The fact is that, at the moment, there are very few stem cell therapies with sufficient medical evidence of success to still be considered acceptable. The best defined and most used is bone marrow transplantation to treat blood or immune system conditions. Many for-profit stem cell clinics advertise therapies that aren't backed by science and that can actually cause harm. Stem cell-based therapies for all other conditions are still experimental.
The ClinicalTrials, gov website contains the most up-to-date information on clinical trials testing whether stem cell-based therapies are safe and effective in humans. The list of diseases for which stem cell treatments have proven to be beneficial is still very short. The best-defined and most commonly used stem cell treatment is hematopoietic (or blood) stem cell transplantation, for example, bone marrow transplant, to treat certain blood and immune system disorders or to rebuild the blood system after treatments for some types of cancer. In some cases, hematopoietic stem cells for treatments can also be removed.
of the umbilical cord or peripheral blood. This opinion document is a brief description of the current state of translating stem cell therapy from the laboratory to the clinic. Basically, the stem cell divides, creating a copy of itself and a daughter (or progenitor) cell that, unlike the stem cells from which it comes, does not self-renew. The way and where cells return to the body is important, and some clinics inject cells into places where they are not normally present or belong.
Its potential is evident in the use of blood stem cells to treat blood diseases, a therapy that has saved the lives of thousands of children with leukemia, and can be seen in the use of stem cells for tissue grafting to treat diseases or injuries to bones, skin and the surface of the eye. Researchers are testing adult stem cells to treat other conditions, including some degenerative diseases, such as heart failure. This has already scared the pharmaceutical industry into abandoning this field, as companies find it more difficult to protect their revenues due to the complexity of cell therapies. The sources of the embryos used to obtain the ESC lines and the stem cells themselves (of any type) are still very poorly characterized.
Efforts are being made to see if stem cells could successfully treat diseases such as Parkinson's and diabetes, in particular type 1 diabetes. You've heard about stem cells in the news and you may have wondered if they could help you or a loved one with a serious illness. If the cells are not derived from the patient to be treated, compatibility between the donor and the cell recipient is a major concern that often limits the use of the technique. And, more importantly, if there are still pluripotent cells in the culture, these cells may have the ability to form tumors in the recipient.
There has been an explosion of so-called clinics offering stem cell treatments for a wide range of ailments, but none of them have proven to be effective. For a differentiation protocol to be useful in a clinical setting, it must be able to efficiently induce stem cell differentiation into a specific cell type. Since human embryonic stem cells are obtained from human embryos, several questions have been raised about the ethics of embryonic stem cell research. Mesenchymal stem cells appear to have an anti-inflammatory effect, and phase I and phase II studies have shown that 50% of patients respond to treatment with these cells.
