CONTENTS

Before we get right into it, I’ll take a minute of your time to run you through a
brief overview. We will first be looking into a small introduction of stem cell
itself, moving on to a look into the history of stem cells, followed by a
comparison of how diseases were treated before and after stem cell therapy came
into play. After talking about stem cells in relation to the past, we will look into
its present applications, and finish off this presentation with what we expect the
future of stem cells to look like.

HISTORY OF STEM CELLS

Now, I cannot get further into detail about the present, without acknowledging
the past. We begin in the year
1956
First successful bone marrow transplant between a related donor and
recipient was performed in New York. (The patient, who has
leukaemia, and was given radiotherapy and then treated with healthy
bone marrow from an identical twin.)
Moving on to
1978
Blood stem cells are discovered in human umbilical cord blood. ( The
umbilical cord tissue itself was regarded as medical waste until 1991. But
subsequent studies show the importance of these cells lies in potential
clinical treatments of blood-borne diseases)
Consequently, in
1981

Mouse embryonic stem cells are derived for the first time. ( it was
done from the inner cell mass of a mouse blastocyst and grown in
vitro.)

2015
Japanese scientists grow and transplant a functioning kidney into a
living organism.
 2016
Lab-grown mouse eggs result in 11 apparently healthy live births.
(The research began with more than 300 embryos.)

COMPARISON
2. PARKINSON’S DISEASE
Before Stem Cell Therapy (1960s to present):
 Parkinson's disease was managed symptomatically using medications,
physical therapy, and deep brain stimulation (DBS).
 Medications to control symptoms and DBS have been widely used since the
1990s.
After Stem Cell Therapy (1990s to present):
 Stem cell therapy is being explored as a potential treatment for Parkinson's
disease.
The goal of stem cell therapy for Parkinson's disease is to replace destroyed brain
cells with healthy, undifferentiated stem cells. These stem cells can then
transform into brain cells and help regulate your dopamine levels. Experts
believe this can relieve many of the symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

ARTHRITIS
Before Stem Cell Therapy:

 Early to mid-20th century:

 Medications: Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) were
introduced, providing symptomatic relief for arthritis.
 Late 20th century:
 Medications: The use of corticosteroids and disease-modifying
antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) became more prevalent.
 Physical Therapy: Physical therapy was commonly employed to improve
joint function and mobility.
 Late 20th to early 21st century:
 Surgical Interventions: Joint replacement surgeries, such as knee or hip
replacements, became standard for severe cases.

Stem Cell Therapy (as a current potential treatment):

Stem cell injection for knee arthritis helps to repair the damaged tissue and
regrow the healthy cartilage in the knee. Stem cell therapy for knees involves the
collection of stem cells from the bone marrow of the patient.
STEM CELL BANKING

I would like to consider stem cells as the building blocks of life. And that’s why
I’d like to think of stem cell banking as a form of medical insurance.
In a nutshell, when babies are born, the blood in the umbilical cord is rich
in stem cells. The umbilical cord is clamped, cut and then the stem cells are
collected.
These stem cells can become specialised, with properties that scientists can use to
treat the root cause of health issues. Heart disease, for example. Spinal cord
injuries. Dementia. Even cancer, and honestly, Far too many to list here.
Babies have lots of stem cells, as you can imagine. As building blocks, they’re
essential for natural body growth and repair.
When we age, we lose these cells. Or rather, we have fewer of them in relation to
the other cells in our bodies.
Therefore, it makes sense to store them when they are at their most plentiful.
Which is: soon after birth. Logically speaking, these same stem cells could end
up saving that baby’s life in the future, if a case of injury were ever to happen.

USAGE OF STEM CELLS IN TREATMENT OF DIABETES

Naturally, the use of stem cells doesn’t just stop there. Here’s something
interesting for you. There are 537 million people over the world living with
diabetes, and that number is growing.

It’s one of the few diseases where a single cell type is destroyed or missing. And
so the idea that you could create those cells and replace them, you can really
address the underlying causal biology of the disease directly. The theory is to
turn stem cells into functional insulin producing cells.

