In June of 2012, Nina Tandon, a tissue engineer, spoke about
her interesting field and its potential to revolutionize the field of medical
diagnosis and testing. Today method of
creating new medicine is lengthy, expensive, and risky. To create a new drug it
can cost as much as one billion dollars and take up to ten years before
reaching the available market. Once a drug is formulated it hast to undergo
laboratory testing, animal testing followed by human testing before being able
to be approved by the FDA. Even when a
medicine has made it through testing and final approval many people don’t react
the same way as the tests indicated causing more harm than good. Nina and her
colleges have designed a new method in tissue engineering that they hope can
pave the path for a new way of prescribing medicine and treating disease.
Stem cell research has been a controversial topic in
headlines for years. The stem cells that cause the most controversy are:
embryonic, fetal, and umbilical stem cells, which are harvested from the
placenta or aborted fetuses. However, adult stem cells are taken from numerous
cells in the body, blood cells or even skin cells. The problem with these types
of stem cells are they are less flexible the sense they can not turn into as
many types of cells as the embryonic or fetal stem cells. However, recently a
new tactic was discovered that induced human cells back into their embryonic
state. Scientists could then mold these cells into any type of tissue they
desired, they called these induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). This is first
time scientists have been able to grow tissues from their own cells.
Think about the possibilities that this new discovery could
have in prescribing more precise medicine to patients. If a person came into
the hospital with a certain disease, doctors could ideally take a sample of a
person’s skin or blood and create an identical computerized model in which to
test different drugs and gauge their effectiveness. Doctors could do hundreds
or even thousands of different trials in a matter of hours compared to years
that today’s medicine has taken. This breakthrough could lead to precise
customized medicine that will be effective to that person’s chemistry. Sound far-fetched? This could very well be
the way future diseases are diagnosed and treated.
Your post is great. A couple years back I did some research about testing future medicine on animals, and you are right. It takes some years to develop cures using animals as test subjects and then running tests on humans. Also, when medicines are finally created and introduced to the public, side-effects are discovered. This is sometimes due to testing medicines on animals or creating medicine for the general public, not for the individual. This is why, as you said, it would be better and quicker to create cures from stem cells. However, there is a clear debate on whether they should be used. What side do you take on this issue?
ReplyDeleteThank you, as for my stance on the use of stem cells I say most definitely.Stem cell research is a ground break study that could revolutionize the way medicine is dealt with today. Although its practical use is still far from perfect it would be wasteful not to study them regardless of where the specimen was extracted.
DeleteThis was a really textured post. You have quite a bit going on here, and the science is fascinating to read about. So I'm going to make a jump here and ask: so are tissue engineers the researchers that work on stem cells? You don't make that explicit, but I think it's necessary for readers to know so that they understand the science better, right? And what type of background do tissue engineers have? Are they MDs? PhDs? One other question I have: why would placental cells be controversial?
ReplyDeleteThis is a really cool concept. I don't know how much more research has been done concerning it, but I do know that there is more customized medicine being developed. It's mostly for people who don't see any effects with normal drugstore products or the normal prescriptions.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.pottershouserx.com/customized-medicine.html