Since their discovery, stem cells have received much excitement as well as controversy with both scientists and the general population. However, not everybody necessarily understands the basic properties of stem cells, or the fact that there is more than a single type of cell that falls within the “stem cell” category. Read on to learn more about the history of stem cell biology in order to provide a background for understanding the field of stem cell research as well as the enormous promise that stem cell treatment offers for regenerative medicine. Innovative Pain Solutions is a top provider of stem cell therapy Orlando residents trust. Call Innovative Pain Solutions today to find out more.
Discovery of Stem cells
Even though it is difficult to exactly pinpoint when and by whom what we today call “stem cells” were discovered first, the consensus is that the first scientists who rigorously labeled the key properties of a stem cell were Ernest McCulloch and James Till. Through their pioneering work in mice in the 1960s, they found the blood-forming stem cell, or hematopoietic stem cell (HSC). The definition of a stem cell is that it must be capable of both self-renewal (goes through cell division to create more stem cells) and differentiation into mature cell types. HSCs are multipotent, as they can still give rise to multiple cell types, but only to other types of blood cells. They are one of many types of adult stem cells, which are tissue-specific stem cells that are crucial for organ maintenance and repair in the adult body. For example, muscle has a population of adult stem cells which are unipotent, as they can only give rise to muscle cells. In 1981, Martin Evans and Matt Kauffman were the first to identify, isolate, and successfully culture ES cells through mouse blastocysts, a discovery which opened the doors to the creation of “murine genetic models,” which are mice that have had one or several of their genes deleted or otherwise tinkered with to study their function in disease.
Stem Cell Treatment
The possibilities in medicine that stem cell research presented were greatly magnified when James Thomson and collaborators began to isolate ES cells from human blastocysts. For the first time, scientists could, in theory, generate all the building blocks of our body in unlimited amounts. It was possible to create cell types for testing new therapeutics and perhaps even new transplantation methods that were previously not possible to put into action. Innovative Pain Solutions, who provides stem cell therapy Orlando residents rely on, notes that the stem cell field has expanded at an unprecedented pace in recent years. Today, these cells represent the future of personalized medicine, as they allow one to capture the unique genome of each individual in a cell type that is able to generate, in theory, all cell types in our body.
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Stem cell treatment represents the future of regenerative medicine. Call Innovative Pain Solutions today for more information about stem cell therapy Orlando residents trust.
