactly a disease develops.

Rising evidence demonstrated stem cell therapy

The US clinical trial by using a 3D guided catheter system to provide heart with muscular stem cells and it was performed in 2009 after one year of follow up showed significant improvement in NEW YORK HEART ASSOCIATION (NYHA) scores . Injection of endomyocardial cells potential cardiopoietic stem cell to the patient with preclinical heart failure showed same result in NYHA with 6 min walk and increase of cardiac parameters or function measured by ECG .

Strategy to enhance cell survival post transplantation

These are strategies which aim to resolve the issue of cell survival , differentiation which includes preconditioning with ways like hypoxia , drugs , growth factors , genetic modification like enhancing expression of specific growth factors , pro survival anti apoptotic genes of stem cell before transplantation of cells .

Mechanism

Mechanism is activating hypoxic inducible factor comprises of alpha and beta subunit ; which is master regulator and facilitates response to low oxygen level .

Another way to upgrade cell survival is to genetically modify the cell before transplantation. The neural stem cell is modified to over-express neurotrophic genes such as brain derived neurotrophic factor, GDNF, VEGF. They also immunomodulatory response , increase the expression of antioxidant and survival genes such as BCL-2. Hypoxic preconditioning and genetically manipulated neurone stem cell transplantation characterize a therapeutic strategy for neural disorders.

Stem cells of Human umbilical cord provided some improvement in cognitive function in Alzheimer disease.

Conclusion :

Decades of investigation resulted that stem cell therapy potentiates to be a solution for disease that were once considered to be not curable . In today’s time patients are frequently undergoing cell transplants for disease like blood leukemia, tutor such as lymphoma, many immune deficiencies, neurodegenerative and metabolic diseases.

Even though there are explored details as of now on the therapeutic uses of stem cells in vitro and in vivo; clinical , experimental finding better methods to control cells for division and differentiation process of such cells and also the methods of administration incorporating cells in different diseases has been a challenge.

On the other flipped side of coin , in healthcare systems stem cell therapy is still to be researched on and reflected on as a research area toward rather than a treatment choice showing that such systems are still not reliable in this method. Hence, future efforts should be determined on removing numerous challenges in clinics and in the administration. A large step towards such goals would be large population clinical trial.