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Summary
of the Issues Surrounding the use of the
Retrodifferentiation Process.
- Cells
grown in a laboratory for use on patients may allow
treatments for a vast variety of conditions such as
Parkinson's
disease, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, spinal cord damage
and various cancers including leukaemia.
- Current harvesting techniques
include the extraction of stem cells from human embryos and foetuses. TriStem's
retrodifferentiation process does not require any human embryos or foetuses and,
therefore, bypasses sensitive ethical and related legal issues.
- The use of a patient's own blood
cells ensures a perfect tissue match and removes the
need for a donor. The use of material from another human can run the risk of immune system
rejection. The retrodifferentiation process eliminates this risk as all the
retrodifferentiated stem cells come from the patient, who effectively acts as his or her
own donor.
- The
use of mature cells to create stem cells is less expensive
and less time consuming than existing harvesting techniques.
In addition, the new process produces huge numbers of
stem cells within hours when compared with
existing technologies.
- The
method of obtaining the retrodifferentiated stem cells
does not involve invasive surgical procedures. The
starting
material can be blood, the most accessible tissue in
the body, and which is simple to extract through a
short veripuncture procedure.
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Potential Clinical Applications
TriStem believes that blood disorders that would routinely
require a BMT represent a priority target disease area.
The well-established clinical end-points of the BMT procedure
will enable standard evaluation of the retrodifferentiation
technology for efficacy against current stem cell based treatments.
Aplastic anaemia, Thalassaemia, Sickle Cell Anaemia and leukaemia
are the initial indications to be pursued
as
it
presents
very
large
unmet
clinical need and opportunity
for
expedited
clinical
development.
No examination has yet been made of the potential of using stem cells in the production of
clean blood.
Leukaemia is a disease where the body's system for making
white blood cells malfunctions, resulting in the uncontrolled
production of abnormal white blood cells that cannot protect
against infection and other disease. Consequently, leukaemia
can cause death in a matter
of months if left untreated. Leukaemia involves either immature
cells which cannot perform their regular body function or
more mature cells which can only partially carry out their
function. Current treatments include chemotherapy, various
anticancer drugs, blood
transfusions and BMT under appropriate conditions.
TriStem plans to develop applications of its new technology
in additional disease areas and will be exploring the application
of its technology in other liquid tumours , some solid tumours
(e.g. lung and breast cancer, spinal cord injury, heart disease
and diabetes type 1). Additional areas of potential application
include certain neurological conditions and viral infections
such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). |
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