Fake news or future cure?
Are stem cells the solution to human disease? From ‘Wonder stem cell cure for heart failure’ to ‘halting blindness’ you could be forgiven for thinking this is the case. But there are those that claim the technology is too ‘young’, and who are concerned that it is being used before it is safe. Still, stem cells have been touted as a cure for HIV, an antidote to ageing, and even a remedy for Andy Murray’s dodgy hip. So what makes journalists and scientists alike get so excited about stem cell research? And has it really provided the answers the papers claim it has? Well, the truth is a little more complicated than that.
The human body is made up of millions of different cells, most of which are specialised to carry out their own role. For instance, the muscle cells in our heart contain the instructions and machinery needed for our heart to beat. But stem cells are different — they have the incredible ability to develop into different types of cell, and so can help the growth or repair of diverse parts of the body.
It’s clear why this field sparks so much excitement — cells which can reproduce and change their features have huge potential. They have a central role in the growing field of ‘regenerative medicine’, which aims to find ways to repair or replace damaged parts of the body. Stem cells are also used in the laboratory to help understand how a disease develops, or to test new treatments.
For example, transplants using bone marrow stem cells have been used to treat leukaemia for decades, and genetically engineered mice — bred for medical research using stem cell technology to lack specific genes — have become vital for research . The BHF even launched its Mending Broken Hearts Appeal in 2011 with the hope of finding new ways to repair the damage caused by a heart attack. So where are we at?
Well, the Dr Who-style regeneration promised by the tabloids is still out of reach for now — but several important discoveries have been made through this funding, like the work done by Professor Paul Riley at the BHF Oxford Centre of Regenerative Medicine. His team discovered that the body’s lymphatic system — which transports white blood cells — plays a vital role in helping the heart repair itself after a heart attack.
But as time goes on, and more research is done, scientists — including several BHF-funded researchers — are continuing to develop new ways of potentially using stem cells to treat heart and circulatory diseases.
For instance Dr Richard Cubbon and his team at the University of Leeds are developing a way of reactivating stem cells taken from a person’s own blood. They hope that in the future they could be used to help heal damage to blood vessels caused by diabetes. Meanwhile, Dr Francessco Dazzi and his team at King’s College London are exploring why and how a type of stem cell known as a mesencymal stromal cell (MSC) could help limit the damage done by a heart attack. Understanding more about how MSCs can promote heart repair could help unlock their potential as a way to help prevent heart failure after heart injury.
As well as exploring ways to introduce stem cells into the body to help kickstart repair, several BHF-funded researchers are using cutting-edge technology to advance ways of growing and studying stem cells.
Stem cells can be manipulated and studied in the laboratory to help scientists understand the underlying processes of heart and circulatory diseases. These stem cells can also be used to test potential treatments and their side effects, without risk of harming people, to try and predict if a new treatment might be successful in a clinical trial. For example, Dr Sanjay Sinha and his team used stem cells to understand the underlying biology of a rare inherited condition called Marfan syndrome
The Imperial College BHF Centre of Regenerative Medicine, meanwhile, is using stem cells in many different, exciting ways. Similarly to Dr Sanjay Sinha, Professor Michael Schneider is using stem cell tissue to test drugs, by building a ‘heart attack in a dish’. Another group led by Professor Sian Harding is using stem cells to grow ‘heart patches’. These thumb-sized patches of tissue are still in their early days of development, but it’s hoped they could eventually be made from a patient’s own cells, creating a personalised repair patch to place on top of the heart and fix damage from conditions like heart failure.
And other researchers are refining these techniques. Induced pluripotent stem cells can be made to turn into heart muscle cells, but new cells grown in this way don’t behave exactly like ‘real’ adult heart cells would. The key to growing more ‘adult-like’ heart cells is likely to be in how they are grown. Dr Chris Denning and his team at the University of Nottingham are hoping to improve the process of growing these heart muscle cells using robots which have been taught how to grow them. They are using these robots to test how the environment that the cells are grown in can influence how quickly they become heart cells.
Dr Michela Noseda and her team at Imperial College London are also approaching stem cells in an innovative way. There’s some evidence that there could be stem cells actually within the heart itself — but if they are there, they are hard to identify. Dr Noseda is using technology known as ‘single cell RNA sequencing’ to study the genetic make-up of over 1,000 single heart cells to try to find markers of repair potential. These findings could eventually pave the way to a treatment for heart failure — a debilitating disease that currently has no cure.
Stem cell research may not have reached the heady heights that some news outlets claim it has, but it does show real promise and, one day, those headlines could be reality. In the meantime, BHF-funded researchers will continue to unravel the mystery of stem cells, and use them to help uncover clues about heart and circulatory diseases. So watch this space…
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Fake news or future cure?
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