09
Nov
2004
Adult Stem Cell Transplants
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I'm willing to bet that the first widely available regenerative therapies based on stem cell research will be adult stem cell transplants of some form or another. The research is going well:

Results from an animal study conducted at Johns Hopkins show that stem cell therapy can be used effectively to treat heart attacks, or myocardial infarcts, in pigs. Stem cells taken from another pig's bone marrow, when injected into the animal's damaged heart, were able to restore the heart's function to its original condition.

A number of other approaches to regenerating damaged hearts - based on the same theme of transplants or culturing the patient's own stem cells for reimplantation - are in trials or late stage research. Some are looking very promising.

Repairing currently irrepairable heart damage is a big deal in and of itself, but scientists will be able to do far better than this in the years ahead - assuming that the obstructionists get out of the way and freedom of research is maintained.

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