Christian Worldview Concepts

The Superior Solution of Adult Stem Cells

An Excellent Source

What makes adult stem cells more useful than embryonic stem cells? Adult stem cells can differentiate into many types of tissue while being derived from another. Research with mice showed that adult stem cells can grow into heart, lung, intestine, kidney, liver, nervous tissue, muscle and other tissues.³ In culture, cells differentiated into bone, cartilage or fat cells.⁴

A second feature of adult stem cells is their apparent unlimited life span. One early study saw researchers repopulate the bone marrow of mice with ONE transplanted stem cell.⁵ Early indications are that embryonic stem cell lines have a similar lifespan, but their differentiation is not nearly as predictable or manageable.

A third feature of adult stem cells is that they are much easier to culture than embryonic stem cells, that is, they do not require the same analogs as embryonic stem cells.⁶ In addition to this, adult stem cells avoid the problem of compatibility with the recipient. Like organ transplants from unrelated cadaver donors, embryonic stem cells possess properties that make the recipient's body reject them as foreign tissue. This means that immunosuppressant drugs may be required to trick the body into accepting the tissue.

Proponents of embryonic stem cell research respond that histocompatibility can be achieved by therapeutic cloning, i.e., cloning the recipients DNA by producing cloned embryos and using their stem cells. However, this takes us back to the moral status of human embryos and opens the Pandora's Box of human cloning questions.

Finally, using adult stem cells reduces the risk of transferring genetic, viral or other disease vectors because the cells come from the patient, not a donor. This alone should infuse the medical community with a desire to expand adult stem cell research and applicable clinical therapies.

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³ Clarke et al. Generalized potential of adult neural stem cells. Science 288 (2 June, 2000): 1660-3.
Eglitis, M.A. et al. Targeting of marrow-derived astrocytes to the ischemic brain. Neuroreport 10 (26 April 1999): 1289.
Brazelton, T.R. et al. From marrow to brain: expression of neuronal phenotypes in adult mice. Science 290 (1 Dec 2000): 1775-1779.
Shi, Q. et al. Evidence of circulation of bone marrow-derived endothelial cells. Blood 92 (15 July 1998): 362-367.
Young, M.J. et al. Neuronal differentiation and morphological integration of hippocampal progenitor cells transplanted to the retina of immature and mature dystrophic rats. Molecular and Cellular Neurosciences 16 (Sept. 2000): 197-205.
⁴ Pittenger, M.F. et al. Multilineage potential of adult human mesenchymal stem cells. Science 284 (2 April 1999): 143-147.
Bjornson et al. Turning brain into blood: a hematopoietic fate adopted by adult neural stem cells in vivo. Science 283 (22 Jan. 1999): 534-537.
⁵ Bhatia, M. et al. Purification of primitive human hematopoietic cells capable of repopulating immune-deficient mice. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 94 (May 1997): 5320-25.
⁶ Cho, R. H. and C.E. Muller-Sieburg. High frequency of long-term culture-initiating cells retain in vivo repopulation and self-renewal capacities. Exp. Hematol. 28 (1 Sept. 2000): 1080-86.