Breakthrough In Stem Cell Treatments For Heart Patients Says Cedars Sinai Hospital
In an announcement that stunned the medical community and industry this past week, doctors at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in California announced that their clinical trials using adult stem cells has resulted in astonishing improvements for patients who had suffered both heart attacks and resulting congestive heart failure.
The improvements were so astonishing that further trials have been greenlighted and the medical world sits on the edge of its seat waiting for further news.
Cedars hasn’t been the first hospital or medical center in the world to show improvements using adult stem cells for cardiovascular diseases. Cedars’ experiment however used stem cells from the patient’s own heart to boost repair. Other cardio stem cell treatments used bone marrow stem cells and some used embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stem cells are now frowned upon for two reasons. One being the ethical question regarding embryos and the other because many top doctors discovered and warned that embryonic stem cells can become cancerous.
The use of bone marrow stem cells was introduced commercially successfully by Mr. Don Margolis who opened up his labs and treatment centers in Thailand and Israel. Margolis is a real pioneer who not only opened the first commercially successful adult stem cell treatment center but also the first illustrated childrens book on repair stem cells called “Doris and the Supercells”.
There are many others who have ventured into adult stem cell treatment but the announcement at Cedars is from the United States that was slow in venturing into the stem cell arena. Russia, China, Japan, Israel, Russia and Germany to name a few had gone gung ho with both adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells. Their reports of their trials have been overwhelmingly successful except the embryonic stem cell treatments.
We now see an American based medical institute, in fact two of them as the trials are now setting for the second trial and third trial. If both pan out and they appear so far to do so, a revolution in health care will have occurred. It’s controversial because American medical procedure appears to be a methodical one that takes years, however, we’ve seen how some drugs, pharmaceuticals and food products seem to get an okay rather rapidly especially if lobbied for by big business. This sometimes turns to be afoul for some manufacturers as several high profile medications have been pulled off the shelves after having been found to be dangerous.
The controversy with stem cells is going to continue for some time in the US because of the apparent competition it gives to the standard model of pharmaceutical companies and their investors. The reason being is that the techniques for this new heart treatment procedure are rather easy and cheap to perform and will be far more fine tuned by the end of the trials as well. Once that occurs and people are found to have their damaged hearts and other tissues that scientists had long professed could not be healed. This new finding throws out all that old technology and science and opens the door to new applications of the new stem cell technologies. What if the same miracles can be performed on other damaged organs? It would revolutionize medicine as we know it, end long term care that is expensive, bring people back to health who otherwise were looking at certain death or long term disability.
It’s going to be interesting to see what lies next in the US pursuit regarding adult stem cell treatments for the heart and other illnesses.
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