Stem Cells

During the 1800’s scientists recognized that the cells in the human body were the basic building blocks of life and that cells were able to produce other cells. This was a very important discovery because it lead to further research and by the early 1900’s scientists in Europe came to find out that all blood cells come from one particular “stem cell”. Recently this type of research has been able to lead to new discoveries which have lead to bone marrow transplants that have helped to combat a number of diseases. Researchers at both the University of Wisconsin and John Hopkins University, who in 1998, isolated and grew stem cells from human embryos and germ cells, made the most prolific discovery of late. By late 1999 and early 2000, researchers discovered that of they manipulated tissues in adult mice; they could develop unsuspected cell types that led them to believe that stem cells could help to develop other cells, such as liver and nerve cells.

After that brief history lesson it is best to now delve into what stem cell research is all about and what it hopes to accomplish. Research on stem cells is advancing knowledge about how an organism develops from a single cell and how healthy cells replace damaged cells in adult organisms. This promising area of science is also leading scientists to investigate the possibility of cell-based therapies to treat disease, which is often referred to as regenerative or reparative medicine. Although the area of stem cell research is very massive and it is impossible to delve completely into the phenomenon of this type of research, the following is a short attempt to describe the fundamentals of stem cell research. Stem cells are cells that can either divide to produce more stem cells or, under appropriate conditions, can become specialized by differentiating into various cell types, such as nerve and muscle. There are two important characteristics of stem cells, which are as follows; stem cells are unspecialized cells that renew themselves for long periods of time through cell division and the under certain conditions they can be induced to become cells with special functions. Scientists are intensively studying these two areas in order to develop treatments because they are the fundamental properties of stem cells. Additionally there are two types of stem cells that are primarily used in research facilities. The first is embryonic stem cells, which are “undifferentiated cells from the embryo that have the potential to become a wide variety of specialized cell types”. The second is adult stem cells which are “undifferentiated cells found in differentiated tissue that can renew itself and differentiate to yield all the specialized cell types of the tissue from which it originated”.

Using this type of research and technological discoveries scientists have been able to treat a number of diseases and expect to be able to treat even more in the future with more research. The

Robert Fontaine

treatments that use stem cell research most often are bone-marrow transplants. This is in fact stem cell therapy. It can also be used in the treatment of breast cancer, but this is a controversial issue. Additionally, stem cell therapy is used in a variety of blood diseases such as leukemia and aplastic anemia. Furthermore stem cells have been used in human organ transplants, helping the newly transplanted organs to take hold in the body. In the future scientists hope that stem cell research will be able to treat patients with Parkinson’s disease, diabetes and heart disease.

As previously mentioned, the most prolific form of stem cell therapy is through bone marrow transplants as a result of diseases such as leukemia. According to a study published by the Duke University Medical Center, bone marrow transplants cost estimates vary greatly depending on the diagnosis, type of cancer and length of stay as well as out patient care. Overall the results were very startling. The mean cost for a bone marrow transplant for the major cancers ranged from a low of $66,796 to a high of $111,134. This type of evidence clearly shows that these procedures are highly expensive.

After analyzing the high costs of bone marrow transplants it seems ever so obvious that these procedures place a heavy burden on the health care system in the United States. The responsibility of paying for these costs fall onto the insurance companies. As a result of this, the areas of the health care system is greatly affected both in a positive and negative way. The positive aspects of this is that as a result of bone marrow transplants the cost for the patients afterwards is reduced because they will need less care and treatment in the future. Additionally these life-sustaining procedures will allow for people with these terrible diseases to live a better life. The negative aspects of these procedures