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Asked by origoody to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 12 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by nnaseem.
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David Christensen answered on 12 Nov 2013:
I don’t think embryonic stem cells are used commonly to treat any diseases yet, but there are some experiments going on that show they could be useful.
Some scientists have made a particular type of eye cell to inject into the eyes of people with a couple of different diseases that cause blindness and they have had some success so far.
I think there has also been work on injecting embryonic stem cells into peoples spines to help after injury, but that work was cancelled because the company doing it didn’t have the money for it.
The problem for embryonic stem cells for use in disease treatment is that the cells will be recognised by the immune system of the person receiving the injection as not being their own cells and might attack the cells. The immune system does not get into the eye, so using embryonic stem cells to treat some types of eye diseases is easier.
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Matthew Tomlinson answered on 14 Nov 2013:
There are clinical trials going ahead as Dave has said but these are quite limited at the moment and are focussed on the eye and spinal cord. There are plenty of therapies going into trials at the moment for adult stem cells, which are cells taken from the body. These cells don’t have the same problems as embryonic stem cells because if you take them from the same patient the immune system doesn’t recognise them as different. You can also use cells from donors who have similar immune labels on their cells, which is how bone marrow transplants for leukaemia work, and in many ways these are stem cell treatments.
At the moment there are trials underway to use adult stem cells for conditions like heart disease, stroke, paralysis, diabetes and Alzheimers. We also use adult stem cells to treat broken bones and some aspects of arthritis.
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