STEM CELL BASED THERAPIES ON NEURODEGENERATIVE DISEASES

What do we know about stem cells, and what can we do with them ? Embryonic stem cell research is a highly debated and sensitive topic.  Such good can come from researching this technology because many people would benefit from it. So if major disabilities can be partially or fully treated, why don't we utilize them? 

Stem cells are the building blocks of life. These cells are able to divide indefinitely, forming hundreds of copies of themselves but of course a limited capacity. However, that is not a unique property. What makes them so important is that within themselves, stem cells hold immense potential. They are categorized as pluripotency,multipotency,unipotency,totipotency which means that they can develop into any cell of the human body; thus, not only can they build an entire organism from scratch, they can also be used to develop healthy tissues or organs that could replace damaged ones.

In mammals, there are two broad types of stem cells: embryonic stem cells, which are isolated from the inner cell mass of blastocysts, and adult  stem cells, which are found in various tissues. 
In adult organisms, stem cells and progenitor cells act as a repair system for the body, replenishing adult tissues. In a developing embryo, stem cells can differentiate into all specialized cells—ectoderm, endoderm and mesoderm but also maintain the normal turnover of regenerative organs, such as blood, skin, or intestinal tissues.

Adult stem cells are generally multipotent or unipotent where they can differantiate into either one or two type of cells. Once a cell become differantiated has its final lineage and becomes to somatic cell as fibroblasts skin tissue etc. Stem cell becomes first the progenitor, they have usually a unipotency which means that they can only make one type of cell and differantiate in to one type of cell. Yet we still don’t know clearly where do the adult stem cells originated from.Their origin is more contraversial..

In 2006, Yamanaka’s team found out that differentiated cells can be reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state by transfer of nuclear contents into oocytes or by fusion with embryonic stem (ES) cells. There are several important transcription factors to induce the reprogramming of differantiate cells.

Those factors are Oct4,Klf4,Myc and Sox2.But yet still a little is known about those factors. There are three different ways to induce the pluripotency; Nuclear transfer, cell fusion, transcription factor based induction. Optimizing the cells stability is the main challenge.

Isn’t the cures for diseases like Parkinson's, Alzeimer’s and cancer not something that humans have been intensively searching for in the past half century? So when a possibility finally arises, why should we give up and try another path? We should work together both for the present, and for the future... 

NAZLI SERIN