Another Adult Stem Cell Victory

The successes for adult stem cells are accumulating so fast and are now so common that they seem almost not newsworthy. But the impact of these successes is definitely not trivial - they represent the future of health care.

Today's success is the "healing of the heart" in angina sufferers. In a placebo controlled test angina patients who were resistant to other treatments were given injections of cells taken from their own bone marrow. The researchers

"took bone marrow from participants' hips and extracted the mass of mononuclear cells--an ill-defined mix of stem cells and progenitor cells."

The results:

"Three months after the treatment, more catheter tests showed that the average number of diseased grid areas in the hearts of treated patients had fallen from 4.2 to 1.8, or 57 percent. In patients given the placebo, the number fell from 3.8 to 3.1--a significantly smaller 18 percent reduction.

Bone-marrow recipients were also able to expend more energy on an exercise bike after three months: 114 kilocalories, compared with 107--a small but significant change. Placebo patients experienced an improvement of just 101 kilocalories compared with 99."

Clearly there is more work to do, but the pace is uncommonly rapid and exciting in its huge potential. This is empirical biology at its finest.

And it depends not one whit on evolutionary theory. (I couldn't resist that...)