Every living thing owes its existence to cells, with the average adult human body made up of nearly 100 trillion of them. So it’s not surprising that cellular processes are at the heart of human disease. And, since stem cells are the ultimate source cells from which specialized cells are generated, stem cell technology is seen as a powerful tool for overcoming a wide range of diseases. So many new discoveries and applications are now being experienced that the overall stem cell market is seen by some as being virtually boundless.
The advantage of International Stem Cell Corporation is that the company is not limited to a particular application or disease. Instead they’ve invented a new stem cell platform, a new technology called parthenogenesis that utilizes unfertilized human eggs to create a type of stem cell that has two important advantages over other stem cells.
First, it avoids the controversy associated with the use of stem cells from human embryos. Second, parthenogenetic stem cells (hpSC), because of the unique way they are generated, can be immune matched to millions of different people, overcoming the serious problem of immune rejection. As a result, a relatively small number hpSC lines could provide sufficient immune-matched cells to cover a large percentage of the world’s population.
The company is now engaged in establishing the efficacy of parthenogenetic stem cells in the treatment of various diseases:
• The treatment of Parkinson’s disease using dopaminergic neurons – ISCO scientists are focused on deriving neuronal cells, and have developed a method of creating pure populations of cells suitable for implantation. ISCO has also recently demonstrated that Parkinson’s symptoms can be successfully treated with the company’s unique parthenogenetic stem cell derived neuronal cells.
• The treatment of liver disease with stem cell derived hepatocytes – ISCO’s scientific team are focused on developing better methods to create pure populations of hepatocyte that could be used in transplantation using HLA homozygous parthenogenetic stem cell lines to avoid the cells being immune rejected.
• The treatment of blindness with corneal tissue – Scientists at ISCO have developed and filed patents on a process that creates human corneal tissue from parthenogenetic stem cells, a tissue that closely resembles a human cornea in structure and cell types.
For more information, visit www.internationalstemcell.com
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