Is this a risk in all fields of stem cell therapy? I am particularly interested in using stem cells for macular degeneration.
It depends on which type of stem cells that you use in your study. Generally, there are still concerns of using pluoripotent/totipotent stem cells for cell therapy even these types of cells are "differentiated" into specific cell types. It is hard to convince that these cells can be 100% induced to differentiate into specific type of cells. Once if one cell is not committed, it has chance to develop a teratocarcinoma in patient's body.
you can refer to this article for more information on the use of induced pluripotent stem cells iPSCs in the treatment of macular degeneration
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4117985/
Hi, these cells are grown in culture in order to use for treatments. During culture it was found that these cells underwent chromosomal changes, including changes that signified cancer growth.
In healthy cells, each cell has two copies of each chromosome, but in these embryonic cells, three pairs of chromosomes were discovered and the third pair were able to rapidly overpower the other normal pairs, causing cancerous growths.
It depends on which type of stem cells that you use in your study. Generally, there are still concerns of using pluoripotent/totipotent stem cells for cell therapy even these types of cells are "differentiated" into specific cell types. It is hard to convince that these cells can be 100% induced to differentiate into specific type of cells. Once if one cell is not committed, it has chance to develop a teratocarcinoma in patient's body.
Hiya Charlotte,
Reasons could be:
1. The stem cells aquire a mutation prior to the transplant.
2. The crosstalk exposure to a cytokine that inhibits a tumor supperessor gene in them.
3. they aquire a mutation after transplant, but before differentiation at retina or the site.
Hope this helps.
Best,
Mannan
One of the first tests for ES used to be teratoma formation....
But this does not happen with adult stem cells like mammary gland, messenchymal stem cells, neural stem cells, just to mention a few.
It does happen, however with iPS
It also happens when you use Cancer Stem Cells
For the same reasons any stem cell becomes cancerous. The cancerization may have happened either before, during, or after the transplant.
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