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Asked by supersciencestep to Aoife, Tomasz, Matt, Dave, Anzy on 17 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by balal, saracody123, sive1911, reissbf, jcoo1787, cheek23, amus1892, willthedon, josephwozniak.
Question: what are stem cells?
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Anzy Miller answered on 17 Nov 2013:
Stem cells are cells that can make copies of themselves and also are able to make other types of cells. For example I work with embryonic stem cells and these are the cells that make up the fertilised egg, and these cells go on to produce all of the embryo and so make ALL the cells of the body (brain, liver, skin etc).
Another example of stem cells are in the adult body – we all have loads of them working to keep up alive! For example, you shed lots of dead skin all the time, and so you need the skin stem cells to keep producing more skin for we don’t ever run out!
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Matthew Tomlinson answered on 19 Nov 2013:
Stem cells are what makes us. We all come from one stem cell which is the fertilised egg, after that the cells divide lots of times to make all the cell types of our body. After that throughout life the cells replace aging cells, for example your red blood cells live for about 120 days, after that they need replacing, this is done 2.4 million times per second (!) by stem cells in the bone marrow. Also bone completely replaces itself over the course of about 9 years, this is done by cells called osteoclasts and osteoblasts and these also come from stem cells.
For cell therapies stem cells are used to try and replace diseased and damaged tissue. This is because they are able to change themselves into lots of other cell types that make up different organs like the heart, bone, skin etc. We put them on things called scaffolds and try and get them to grow into the organs we are interested in. Hopefully in the future stem cell therapies will put end to organ donor waiting lists because we will be able to replace a damaged organ from stem cells, rather than waiting for a donor.
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