Diabetes happens when your body attacks your pancreas with antibodies. The
organ is damaged and doesn't make insulin. Insulin is a hormone that regulates
blood glucose levels -- without it, blood glucose becomes too high, causing
diabetes and its many complications
Current treatments in such cases include manual and wearable-pump injections of
insulin, which have multiple drawbacks including pain, potentially inefficient
glucose control, and the necessity of wearing cumbersome equipment.
Stem cells from the human stomach can be converted into cells that secrete
insulin in response to rising blood sugar levels, offering a promising approach to
treating diabetes according to a preclinical study from researchers at Weill
Cornell Medicine.
In the study, which appeared April 27 in Nature Cell Biology, the researchers
showed that they could take stem cells obtained from human stomach tissue and
reprogram them directly—with strikingly high efficiency—into cells that closely
resemble pancreatic insulin-secreting cells known as beta cells. Transplants of
small groups of these cells reversed disease signs in a mouse model of diabetes.

And this is what leads us to the next big thing, a bio artificial pancreas

BIOARTFICIAL PANCREAS
The whole point here is to replace the function of a whole pancreas. And this gets
replaced by implanting cells into the body while protecting them using a plastic
pouch. People who have type1 diabetes wake up one day and they have lost of
insulin-producing cells within their pancreas and that causes very high blood
sugars, which can be deadly if not treated with insulin. They then learn that they
have to use insulin for a lifetime in order to control their blood sugars. And
unfortunately these insulin injections that are currently available are not minute-
to-minute regulating which is very problematic.
And a way to go around this is by providing a functional cure by replacing the
function of a pancreas with a subset of cells that actually produce and release
insulin in response to the rise in blood sugar.
Biomedical researchers aim to replace beta-cell function in a more natural way,
with transplants of human cells that work as beta cells do: automatically sensing
blood sugar levels and secreting insulin as needed. Ideally, such transplants
would use patients’ own cells, to avoid the problem of transplant rejection.

Dr. Zhou has been working toward this goal for more than 15 years. In early
experiments as a postdoctoral researcher, he discovered that ordinary pancreatic
cells could be turned into insulin-producing beta-like cells by forcing the
activation of three transcription factors—or proteins that control gene expression
—resulting in the subsequent activation of genes required for the development of
normal beta cells. In a 2016 study, again in mice, he and his team showed that
certain stem cells in the stomach, called gastric stem cells, are also highly
sensitive to this three-factor activation method.
The stomach makes its own hormone-secreting cells, and stomach cells and
pancreatic cells are adjacent in the embryonic stage of development, so in that
sense it isn’t completely surprising that gastric stem cells can be so readily
transformed into beta-like insulin-secreting cells

Dr. Zhou said that he and his lab still need to optimize their method in various
ways before it can be considered for clinical use. Necessary improvements
include methods to increase the scale of beta-cell production for transplants to
humans, and modifications of the beta-like cells to make them less vulnerable to
the type of immune attack that initially wipes out beta cells in type 1 diabetes
patients.
Ultimately, the researchers hope to develop a technique enabling the relatively
easy harvesting of gastric stem cells from patients, followed by the transplant,
weeks later, of insulin-secreting organoids that regulate blood sugar levels
without the need for further medication.

GRAPH EXPLANATION

Now, take a look at this pie chart over here. It shows the percentage of work done
with different stem cell types today. The highest percentile you can see here is
for mesenchymal stem cells, at 21%, followed by iPSC induced pluripotent stem
cells (19%), as you can see, cancer stem cells has a 17% of work being done on
it, and Embryonic stem cells are at 14%. Also, neuronal stem cells 11% use and
then other stem cells 6% use. The main objective behind this is mostly basic
research and development of stem cell-based therapeutics, regenerative medicine.

CONCLUSION
After several decades of experiments, stem cell therapy is becoming a
magnificent game changer for medicine. With each experiment, the capabilities
of stem cells are growing, although there are still many obstacles to overcome.
With stem cell therapy and all its regenerative benefits, we are better able to
prolong human life than at any time in history.