As far as I know, we are now able to take a persons own cells from areas like bone marrow and use them to make pluripotent stem cells, which can then be used to make tissues and organs w/o immune rejection.
So if everything works out and we eventually figure out all these stem cell issues, what could that mean for medicine 5-40 years from now?
I have seen youtube and other videos about 3D organ printing, where scientists can use your stem cells to print new lungs, hearts, bladders, etc as well as regeneration damaged organs. But they aren’t to the point where they can put most of those back in the body, I think they’ve just implanted bladders and tracheas now, it’ll be a few years before other organs like hearts or kidneys are going to be realistically replaced, and years after that until it is more affordable.
Stem cells injected into joints could be a treatment osteoarthritis to regrow cartilage.
I’ve also seen videos where stem cells could be used to treat burns by basically inserting new cells layer by layer on a body part that has experienced burns or trauma.
Are there any real opportunities for stem cells to help with type II diabetes, atherosclerosis, mood disorders, neurological disorders, cancer, autoimmune disorders, etc?
Replacing organs and tissue is nice, but it seems a lot of our problems are due to the body wearing out and not working properly. I don’t know how much stem cells could help with that (they wouldn’t make insulin more sensitive, and you wouldn’t be able to replace the entire cardiovascular system network of arteries and veins as far as I know).
I’m kinda curious if you could take a sizable vein that was clogged, tie a stem-cell-bred and pristine replacement vein to one end and pull the other end, drawing the new vein in to replace the old one, like you were installing new telephone cable.
If it all comes true very rich people will become potentially immortal, but will end up being killed by their kids.
Bryan, I don’t know about pulling veins, but the cardio-vascular system seems like one of the easier things to replace. We’ve been doing it much of it already.
Auto-transplants where the doctors take a piece of vein from a leg and put it someplace else are pretty much routine now, I understand.
As for the OP, being able to grow new organs in a reasonable amount of time, and organs who would not trigger immune-system problems (like both donated organs and non-biological replacements can do) or need replacing (which some non-biological replacements do), could do away with transplants (perhaps not in cases in which the original problem was genetic - although combined with other techniques, it might) and also reduce the amount of time that people in need of organ replacement would be waiting. I know some transplant recipients who say that it’s weird, realizing you’re alive because somebody died; with vat-grown organs, there would be no such thing any more.
Well there are trials going on right now to treat a form of sight loss with stem cells.
I have a friend who suffers from a form of progressive sight loss that could see her blind within 5 years…
I would never say this to her, but I would bet money that she would have at least “shapes and colour” vision in 10 years. They have already essentially cured the exact same form of degeneration in mice, using stem cells.