Stem Cell: Construction or Destruction

STEM CELL TRANSPLANT:

CONSTRUCTION OR DESTRUCTION?

Chapter 1

Introduction

A. Background of the study

Nowadays creating cure for different diseases became easier because of advanced technology. There are lot of diseases out there but Cancer, the leading cause of death worldwide, must be focus on. Stem cell treatment is a type of intervention strategy that introduces new adult stem cells into damaged tissue in order to treat disease or injury. Many medical researchers believe that stem cell treatments have the potential to change the face of human disease and alleviate suffering. The ability of stem cells to self-renew and give rise to subsequent generations with variable degrees of differentiation capacities, offers significant potential for generation of tissues that can potentially replace diseased and damaged areas in the body, with minimal risk of rejection and side effects. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell_treatments)

Nowadays Stem cell treatments like bone marrow and umbilical cord blood stem cells transplants have been used to treat conditions such as leukaemia and lymphoma. During chemotherapy, most growing cells are killed by the cytotoxic agents. These agents cannot discriminate between the leukaemia or neoplastic cells, and the hematopoietic stem cells within the bone marrow. It is this side effect of conventional chemotherapy strategies that the stem cell transplant attempts to reverse through healthy bone marrow reintroduces functional stem cells to replace the cells lost in the host's body during treatment.

(http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Therapy/bone-marrow-transplant)

Embryonic Stem cell treatment is a stem cell transplant which uses pluripotent stem cell derived from an early-stage embryo. Human embryo reaches the blastocyst stage 4–5 days post fertilization, at which time they consist of 50–150 cells where the isolating the Embryoblast happen which results in destruction of the fertilized human embryo. While some...