Regenerative Medicine And Stem Cell Therapy

By Author: KeastDareen.
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Posted by Cells4Life on Jul 1, 2013 in Stem Cell News | 0 comments

When injured or invaded by disease, our bodies have the innate response to heal and defend. What if it was possible to harness the power of the body to heal and then accelerate it in a clinically relevant way? What if we could help the body to heal itself better?

The promising field of Regenerative Medicine is working to restore structure and function of damaged tissues and organs. It is also working to create solutions for organs that become permanently damaged.

The goal of this medicine is to find a way to cure previously untreatable injuries and diseases.

Scientific research is working to make treatments available for clinical use. Stem cell therapy promotes the reparative response of diseased, dysfunctional or injured tissue using stem cells or their derivatives. Researchers grow stem cells in a lab. These stem cells are manipulated to specialize into specific types of cells, such as heart muscle cells, blood cells or nerve cells.

The specialized cells can then be implanted into a person. For example, if the person has heart ...
... disease, the cells could be injected into the heart muscle. The healthy transplanted heart cells could then contribute to repairing defective heart muscle.

It is estimated that up to 128 million individuals might benefit from regenerative medicine therapy, or almost 1 in 3 individuals in the US. If accurate, the need to relieve suffering and reduce healthcare costs is an enormous motivator to rapidly bring stem cell therapies to the clinic.

Stem cell treatments are already being tested in people. Much of that work is in its early stages, focusing on the safety of the procedures — safety always comes first in testing a new treatment. But there have been promising signs in some of these initial trials.

There are a number of key areas being focused on for stem cell therapy and are at varying stages of clinical trials.

Research focuses in the following areas:

Heart disease
Eye diseases
Diabetes
Stroke
Spinal cord injury
Parkinson’s disease
Alzheimer’s disease
ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease)
Multiple sclerosis
Cancer
Cartilage repair

The lifesaving power of umbilical cord blood stem cells and the regenerative healing of cord tissue is no longer a secret. As stem cell treatments and research advance, more and more parents are opting to bank their newborn baby’s cord blood and tissue. Find out how stem cells are being used in medicine today.

Umbilical cord blood is the blood remaining in the cord after your baby has been born and the cord has been cut and clamped. It contains valuable stem cells that can be used in a variety of medical treatments such as regenerating the immune system after chemotherapy. Stem cells are known as ‘the building blocks of life’. They have the unique ability to become other types of cells in the body such as the blood, nerve cells, muscle, bone, and cartilage.

Why are umbilical stem cells so valuable?

Cord blood stem cells can only be collected at birth, so it is important to make the decision to do cord tissue storage several weeks before your due date.

Cord Tissue stored at birth have many advantages – they are readily available for your family if needed, they are considered to be the ‘youngest and freshest’ type of stem cell, and importantly there is a greater potential of a stem cell match between siblings.

Stem cells from the cord blood have been used for more than 20 years for the treatment of a number of disorders of the blood such as leukemia, lymphoma and thalassemia, which previously had been treated with bone marrow.

The umbilical cord blood collection process

After the safe delivery of your child, your obstetrician or midwife cleans the umbilical cord (with the materials provided in the Cells4Life kit) and inserts the blood bag needle into the umbilical vein. The blood flows into the bag by gravity. The blood bag tubing is clamped, sealed and labeled to await courier collection. The whole process takes only a few minutes and causes no pain for mother or baby.

Darren Keast is the author of this article on tissues and organs.Find more information, about stem cell therapy here