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Asked by battleborn to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 15 Nov 2013.
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David Christensen answered on 15 Nov 2013:
That’s a good question battleborn.
Pluripotent stem cells which are iPS cells and embryonic stem cells are likely to be most useful because we can make them become any other type of cell. At the moment, there are some worries that iPS cells, because they used to be a different type of cell, might still have memories from being a different type of cell and might not work so well if we try to make them into some different again. Because of this, there might be treatments using embryonic stem cells first.
But, embryonic stem cells will be seen as not being the patients own cells by their immune system, so transplants using embryonic stem cells are likely to fail, just as normal transplants that are used at the moment do. In the long-term iPS cells might be more useful because we can make them from the patients own cells so that the transplant wouldn’t be attacked. But we will need to know that use of iPS cells is safe and that the cells won’t suddenly change into the type they were originally.
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Matthew Tomlinson answered on 15 Nov 2013:
It really depends on the type of therapy. To repopulate the blood you can use bone marrow stem cells and these work really well, to repair bone different types of bone marrow stem cells are great, to regrow nerves fat stem cells can be very good. There are stem cells all through the body that are good for different things, this is because of genetic factors which mean the cells make certain proteins better than others.
As Dave said, iPS cells are also a really interesting cell type to use for therapy because they can be made into any cell type and won’t be recognised by the immune system. But I think at the moment adult stem cells from the body are the best candidates for a lot of therapies.
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