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Asked by origoody to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 15 Nov 2013.
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Matthew Tomlinson answered on 15 Nov 2013:
It is the potential of the cells, they can, in the case of embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells, make every cell in the body. This allows us rebuild diseased and damaged tissue and give increases in quality of life that are not possible with conventional drug treatments. I honestly believe that in 20 years organ donor waiting lists will be a thing of the past, or they will be a lot shorter than they are now. And a lot of that will be because of stem cell treatments.
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Aoife O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan answered on 15 Nov 2013:
Hi origoody,
The advantages are that we can maintain a population of stem cells (embryonic specifically) quite easily and of course that we can direct them to turn into many different types of cells. We can use these to learn about disease and even test drugs. In the future hopefully if a particular cell type is damaged in a patient we might be able to replace them with cells grown from stem cells. -
David Christensen answered on 15 Nov 2013:
The others have given good answers and I just want to add 1 thing.
Because stem cells can change between cell types, studying stem cells can teach us something about cell identity. This is what it is that makes a cell what it is. It seems from studying stem cells that cells aren’t fixed within a particular type exactly and that individual cells within a group grown on a plate are going to be very slightly different to each other (I guess a bit like people are all very similar, but are quite different as well). This is quite a complex idea, but it is very interesting, I think.
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