[quote]Ren wrote:
Sloth wrote:
Ok, the whole stem cell thing keeps coming up. What exactly is special about embryonic stem cells compared to umbilical blood stem cells? This isn’t something I’ve really kept up with. However, haven’t they recently discovered how to change umbilical blood stem cells into target cells? Such as the British scientists who grew a specific organ, a liver.
Am I missing something? It’s an honest question.[/quote]
To answer you Sloth, no, you’re not missing anything.
Which is more than they’ve done with any line of ESCs and they managed to do it without using any left over embryos and pissing off any hard-line pro-lifers.
[quote]Basic differences:
Embryonic - Harvested from fertilized eggs, have the potential to become any of the cells we find in the human body.
Umbilical - collected from the umbilical cord of a recently born baby. Some stem cells harvested this way can be grown into any kind of cells, some can’t.
Adult - Harvested from adults. Replicate slower than the other 2, and have shown some hope of being able to change into other kinds of cells.[/quote]
This is incorrect, adult stem cells grow just as rapidly as any other cell. The major difference is that the ASCs are more application specific and might (the same might that ESCs carry for any use) require more time in cross-tissue applications.
[quote]Here is the thing, at least in my opinion. Embryonic stem cells have the potential to become any kind of cell, basically the building blocks of the human body, since this is what we all started out as. If we can decipher exactly how these cells replicate and grow into stable versions of other cells, we can better understand both umbilical and adult stem cells.
Think about it, if you know how an embryonic stem cell grows into an adult stem cell, it is feasable that we can use that knowledge to decipher how we can change adult stem cells into other cells, something which has had some, but limited success.[/quote]
Would you say the best way to understand ASCs is to study ESCs or ASCs? I’m not saying that a complete understanding of ASCs can be reached without ESCs, but what the cells can/can’t do once they’re there is much more important than how they got there.
I hope jsbrooks is paying attention. ASCs have been and are currently used in clinical medicine to treat disease. Every bone marrow transplant performed is/was at it’s core an ASC treatment/cure. Patients have had their diabetes cured from ASCs, cardiac and arterial diseases have been treated and cured all are/were done with ASCs.
How about because every time you turn a new cell line into a treatment it would cost as much as the research to do the same thing with ASCs? How about because the only place that the equivalent pluripotency is seen in an adult body is cancer? How about because a cottage industry of ‘ASC harvesting’ already exists and would be wildly less taboo than its ESC equivalent? How about because with more of the right research any patient could be his/her own stem cell donor and negate a ‘tissue harvesting industry’? Should I go on?
Amgen (the largest independent biotech company in the world worth, $12.3B in revenue) has partnered and put Visacell’s blood cancer treatment in Phase I trials. Aastrom and Stemcells Inc. both have products in Phase I trials. The nearest ESC-based companies are still looking to garner funds to do the research work to get them into trials. Lack of federal money is supposedly holding them back.
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VC funding isn’t the issue, VCs can spend their money as whimsically as they want to. The good ones actually make a pretty profit. I don’t think our gov’t would, could, or should.
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No, Edison would’ve failed to secure funding if incandescent bulbs required fertilized human eggs to run and he had to compete with Germer’s fluorescent bulb.
