“Latest Stem Cells News”

Storing your children’s umbilical stem cells in private banks for autologous use is a growing trend. But is it an evil marketing ploy, a useless precaution, or a winning strategy? The debate rages on, but perhaps a report in Newsweek could shift the balance in favor of this practice.

When he was 9 months old, Dallas Hextall was diagnosed with cerebral paralysis, a serious neural disorder caused by oxygen deprivation in the uterus or at birth. His parents consulted many neurologists, but according to them, he boy’s chances for a recovery were almost non-existant.

An experiment successfully performed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Missouri in Colombia, described in Nature magazine shows that cells removed from a patient’s skin and transformed into cells similar to embryonic stem cells have become a laboratory model for diseases and can be observed in real time and studied to find new cures. The researchers recreated spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) pluripotent stem cells removed from the skin of a child affected by the neurodegenerative genetic disease. In the laboratory, the cells behaved exactly as they do in a human being, giving the researchers an opportunity to observe the progression of the disease. This is an entirely new opportunity, made possible by a discovery by a Japanese research group, which less than a year ago was able to reprogram adult embryonic-like stem cells.