Stem Cell Therapy

"Gene therapy involves inserting genes into a person’s cells with the aim of providing treatment for a particular disease. At a very simplistic level, gene therapy is the use of a person’s own cells to provide a therapeutic effect. In most types of gene therapy, a healthy and normal gene is inserted into a cell or tissue to replace a gene that is abnormal and thus, produces disease. Delivery of the gene can be difficult and viruses are commonly used to ‘carry’ the normal gene into the cell......"


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Stem cell therapy in theory is meant to replace destroyed or damaged cell lines within a diseased tissue. It is based on the capacity of the stem cells to produce offspring of different cell families. for example a skin cell can birth only more skin cells. It would never be able to gave birth to a neuron. But a stem cell has no family restriction so it can give birth to various cell family types.

The best example for this could be a treatment for Parkinson disease. Parkinsos i s caused by the progressive death of a particular type of neurons in the brain stem in an area called substantia nigra. A stem cell therapy would lead to the implantation of a stem cell that would rapidly reproduce. Its offprings will be new specialized substantia nigra neurons that will replace the missing ones.

Adult stem cells may not be able to produce all cell types, which limits how adult stem cells can be used to treat diseases