Stem Cell Therapy: Myth or Fact in the Clinical Medicine?
Phoenixes are mythical birds with brightly colored feathers that are very popular in Greek mythology because if its legendary rebirth. After living a long life, the Phoenix dies by burning itself and it is reborn again from its own ashes. The myth parallels the current beliefs concerning the capability of stem cell therapy to regenerate human tissues of damage or diseased organs.
Research regarding stem cell therapy has become one of the most exciting and fascinating areas of clinical research and basic science for the past decade. The concept of this technology, which is tissue regeneration, has raised a lot of hopes from health care professionals, scientist, as well as patients who are looking for ways to repair injured organs because of serious illness like cancer.
These diseases are considered as irreversible or incurable in the past. The hope is that regenerative tissue therapies could minimize the mortality and morbidity rate associated with these incurable and irreversible diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or Huntington’s.
The general public, as well as the news media has already taken a keen and eager outlook towards this exciting and new technology in the clinical therapeutics. In 2010, the United States Department of Health and Human Services or the USDHHS, published a compelling report about cell therapy. But despite the enthusiasm, a lot of clinical researches have an inconsistent report finding, warning a long and challenging road before this technology can become a legitimate daily clinical practice.
If you want to know more about stem cell therapy in Miami, you can check out websites, forum sites and social media accounts related to this topic.
In recent studies published by the New England Journal for Medicine involving stem cell therapy, which includes five patients suffering from macular degeneration, it saw a fascinating result. Scientist injected cells that were derived from laboratory manipulated cells from the patients.
According to the first report, a sheet of stem units derived from the patient’s fibroblasts was placed under the person’ retina with resultant engraftment using surgery. Researchers noted that although the cells remained viable and intact after one year, there are no significant improvements in the patient’s vision, but instead, they developed macular edema.
And in the second report, researchers examined patients treated using the self-proclaimed stem cell therapy. Each one received intraocular injections of stem cells obtained from the patient’s adipose tissues. All patients suffered a loss of vision, related to intraocular hypertension, vitreous hemorrhage, retinal detachment or commonly called lens displacement and hemorrhagic retinopathy. To know more about hemorrhagic retinopathy, visit https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/hemorrhagic+retinopathy.
In an accompanying study from Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital, they referred to the treatment received by the patients who experienced vision deterioration as a careless and misapplication of cell therapy. There are a lot of clinical studies that use stem cell therapy in patients with reduced left ventricular function and ischemic heart disease.
The most common researches studied patients with acute, chronic or subacute myocardial infarction. Stem cells in the form of mesenchymal, cardiac progenitor, adipose-derived, as well as bone marrow-derived cells are being used in some clinical trials.
The simplest view of these studies is that the administered cells would grow and distinguish into more functioning myocytes when they are implanted into the heart’s myocardium, replacing all dying cardiomyocytes and help improve the overall ventricular and cardiac function.
What is an Endothelial Progenitor? Click here to find out more.
Researchers also tested Endothelial progenitor units in smaller trial numbers, under the premise that the biological therapy will lead to neovascular results with subsequent growth in myocardial function and perfusion.
A small number of events have been observed in the early trials if the therapy. Theoretically speaking, the possible side effects that can result from the injection may include tumorigenesis, adverse immunological responses and failure of retaining the stem units if the allogeneic sources of the cells are used.
To this day, there are a few potential issues has been reported during clinical trials, leading to the belief that the biological therapy is very safe, although there is no scientific backing resulting in a long-term amelioration of the functions of the heart. One study shows that injecting bone marrow cells in the heart’s myocardium are considered safe, with little to no adverse reaction.
To find out more about bone marrow transplant, visit this site for more information. Different results obtained involving stem therapy support the importance of interplays between clinical researchers and science investigators to increase the success rate for future testing for different cellular therapeutic modes. Considerably more basic, clinical and scientific investigation is required before new methods can be recommended for test subjects with various illnesses.
Future studies in this area of science will require protocol standardization with more focus paid to the patient’s medical condition, the quantity of biological component infused and the timing of its administration. It will also focus on the types of stem cell infused, the techniques of infusion and delivery and the synchronization with the host.
One fascinating discovery is that cardiovascular components secrete vesicles that contain a lot of biological factors like exosomes, which has regenerating elements, that provides the potential for cell bypass injection. What are exosomes? Visit https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-016-0268-z for more ingormation.
Although there are clinical trials that already entered Phase three, from a clinical standpoint, double-blind and broad-scale studies with mature methods of delivery, as well as standardized cell preparation, will be needed to evaluate the potential of clinical benefits of the new therapy.
With respect to the growth and increasing population of stem cell facilities and clinics that are offering treatment of patients with severe illnesses like macular degeneration, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, injury in the spinal cord and MS or multiple sclerosis has seen early success in the treatment with a considerable personal cost.
According to experts, the International Society for Stem Cell Research recent releases rules and regulation of translation of stem cells results. The rules and regulations highlight the distinction between unproven interventions that clinics or facilities are offering, who have little to no idea on biologic complexities of the treatment or by quack doctors peddling face treatment and innovative treatments that are both proven and effective when it comes to rigorous clinical trials. The best way to understand stem cell therapy is to do your due diligence and research everything about this subject.