Looking to the Future of Stem Cell Medicine
The next decade will see ever more ambitious stem cell medicine made commercially available, very much despite the regulatory and legislative atmosphere at present. From the Sunday Herald: "Stem cells are primal cells at an early stage of development. Scientists hope to use their properties to study diseases and to develop 'repair' kits for the body by enabling healthy tissue to be grown. ... researchers around the world were already considering the use of stem cells to repair corneas, bones and specific cases of spinal cord injury. ... New therapies are just the same as medicines, they have to be tested and shown to be effective and safe. So it will be a small number of cases and a small number of treatments first, which will grow over the years and the decades. If you look back to when, for example, antibiotics first came along, there was a small number of them, but progressively they became more and more effective and now we take them for granted."