ProducingĀ stem cellsĀ from other persons would be a major step forward.
Usually, stem cells are made from cells from your own body. Taking a cell from your body, like a skin cell, and converting it into a stem cell is a time-consuming and very expensive process.
However, if you could use ready-made stem cells derived from other people, this would hasten the process considerably. You can pick prepared stem cells from the shelf and immediately implant them.
Also, these stem cells could be acquired from young people, so that these stem cells are also younger and less damaged. This is very interesting, because mostly elderly people would need stem cell treatments and creating stem cells from their already aged cells yields stem cells of lower quality compared to stem cells extracted from young people.
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The Nobel prize winnerĀ Shinya YamanakaĀ is setting up a stem cell bank with stem cells of other people, tweaking specific receptors on the stem cells (HLA receptors), so that these stem cells wonāt be rejected by a considerable part of the population.
Such stem cells could be produced in large quantities, can be of better quality when derived from a young person and would be immediately available, which would all entail huge advantages.
In the future, new technologies likeĀ CRISPR-cas 9Ā will allow scientist to tweak stem cells even more, giving them all kinds of new qualities, like evading rejection by the host, being more powerful, specific or versatile, among other things.
Source:Ā Scientific American
