ANOTHER ADULT STEM CELL Breakthrough?

Because MOST people won't read far enough (as pointed out by Diogenes... I have put it here, and put emphasis on the IMPORTANT WORDS ... note the LACK of the term EMBRYONIC ... which has had NO success.... The full story can be found here.

BUT, as Diogenes pointed out, the IMPORTANT information starts about the tenth paragraph down.... the only real progress has come from Adult Stem Cells or Cord Blood Stem Cells, NEITHER of which requires that ANYONE die in order to harvest them!!

God bless!

By using chemical and physical nudges, the scientists first coaxed stem cells extracted from bone marrow to grow into heart valve cells. By placing these cells into scaffolds made of collagen, Dr Chester and his colleague Patricia Taylor then grew small 3cm-wide discs of heart valve tissue. Later this year, that tissue will be implanted into animals - probably sheep or pigs - and monitored to see how well it works as part of a circulatory system.

If that trial works well, Prof Yacoub is optimistic that the replacement heart tissue, which can be grown into the shape of a human heart valve using specially-designed collagen scaffolds, could be used in patients within three to five years.

Growing a suitably-sized piece of tissue from a patient's own stem cells would take around a month but he said that most people would not need such individualised treatment. A store of ready-grown tissue made from a wide variety of stem cells could provide good matches for the majority of the population.