Private banking of umbilical cord blood is gaining momentum. The blood should be beneficial for curing future diseases, or so the banking firms promise. The use of stem cells derived from this blood are now usually used to treat cancer if at all; however, in the near future they might be used in the emerging treatment concept termed regenerative medicine. Umbilical cord stem cells could be of use in regenerative medicine but could become useless if other methods of producing stem-cells will become available.
What is Regenerative Medicine?
Stem cells are cells that can differentiate into specific cells. All the cells in our body were initiated from a single cell, an embryonic stem cell, and were differentiated into heart, eyes, teeth, brain, skin and all the other tissues. Many diseases, especially ones that involved the destruction of cells or their malfunctioning could be potentially cured by introducing fresh cells to the relevant sites, cells that are differentiated from stem cells.
Using stem cells to rebuild an injured tissue or generate new cells is called regenerative medicine. Regenerative medicine will probably be used to treat tissue damage, genetic disorders, and degenerative diseases. Several pre-clinical and clinical trials have been and are being done in this field, and a lot of them aim at treating heart failure. The sources of the stem cells used are various and include umbilical cord blood derived stem cells, stem cells taken from bone marrow and induced stem cells.
Among the potential applications of stem cell therapy are treatment of heart failure, type-1-diabetes, brain injuries and neuronal disorders such as cerebral palsy (CP). Some of these uses are already in clinical trials using umbilical-cord stem cells or under research using induced stem cells.
Other Sources of Stem Cells
Since 2006, scientists were able to take a differentiated cell such as a skin cell and turn it into a pluripotent stem cell. This induction was first done by introducing new DNA into the cells by the means of engineered viruses. This method of induction bears the potential risk of these cells becoming cancerous since the new DNA segment could be assimilated anywhere along the chromosomes, leading to abnormalities and cancer, which made the use of this method incompetent for regenerative medicine.
During 2009 at least two methods were developed to induce pluripotent cells without the introduction of new DNA. One uses proteins that are inserted to the cells and the other changes the epigenetic code of the cells. These two methods are considered safe for generating stem cells; however, their safety should be further examined.
Induced pluripotent stem cells are a potentially good source of stem cells. The question is how long will it take to have them in clinical use and how many years will pass with the umbilical cord stem cells using as the only source for stem cells available for use in regenerative medicine.
The Benefits of Self Implant
The obvious benefit of using umbilical cord stem cells is that the body will not reject them, as opposed to non-self cells. Stem cells implanted for treating cancer, for instance, will be more successful if one's own cells are used, at least in theory.
In practice, the World Marrow Donor Association has stated in 2006 that the use of self stem cells to treat childhood leukemia is contraindicated since the genetic defects that caused the disease are present in the stem cells. Regenerative medicine, on the other hand, could use the benefits of self implant.
The potential uses of umbilical cord blood derived stem cells are vast. There are some clinical trials testing the use of these cells to treat CP, type-1-diabetes and several types of cancer. Although other, more accessible, sources of stem cells might become available, the safe and natural umbilical cord blood remains their major source. Private banking of this blood could be of benefit in the near future but it's hard to tell when the use of this kind of treatment will become practical and how long will it take to find other reliable sources of stem cells.
References:
- Andersson ER & Lendahl U, "Regenerative medicine: a 2009 overview", J Intern Med. 2009 Oct;266(4):303-10.
- Zhu XQ, Pan XH, Wang W, Chen Q, Pang RQ, Cai XM, Hoffman AR & Hu JF, "Transient in vitro epigenetic reprogramming of skin fibroblasts into multipotent cells", Biomaterials. 2009 Dec 29
- NIH clinical trials website
- Reimann V, Creutzig U & Kögler G, "Stem cells derived from cord blood in transplantation and regenerative medicin", Dtsch Arztebl Int. 2009 Dec;106(50):831-6
- Harris DT, "Non-haematological uses of cord blood stem cells", Br J Haematol. 2009 Oct;147(2):177-84.
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