John Bovill Difficult Process
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Difficulties in the Creation of Stem Cells
Challenges to generating new stem cells
- Ideally, new stem cells could be generated by inducing pluripotency in cells types that are desirable. In theory, you could remove adult cells from a patient, create stem cells from them and reintroduce them into the body.
- Unfortunately this does not work well with current techniques. The processes that exist for inducing pluripotency in cells are time consuming, resource intensive, and inconsistent. (3)
- The investment needed for induction of pluripotency doesn't seem to change drastically among the type of cell or the methods used.
- This currently makes stem cell treatments too expensive to be common in medical practices.
- In addition to being resource intensive, the procedures that exist do not always yield perfect populations of stem cells, but will often create a multitude of cells that are at different stages of differentiation.
- This makes stem cell induction both expensive and inefficient.
- Current methods for inducing pluripotency can also alter the cell in undesired ways, leading to inconsistencies in generated cells.
- Inducing pluripotency can lead to genetic and epigenetic differences between cell lines that were created using the same methods and progenitor cells.
- The investment needed for induction of pluripotency doesn't seem to change drastically among the type of cell or the methods used.
- Until the various problems with creating induced pluripotent stem cells are addressed, they will remain an expensive and relatively unused option.
Stem cell sources and ethical concerns
- Embryonic stem cells hold vast potential in applications as tools in medical treatments.
- Because embryonic stem cells are capable of becoming any type of cell in the body, these are potentially the most desirable type of stem cell for research and applications.
- Embryonic stem cells only exist very early in human life however, and obtaining sufficient amounts of them can be difficult. (18)
- In order to gather sufficient amount of embryonic stem cells, the embryo often must be destroyed. New methods are being found that could possibly avoid the destruction of an embryo, but are still relatively new. The use of human embryos in such practices is an ethical concern.
- Embryonic stem cells in mice were also shown to have potential dangers associated with them, such as the growth of malignant tumors upon transplantation.
- Induced pluripotent stem cells come from adult cell lines. (18)
- There are low risks associated with gathering adult cells necessary to induce pluripotency, but the efficiency of the process, outlined above, makes this source of stem cells relatively unused.
- Epiblastic Stem cells are also one potential source of stem cells. (18)
- These are derived from post-implantation mouse embryos at a specific stage of development.
- They show promise of use in human treatments, as they may be more closely related to human embryonic stem cells than mouse embryonic stem cells, but their origin in another species may carry with it a number of other obstacles.
