What is an Stem Cell Therapy ?
Stem cell treatments are a type of intervention strategy that introduces new cells into
damaged tissue in order to treat disease or injury. Many medical researchers believe
that stem cell treatments have the potential to change the face of human disease and
alleviate suffering. The ability of stem cells to self-renew and give rise to subsequent
generations with variable degrees of differentiation capacities, offers significant
potential for generation of tissues that can potentially replace diseased and damaged
areas in the body, with minimal risk of rejection and side effects.
A number of stem cell therapeutics exist, but most are at experimental stages and/or
costly, with the notable exception of bone marrow transplantation. before stem cell
therapeutics can be applied in the clinical setting, more research is necessary to
understand stem cell behavior upon transplantation as well as the mechanisms of stem
cell interaction with the diseased/injured microenvironment.
Wound healing
Stem cells can also be used to stimulate the growth of human tissues. In an adult, wounded tissue is most often replaced by scar tissue, which is characterized in the skin by disorganized collagen structure, loss of hair follicles and irregular vascular structure. In the case of wounded fetal tissue, however, wounded tissue is replaced with normal tissue through the activity of stem cells. A possible method for tissue regeneration in adults is to place adult stem cell "seeds" inside a tissue bed "soil" in a wound bed and allow the stem cells to stimulate differentiation in the tissue bed cells. This method elicits a regenerative response more similar to fetal wound-healing than adult scar tissue formation esearchers are still investigating different aspects of the "soil" tissue that are conducive to regeneration.