LONDON, UK, December 2, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A new technique developed by a British biotech company has determined that blood itself, not necessarily harvested from babies, may be the best source of stem-cell-like cells. Stem cell research is a relatively new development in medicine. They are undifferentiated cells, which means they can be transformed into cells ordered to almost any bodily tissue. They may aid in the repair and regeneration of tissues previously thought irreparable; for instance, the brain in Parkinson's disease, or heart tissue in heart attack sufferers, and so on.
Research to date has incorporated both adult and fetal sources of stem cells. Although studies involving fetal stem cells have generally yielded poor results when compared with studies involving adult stem cells, experiments utilizing stem cells from aborted babies are ongoing. While adult stem cells have successfully treated patients, fetal stem cells used in experiments with human patients have caused sometimes fatal damage to the human subjects of those experiments.
TriStem, a UK company, has used a new procedure to turn the white blood cells of mice into the blood-generating cells found in bone marrow. Their research will appear in the January, 2004, edition of the Current Medical Research and Opinion (vol 20, p 87). The implications for human blood cells are obvious. An individual's own normal white blood cells may revert back to stem-cell-like cells.