What is Cell Medicine?
Cell therapy is the process of using stem cells or their derivatives to replace
damaged tissue or promote a patient’s own body’s natural repair response travelleisuremag. This
approach is a promising new way of treating many diseases, especially cancers, by
replacing diseased or injured tissues with healthy ones.
Stem cells can be found in most body tissues, including bone marrow and blood
cells. They can divide into additional stem cells and then form different types of cells
in the body https://travelleisuremag.com/news/introducing-the-power-of-cell-medicine-with-prof-carl-zhang-pioneering-research-and-applications-in-regenerative-medicine/426509. They are considered pluripotent (plu-RAW-uh-tunt) cells because they
can grow into almost any type of cell in the body.
There are several ways to use stem cells, but most commonly researchers will
transplant them into patients who need them in order to heal or regenerate
damaged tissues or organs. This is a technique called regenerative medicine and
can be applied to a wide range of conditions, from arthritis to Parkinson’s disease.
One of the earliest forms of stem cell treatment is the bone marrow transplant, in
which doctors insert healthy stem cells into a patient’s bone marrow to replace
unhealthy ones that have been damaged by chemotherapy or disease. In other
areas, scientists are studying how to direct stem cells to become specific types of
cells, such as heart cells. This is a promising area of research that could lead to new
treatments for conditions such as heart attack.
Other potential uses of stem cells include testing new drugs to see if they work.
These tests can be very expensive, but they can help speed drug development and
avoid toxic side effects. The NCI has developed a technique to make tissue-specific
stem cells that can be used for these purposes.
The NCI also is developing techniques to reprogramme adult skin cells into stem
cells that are more specialized, called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. This can
help accelerate research in a large number of diseases that are not well treated with
existing methods.
This is an exciting research frontier, but it will take a long time to develop the
necessary techniques and identify a safe and effective method of creating the
specialized cells needed for these therapies. In addition, the cells must be able to
survive in the human body after being reintroduced to patients, which is
challenging.
Cell-based therapies that use the body’s immune system to fight tumors are another
promising application of cell therapy. T cells are engineered with a receptor that
detects a cancer-associated protein and presents the protein on their surface for
immune system recognition. T cells can then be infused back into the patient to
attack and destroy the tumor. NK cells, which are similar to T cells but can target
and eliminate abnormal cells, are also being studied for this purpose.
Immune cell therapy: Unlike traditional chemotherapeutic treatments, immune cell
therapies can be delivered directly into a patient’s bloodstream without the need for
additional surgeries. This approach, known as adoptive cell therapy, can be effective
in certain types of cancers, such as leukemia.