If you have damaged tissues, lost limbs or organ problems, then what would you prefer? Organ transplant is a complex option and needs a lot of money and time for healing. You want to have a way to restore your damaged tissues so that you can be healthy again. Fortunately, there is a branch of science-based medicine that has got success to solve the problem of restoring damaged cells and tissues, which is known as regenerative therapy or stem cell therapy.
They are unspecialized cells with an extraordinary ability to self-renew, capable of differentiating into one or more specialized cell types playing a crucial role in homeostasis and tissue repair. When called into action following an injury, a stem cell self-renews – undergoes cell division and gives rise to one daughter stem cell and one progenitor cell. A progenitor cell is an intermediate cell type formed before it achieves a fully differentiated state. It is regarded as committed to differentiating along a particular cellular developmental pathway of stem cells:
Stem cell → Stem cell + Progenitor cell → Differentiated cell
Characteristics of Stem Cell
- Totipotency: generate all types of cells including germ cells (ESCs).
- Pluripotency: generate all types of cells except cells of the embryonic membrane.
- Multipotency: differentiate into more than one mature cell (MSC).
- Self-renewal: divide without differentiation and create everlasting supply.
- Plasticity: MSCs have plasticity and can undergo differentiation. The trigger for plasticity is stress or tissue injury which up regulates the stem cells and releases chemo attractants and growth factors.
Differentiation capacities to make new cells:
- Direct differentiation: a specific type of cell in a special niche developed in a multistep unidirectional pathway (e.g., MSCs differentiating into osteoblasts/fibroblasts).
- Transdifferentiation: direct conversion of one cell type to another different cell type (e.g., blood cells into brain cells and vice versa).
- Dedifferentiation: a unipotent stem cell becoming a multipotent one.
- Cell fusion: a stem cell fusing with a somatic cell resulting in another lineage (e.g., ESCs fuse in vitro with HSCs and neuronal cells).
WHY STEM CELL RESEARCH?
- Advances in stem cell research have explored many therapeutic avenues and the insight gained by a pilot proof of concept studies promises a plethora of unimaginable benefits:
- They are useful in functional genomic studies to understand human embryonic gene expression, genomic data mining, and bioinformatics.
- They serve to study biological processes which help in understanding human developmental disorders like birth defects, cancers, etc.
- They are new means of creating human disease models for drug discovery and development. It serves as an alternative to animal toxicology thereby hastening the drug to the market.
The most crucial and exciting of all stem cell uses is cell-based therapy.
Cell-based therapy
- Adult stem cells have been used in pilot studies as potential cell-based therapy for various diseases. The following stem cell characteristics make them good candidates for cell-based therapy:[9]
- Potential to be harvested from patients
- High capacity of cell proliferation in culture
- Ease of manipulation to replace existing nonfunctional genes via gene splicing methods
- Ability to migrate to host target tissues (homing)
- Ability to integrate into host tissues and interact with the surrounding tissues.
POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS IN MEDICINE
Stem cells are being explored for a variety of chronic debilitating diseases that have so far escaped remedial measures from traditional allopathic approaches with a hope that cell therapy would repair, repopulate, replace, and rewire tissues and organs regenerating hope and kindling confidence in such therapies.
Benefits of stem cell treatment in India
A patient can go anywhere to get such a treatment, so why New Delhi, India. The place is home to a number of world class hospitals and research institutions, which boasts of qualified doctors and latest devices to perform stem cell treatment. Regenerative medicine or therapy is an alternative option for patients when other treatments have failed. The success of the procedure increases by manifold when the patient is in good health and get the stem cells available from a sibling, or any other family member.
Procedure of stem cell therapy in New Delhi, India
Before advising this therapy, healthcare service providers would create a treatment plan depending upon the condition of the patient. Once the patient gets ready and mentally prepare for it, an appointment is scheduled with professionals for bone marrow extraction. Since it is a minimally invasive surgical procedure so patients should not be afraid of. Discuss everything in detail with your surgeon before the procedure. The cost of the procedure is also very low compared to other countries drags patients from all over the world.
Take Viezec’s assistance to smoothen the treatment procedure
Viezec is a well experience in health care industry for the past couple of years. It has collaboration with the multispecialty hospitals and research institutions of India to ensure best treatment of international patients at cost effective rates.The multispecialty hospitals and research institutions are well equipped with specialized team of doctors,finest infrastructure, modern equipment and are offering the International standards of hygiene for the comfortable of foreign Patients. It also provides language translation services, VISA assistance, pick and drop and accommodation assistance. So before planning your visit, get expert opinion.
