Stem Cell FAQ Page 3
Q: Have people already begun taking stem cells in experiments?
A: So far, few people have been experimentally treated with stem cells. In most cases, stem cells were used to treat patients who had very advanced diseases. More research on many more people will be needed before we have an idea of how well stem cells work.
In September 2006, European researchers reported promising results from clinical trials to test whether injections of bone marrow cells can repair heart attack damage.
Some scientists think bone marrow cells contain stem cells, but that hasn’t been proven yet.
Q: Are stem cell treatments going to be safe?
A: This is a very important question, and there are no good answers at this point. If the stem cells came from another person, they could carry infections that that person has. This is a significant concern nowadays, particularly because of HIV/AIDS, but it is not likely to be a problem. Doctors already screen blood thoroughly for HIV and many other diseases, and they would definitely screen stem cells for things like HIV and other potential problems.
A bigger concern may be cancer. Most normal cells divide a certain number of times and then die. When cells are grown in the laboratory, as stem cells are, they can get “immortalized.” That is, they can go on dividing endlessly — similar to cancer cells. Immortalized cells are not cancer cells, but they are one step closer to cancer cells than normal cells. Thus, it is possible that they may someday form cancer.
Unfortunately, there is no way to know for sure without actually doing stem cell treatments. Doctors will be watching patients who receive stem cell treatments very closely, so if such a problem developed, they could treat it early.
“Safety is always the first priority. You don’t want to cause anything that the patient didn’t have before. So we are addressing those problems. We wouldn’t go into clinical trials before doing that,” Dominguez-Bendala says.
Q: When could stem cell therapy be widely available?
A: Much work lies ahead, as well as FDA review. Treatments such as stem cells are first developed to fight a specific disease in the laboratory, then they are extensively studied in animals. If these studies are promising, they are then studied in humans. Initially, they are tested in small groups to see if they are safe, then they are tested in larger and larger numbers of patients to see if they are safe and if they are effective. FDA approval is then required for treatment.
Source credit: http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/stem-cells-11-questions-answers