Stem Cell Lines Derived to Avoid Immune Rejection

stemceller brings us a story about an experiment that was published online in the journal Cloning & Stem Cells. The paper demonstrated that embryonic stem cells can be used to develop therapeutic cells which will not provoke an immune response from a significant portion of the population. This comes alongside news that UC Irvine researchers have found a method of sorting stem cells that should be "quicker, easier and more cost-effective than current methods." The Cloning & Stem Cells publication states: "It is likely that treatment of large numbers of patients by cell therapy will only be possible if methods are found using any one cell line to treat very large numbers of patients. This very exciting paper represents a significant step forward towards the use of such cells in cell therapy."

HLA homozygote

[David Munch]

I was wondering how they would do this.. And surprise, according to the article they are using a homozygote for the most prevalent HLA gene in the US, which means that this probably will only be for ~20% of the US population, and on top of that probably *only* in the US and not the rest of the world. But of course, it could open up for several stem-cell lines and I still see it as a great achievement.

Teratomas?

[Hal_Porter]

Seems like a risk of teratomas if you get these things injected into you.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1748928.stm [bbc.co.uk]

Re:The most important thing ...

[fredclown]

Pro-life advocates prefer adult stem cells because it does not require the destruction of an embryo. Preferring life is not an emotional argument. It is in fact a reasonable argument. What is unreasonable is anti-life(to use your own line of reasoning) advocates who claim that a developing baby is not fully human, when at 6 weeks there is a heart beat including a developed nervous system and brain waves. These brain waves are not supplied by the mother. The pumping heart is not the mothers. It is the child's and thus is it's own life form. The mother does not grow the child, the child grows itself. The mother only serves as an incubation chamber. There are reasonable arguments to be pro-life. Simply because you disagree with the position does not man that the arguments are based only on emotion. You sir or mam are simply trying to set up a straw man argument that you can easily push over to make your views look better and to ease your conscience.