What is stem cell therapy?

Cell therapy - is a new revolutionary treatment of injuries and diseases, that allows to repair damaged or sick body parts using healthy and new cells - stem cells. 

Recently stem cell research became most progressing filed in biology and biomedicine. Scientific literature is full of articles about successful treatments using stem cells. 

While the number of population with oncological, heart and vascular diseases, diabetes, degenerative muscle and nerval system disorders and autoimmune system diseases are growing, scientist are looking for the ways to repair damaged tissues, organs and their functions. A new progressive filed - regenerative medicine - offers possibility to treat many of these diseases by inducing natural healing processes, restoring damaged tissues, organs and their functions using gene engineering and transplanting healthy and new cells.

Many today's illnesses are caused by early death of specific cells or their failure to function. Organism is not able to regenerate new cells and repair their function by itself. Today the most promising damage tissue and function repair method is cell therapy. During cell therapy healthy and new cells are transplanted into a recipient and the failed functions are restored, together with damaged tissues and organs. 

Most famous cell therapy example is donor bone marrow stem cell transplantation. At the moment it's the only standard treatment using stem cells from bone marrow, peripheral blood or cord blood. This transplantation is used for treating chronic and acute leukemia, myelodysplastic syndromes, lymphomas, inherited blood cells abnormalities, other disorders of blood cell proliferation, cancers in bone marrow, some solid tumors, metabolic disorders.

However the list of diseases treated by stem cells grows everyday. Also there are many on-going clinical trials for treating diseases such as diabetes, multiple sclerosis, lupus, cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury. Stem cells are used in cardiac therapy, gene therapy, organ repair and for some solid tumors as breast cancer, Ewing's sarcoma and Renal cell carcinoma. These treatments are only in clinical trial stage. Also there are many experimental treatments, and fields that scientists are still work for improvements. But in the end, cell therapy is progressing very fast and usage of stem cells for treatment is becoming more and more multifunctional.

For cell therapy at first you need to have enough amount of the cells. Stem cells can be derived from bone marrow and peripheral blood, however it is possible to store cord blood stem cells. During delivery of the placenta together with cord blood is usually disposable. Today more and more people decide to collect and store cord blood stem cells, because they could be used for treatment of the newborn in the future.