Cord Blood Stem Cells Information

Impact of stem cells and timeframe?

Reading the following paragraph I truly appreciate the research and development of stem cells. But how long do you think it will be before some of the things mentioned are realized and made available to the masses? 5... 10-20 or 40 years off? To appreciate the potential importance of stem cell therapy, consider the following applications in the treatment of human disease: the use of stem cell therapy to repair damaged spinal cords; cure Crohn's disease, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's; re-grow arteries around a blockage; re-grow limbs; replace failed kidneys and hearts; cure diabetes by replacing non-functional cells in the pancreas; restore vision and hearing; treat leukemia and lymphoma that are non-responsive to normal therapy; and treat brain cancer. These are merely a few of the potential applications of this phenomenal science. In fact most of the treatments listed above have already been studied, and with promising results. Maybe the way I asked the question sounded crazy... I thought people would be a little more excited about the subject, lol~

Public Comments

1. This is a really exciting field! Personalized medicine is probably the future of health care. Unfortunetly we are really only starting to understand the regulatory process that impart stem cells with their unique attributes. As with any research advancement it takes a long time to make it to the clinic. However many years the research takes, plus extensive clincial testing phases up to 10 years. The FDA will be slow to approve any such treatments or genetic engineering. And this is per treatment. It will be probably be decades before the technology is widespread enough to consider it part of normal medicine. Embryonic stem cells will probably have little to offer in clincial terms, but they were be vital for research/academic understanding that may lead to clincal applications. What I mean is, embyronic stem cells are important for our understanding but they are just overkill for treatment of a disease. Adult stem cells can do all the things we require for disease treatment and have less risk because they are limited to specific types of tissue. Once we understand the molecular regulation of stem cells, we may not even directly use any kind of stem cell in our future treatments. We may be able to target drugs to induce our bodies stem cells to do their jobs better! Also, genetic engineering will probably be more succesful at treating diseases like muscular dystrophy or parkinsons than stem cell therapy. Each of these diseases have completely different causes and the idea of stem cell therapy simply can't do all of what it is promising. While I don't think stem cells will be sucessful at treating many of these diseases, they are important to study, and may be applied to the regrowth of lost limbs or other such healing type situations. My guess is that we will probably have no gains for maybe 20-30 years until there is a fundamental breakthrough in our understanding, then there will be an explosion of new therapies in the following decade.