Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Adult Stem-Cell UPDATE: Adult Stem-Cells Transformed into Functional Lung Cells!

It's been one of our mantras here at A Shepherd's Voice since Fr. Malloy, the Church and others opposed California's Proposition 71 in 2004: Are California voters having second thoughts yet about shelling out $3 billion + for immoral & unproven embryonic stem cell research, which has yet to show a single cure, while adult stem cells are curing people left and right?

This is from Stem Cells Freak, a website devoted to  stem-cell news:

"Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center announced today that they have succeeded in transforming human induced pluripotent stem cells into functional lung and airway cells.

The advance, has significant potential for modeling lung disease, screening drugs, studying human lung development, and, ultimately, generating lung tissue for transplantation.

"Researchers have had relative success in turning human stem cells into heart cells, pancreatic beta cells, intestinal cells, liver cells, and nerve cells, raising all sorts of possibilities for regenerative medicine. Now, we are finally able to make lung and airway cells.
 
This is important because lung transplants have a particularly poor prognosis. Although any clinical application is still many years away, we can begin thinking about making autologous lung transplants -- that is, transplants that use a patient's own skin cells to generate functional lung tissue.", said study leader Hans-Willem Snoeck, MD, PhD (above, left), professor of medicine (in microbiology & immunology) and affiliated with the Columbia Center for Translational Immunology and the Columbia Stem Cell Initiative."

God bless all scientists who are ethically doing so much to better the human condition!


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