Exper­i­men­ta­tion

In spite of the fact that many coun­tries are hav­ing trou­ble defin­ing the legal use of stem cells and pro­hibit some cru­cial appli­ca­tions of them, a new tech­nique was recently exper­i­mented with at the Spire Hos­pi­tal in Southamp­ton, United Kingdom.

Stem cell

New method
One of the first oper­a­tions was done on a 39 y.o male suf­fer­ing from a bone dis­ease that caused him pain on move­ment. Actu­ally the new method of per­for­mance would com­ply with many legal restric­tions con­nected to embry­onic cells whose use has been com­pletely avoided by exploit­ing stem cells from bone mar­row extracted by the sur­geons from donors´ pelvis. On top of that any pos­si­ble proth­e­sis rejec­tions or the issue itself of look­ing for and wait­ing for a com­pat­i­ble donor would be avoided by tak­ing the bone mar­row from the patient’s body.

Actu­ally the donated bones are degraded pieces taken from patients who needed and were already pro­vided of a joint replace­ment. That means that side effects would stay for those donors.

Fol­low­ing the stem cell extrac­tion the sur­geons puri­fied the stem cells and mixed them with cleaned bone from a donor who had already had the bone replaced. Finally the dead tis­sue, a con­se­quence of the dis­ease, was removed and the cav­ity was filled with the mix­ture. Sub­se­quently the stem cells are to gen­er­ate new tis­sue by them­selves and to drive the for­ma­tion of new blood ves­sels in order to bring in nutri­ents which guar­an­tee the cells’ sur­vival and growth.

The future

As a next step doc­tors are aim­ing to improve the tech­nique with the appli­ca­tion of an arti­fi­cial chem­i­cal mate­r­ial sup­port­ing the stem cells’ growth. The ben­e­fit of that would be using this mate­r­ial in place of the donated human bones, and pre­vent the use of joint replace­ments even for those patients. Some of the most unpleas­ant side effects of the cur­rent proth­e­sis are in fact the device sub­sti­tu­tion occur­ring repeat­edly through the patient’s life and a pos­si­ble rejec­tion or slip­ping after the operation, which means new dis­tress­ing oper­a­tions, a pro­long­ing of the treat­ment and last but not least a con­sid­er­able wors­en­ing of the patient’s life quality.

As soon as the next goal is pur­sued all of those tem­po­rary mea­sures will be over. Even­tu­ally as a very pos­i­tive con­se­quence of this new pro­ce­dure and its fore­cast enhance­ment, the treat­ment time would be con­sid­er­ably short­ened and on top of that the time wasted in wait­ing for a donor to be avail­able would be com­pletely eliminated.

Any­way the new pro­ce­dure has to show long term results before its full oper­a­tion is con­firmed. That day when poten­tial good results are ver­i­fied, its use could open the way to a com­plete replace­ment of proth­e­sis and any arti­fi­cial devices apt to sub­sti­tute human joints.

Improv­ing life quality

On the other hand to pro­vide evi­dence of the first new pro­ce­dure suc­cesses, a patient oper­ated on one year ago can already say that he can walk nor­mally and with­out pain. Only one fail­ure has resulted from six patients oper­ated on so far, thus the future is going to pro­vide a high per­cent­age of cases hav­ing a pos­i­tive out­come to be really sat­is­fied about, that will improve patient life qual­ity, an aspect of the utmost impor­tance in dis­ease treat­ments.

Obstacles

Whereas eth­i­cal issues would be pre­vented from being fur­ther dis­cussed, new obsta­cles would be raised by multi­na­tion­als oper­at­ing in that trade, that could drive pub­lic opin­ion against the inno­va­tion and could con­se­quently influ­ence global expen­di­ture in order to enable their busi­ness the sur­vival of, or even boost, their business.

Pos­i­tive social impact
How­ever, the life qual­ity improve­ment due to the new tech­nique is going to result in a pos­i­tive social impact which is at the base of any discovery’s ful­fill­ment and prop­a­ga­tion. In other words people´s needs and strengths would be the deci­sive fac­tors that could quickly drive many of the above men­tioned busi­nesses out of the market.

A poten­tial new grow­ing market

It is highly likely that those com­pa­nies would soon be advised to rethink their prod­ucts and pos­si­bly replace them with an active sup­port to meth­ods involv­ing the uti­liza­tion of stem cells. For instance, the pro­duc­tion of arti­fi­cial mate­r­ial nur­tur­ing the stem cells, whose employ­ment doc­tors are going to set up in the near future, could early become one of the key prod­ucts of a poten­tial new grow­ing market.