Stem cells are unique because they have the power to differentiate into every cell type in your body, while also being capable of self-renewing and maturing into specialized adult cells.
Kidney diseases often progress into end-stage renal failure, necessitating dialysis or kidney transplant surgery as the only treatment options. Stem cell therapy could potentially halt or even reverse kidney damage.
How Stem Cells Work
Cells within our bodies serve different functions, yet all begin as stem cells. Stem cells possess the capacity to become any type of cell within the body – including blood, skin, heart muscle cells and even kidney epithelial cells that repair damage caused by glomerulonephritis.
Stem cells can be found in bone marrow and umbilical cord blood. Over the years, physicians have used hematopoietic stem cell transplantation as an effective means of treating blood cancers and diseases like leukemia.
Scientists have recently demonstrated their ability to reprogram differentiated cells back to stem cell states, potentially allowing them to generate healthy tissue in a laboratory that could potentially treat disease. For instance, scientists are working on creating pancreatic cells that could replace damaged ones found in people living with diabetes; this could potentially bring relief by increasing body’s insulin production capabilities again.
Advantages
Stem cells possess remarkable healing power that allows them to replace damaged tissues and organs, significantly improving lives of kidney disease sufferers who do not respond to traditional treatments.
Stem cells have the capacity to become differentiated adult cells with specific functions within the body, providing a great resource for developing medications to treat kidney disorders or any number of conditions.
Mesenchymal stem cells have been demonstrated to accelerate renal regeneration processes and aid tubular regeneration following acute injury, while also producing growth factors and cytokines that help mitigate inflammation in the kidneys.
Mesenchymal stem cells have also been successfully transplanted into ischemic kidneys without any instances of rejection, although further research needs to be conducted on their long-term effects on glomerular and tubular functions. Furthermore, standard protocols must be set forth regarding production, administration, and monitoring for mesenchymal stem cell therapy.
Drawbacks
Stem cells can differentiate into numerous types of specialized cells that serve a specific organ or tissue, known as differentiated cells. These specialized cells perform vital functions for maintaining health in that organ or tissue while healing itself properly and functioning optimally.
Stem cells are distinguished by two characteristics that define them: perpetual self-renewal and the capacity to become specialized cell types. When stem cells divide, their offspring typically resemble either their parent cell in terms of appearance and behavior or have differentiated somatic cells as offspring, increasing specialized cells while also maintaining the stem cell population.
Stem cells have long been recognized for their therapeutic benefits in relieving inflammation, improving immune modulation and inducing differentiation into specific cell types required for regenerative and therapeutic applications. Unfortunately, however, many questions still exist around how best to isolate and deliver stem cells for clinical use safely; as a result regulations must be in place in order to monitor how stem cells are procured, delivered and monitored to avoid potential risks and complications.
Conclusions
Stem cell therapy’s success depends on a range of variables. This includes where, when and how the stem cells were obtained; their administration; how they differentiate into desired cell types; patient health status can all have an impactful influence on treatment effectiveness.
It is also essential that the type of stem cells being utilized be taken into consideration. Hematopoietic stem cells derived from bone marrow have been well-studied and shown promise in treating various conditions; MSCs derived from fat tissue or umbilical cord blood could have different results.
Multipotent stem cells can also be useful clinically. They possess the capacity to become all the progenitor cells for one specific germ layer while still differentiating into specialized cells. Newborn babies typically possess large numbers of these in their blood, which can then be collected after birth from umbilical cord and placenta cord blood samples, frozen and stored away until necessary or even reprogrammed into pluripotent cells for use against disease treatment.