“This is really where, I think, so much of biomedicine is going to be going in the 21st century,” says Dr Andrew Yeager of the University of Pittsburgh. According to the National Institute of Health, stem cells may one day be able to repair the body’s tissue and muscle and cure everything from spinal cord injuries to Alzheimer’s.
“It’s not just pie-in-the-sky speculation,” says Yeager. “There are studies that would suggest that other organ dysfunction – nerve damage, heart damage, brain cell damage – might actually be fixed.”
It has the potential to make paralyzed patients walk and Alzheimer’s sufferers remember.
That potential is what Dr Yeager was counting on to cure a young patient named Keone Penn. Keone suffers from a case of sickle cell, a painful genetic blood disease. He was diagnosed when he was 6 months old. The odds were that Keone had, at best, 5 years to live. So Yeager decided to take a chance on a new procedure. Never before had stems cells from umbilical cord blood been used to treat sickle cell. It was umbilical cord stems cells that cured Keone.
