• Question: could your work ever change how we treat people with an illness, disease or loss of body parts?

    Asked by reginageorge to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 13 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: David Christensen

      David Christensen answered on 13 Nov 2013:

      I’m going to say yes, but it’s a bit more complicated than that.

      My work hasn’t got a target disease to treat, but I hope that it might help lead to easier use of embryonic stem cells by other scientists. The better we can understand the embryonic stem cells, the more chance we have of making treatments for disease and organ replacement using the embryonic stem cells.

      I think most scientists that work in the subjects related to Biology, Chemistry and Medicine are hoping that there work might help give us new ways to treat people with disease.

    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 13 Nov 2013:

      Hi reginageorge

      Yes, my work is based on improving bone healing after fracture. At the moment when people break a bone they have it put in plaster, this works most of the time but occasionally the break doesn’t heal and it becomes something called a non-union fracture. To repair these at the moment people have bone taken from another part of the body, like the hip, and have it screwed into the site of the break. This works well-ish most of the time, however we can use stem cells to try and improve the speed and quality of healing and this is what most of my work is on.

      Also, in some mouth cancers you get loss of jaw bone and patients need a facial reconstruction, by using stem cells from teeth we are trying to develop treatments that produce new bone and regrow a person’s jaw.

      So, yes my work hopes to change how people with diseases are treated. Thanks for the question!

    • Photo: Tomasz Kostrzewski

      Tomasz Kostrzewski answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      Hi reginageorge

      hopefully one day some of my work will contribute how to how we treat disease. I study how natural killer cells are made from stem cells in the bone marrow. Natural killer cells can be used to treat certain types of cancer, so we are trying to better understand how these cells develop. Once we can do this hopefully we can produce lots of natural killer cells that can then be given to a patient to help treat their cancer.

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