Diabetes and Stem Cell Research
The research about stem cells has been very controversial. The issues in the advent of stem cell research as well as the health care distinction are some of the topics that have been delved into by many medical experts as well as those suffering from certain illnesses such as migraine and diabetes. The most part that has caught the interest of these experts is where these cells are from. There are so many sources associated with stem cells. These cells may either be from the blood in the umbilical cord, embryos or from old age.
Diabetes treatments and cure depend on the results of the research on stem cells. The American Diabetes Association has been very supportive on these researches and has been cooperating by means of financial support. Recently, there have been many protests on the researches done in stem cells and the American Diabetes Association has tried its best to eliminate and stop these protests.
UC Berkeley and Stanford University are two schools that are joining forces on a project to encourage cooperation among scientists who do stem cell research.
Doctors, biologists, chemists, engineers and computer scientists from the two schools previously mentioned, are coming together to discuss their work and to share it with students and faculty.
Both institutions are extremely involved in embryonic stem cell research that scientists foresee will offer managements or cures for diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
To represent the teamwork, Stanford and UC Berkeley plan to build separate laboratories for researches who constantly visit the campuses and especially for those who spend their time off with friends and colleagues from other universities.
A biotechnology company, VistaGen Therapeutics, Inc., utilizes embryonic stem cell technologies to find and develop new drugs for diabetes, announced an expansive embryonic stem cell research union with Toronto's University Health Network, Canada's leading research hospital, and its stem cell research colleague, the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine.
VistaGen has been positioned to carry on with influencing the knowledge about embryonic stem cell biology as well as Dr. Gordon Keller's technology about stem cell. Dr. Gordon Keller is one of the prominent figures in the stem cell research and he is also the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine's director. Dr. Keller and VistaGen look forward to highly developed techniques that would tell the difference in the stem cells for full grown beta-islet cells in liver, cardiac and pancreas. Furthermore, it is anticipated that the research about toxicology application about bioinformatics databases and vitro biological systems will be improved.
This research program can be seen on the licenses of Dr. Keller which were provided by VistaGen. These licenses were given for the intellectual property of the former embryonic stem cell. These also include research and findings about the recent embryonic stem cells.
VistaGen is also hopeful that the outcomes of the stem cell research will be useful in developing and finding the newer invention for the different systems that would be used in embryonic stem cell-based liver, pancreas and cardiac beta-islet differentiation. Moreover, VistaGen is hopeful that the results will be used to develop pioneering medications for heart and liver diseases as well as diabetes.
Spring Point Project, a different group of researcher as also exerted efforts to give treatments by using injectables. These injectables contain insulin-producing islet cells that were taken from pigs. According to these researches, healthy human islet cells in patients suffering from diabetes could reverse the symptoms of the disease as well as its effects and complications. However, the group could not proceed with this because access to human donor organs is restricted to the number of cells gathered.
Dr. Bernhard Hering, a world-renowned diabetes authority and scientific director of the Diabetes Institute for Immunology and Transplantation at the University of Minnesota, and his team ran test with pig islet cell transplants on monkeys and revealed that those cell transplants resulted in long-term diabetes reversal in the monkeys. A PowerPoint presentation incorporated a chart that showed unpredictable blood sugar counts in the monkeys achieving a level point. The application of pig parts in humans has been showing success in other areas, involving pig valves or bowels in transplants. Pig skin is already utilized in burn centers to replace human skin.
Due to the fact that this is introducing foreign cells into a body, those receiving the transplants would have to take medication to make sure they did not reject the cells. There could be side effects, but at this time, it is unknown how serious they could be, and the side effects could vary from patient to patient.
Sooner, the very first experiment on the different severities of diabetes will be clinically tried especially to those who cannot check their blood sugar levels constantly. These people are also those who experience different episodes of the disease.
Stem cell research will continue to be controversial for some time as long as the sources of the cells remain the same as they are today. If the stem cells can be derived from a source that the public is comfortable with, the controversy may decline.
Article Source: http://www.search-raven.com
About the Author
Julia Hanf author of the book How To Play the Diabetes Diet Game and Win Through a real life crisis Julia figured out how to live diabetes free. Visit http://www.yourdiabetescure.com and learn more about your solution for diabetes.
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by: JuliaHanf
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