Here's news of yet another medical science breakthrough in which nobody is hurt, killed, or morally stained -- because the technique involved uses adult stem cells and not cells from a human embryo.
Roger Highfield, Science Editor for the Telegraph, reports on this significant advance that could substantially help researchers discover treatments for Parkinson’s and numerous other dreaded diseases.
...For the first time a research team has managed to take human skin cells from a patient with a genetic condition and transform them into nerve cells. It means they will now be able to create limitless numbers of the diseased cells to help them carry out research in the hope of finding a way to treat the illness.
The research has been carried out by an American team. They took skin cells from two elderly patients with motor neuron disease and turned them into nerve cells so they could study the cause of their nerve degeneration. The cells can now be used to test drugs to treat the condition.
But scientists also hope if they can find a way of altering the cell to make it healthy they will be able to grow a patient’s cells and tissue, free of disease, to transplant back into their body and fight the condition. Research teams would theoretically be able to use the technique to develop treatments for a range of genetic conditions.
The advance is published in the journal Science by a team led by Prof Kevin Eggan of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Prof Eggan said. “Now we can make limitless supplies of the cells that die in this awful disease.”...
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