A chance to cure everything - Part one

The miserable truth is that the moment you are born, your body is as perfect as it can ever be. Then it starts to deteriorate, inside and out. Accidents, disease, and ageing all leave their mark – wrinkles, hair loss, or something more serious like a worn-out knee joint or tissue damage caused by a stroke or heart attack.

The degeneration of the body is too complex to be treated by drugs or surgery. But research over the last quarter century has led to a new approach called ‘cell therapy’ – sometimes also known as regenerative medicine – where living cells are used to assist and repair tissues and organs.

The idea of replacing damaged parts of the body arose in the early days of organ transplantation, which culminated in the first successful transplant of a heart in 1967. These operations proved that cell transplants – in the form of whole organs – can work.

Today, transplantation is almost routine, thanks to advances in surgery and drugs that stop the immune system from rejecting the ‘foreign organ. However, there is a serious gap between supply and demand in organ transplantation.

Meanwhile, damage to the mechanical parts of the body can be fixed with pins, plates, rods, screws and devices like hip replacements. On a personal and grateful note, I have to say my lower spine is held together with rods and screws, and I have a hip replacement. Unfortunately, as I have found out during my research, these items only have a maximum lifespan of 15 years, so many recipients outlive them.

Cell therapy could provide a better way of repairing the body – because cells can be multiplied and are, in theory at least, unlimited in supply and can stimulate the body’s healing mechanisms.

Dr Stephan Minger, Director of the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory at the Wolfson Centre for Age Related Disease in London stated in an interview that cell therapy has the ability to provide life-changing medical advancement in the future.

Reports from trials of cell therapy on heart patients in Germany have suggested that just a small increase in heart function means the difference between sitting in a chair all day and being able to play golf.

Back to reality: there are two types of cell that can be used – stem cells and somatic cells. Stem cells have the ability to grow indefinitely and develop into different types of cells, while somatic cells have a limited lifetime.

Bone marrow transplantation for leukaemia and immune disorders is a stem cell therapy that has been around for 25 years and more. Meanwhile, products made of skin cells are used to treat burns and heal chronic wounds, such as diabetic foot ulcers.

But it was the discovery of human embryonic stem cells by James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin in 1998 that really opened up the field.

Making cells as medicine is far more demanding than making a drug like aspirin or insulin. Like all living things, cells need to be carefully looked after with the right nutrients, sufficient oxygen, and a controlled temperature.

Even more difficult is persuading cells to turn into the type you want. If, for instance, researchers want to turn stem cells into brain cells to fix damage after a stroke, they need to know how to guide them along this path.

Usually, this requires exposing the cells to various chemical signals known as growth factors, which will help the cells turn on all the right genetic switches to make sure they become brain cells (and not, for example, liver cells).

With cells that are already differentiated, the challenge is to keep them in this state.

Peter Andrews, Professor of Biomedical Science at the University of Sheffield, one of the world’s leading experts in stem cell biology has stated that it is fairly demanding to keep stem cell cells going in culture. It involves a measure of science and a measure of art.

As with organ transplants, the body may tend to reject ‘foreign’ cell transplants. The way around this might be to use a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer (the process used to create Dolly the sheep) to make an embryo that could be a source of an individual’s own stem cells for future repair of the body.

The prospect of therapeutic cloning, as it is known, has generated lots of hot air and debate – but technically, it is not really an option in the foreseeable future.

Then there are the ethical concerns over the use of spare human embryos from IVF treatment as a source of embryonic stem cells.

Indeed, there is a lot of hype about stem cell therapy and it will take a long time for the true benefit to be seen. There is promise in cell therapy, but a healthy dose of realism is needed – and there is still work to be done.

Next week a look at what can be done for you using cell therapy.