Adult Stem Cell Repair Successful in Horses to be Tried on People
People who have badly damaged tendons may soon find relief from their own adult stem cells. From the story:
A stem-cell repair technique that has already been used to fix hundreds of injured race horses is to be tested for the first time in people with damaged Achilles tendons.Mr. Ed is pleased. Oops. I'm aging myself, aren't I?
Privately owned British biotech firm MedCell Bioscience Ltd said on Wednesday it would start clinical tests within 12 months and planned to run a larger confirmatory study at several European hospitals in 2011.
Patients will receive injections containing millions of their own stem cells, which have been extracted and multiplied up in a laboratory, and can regenerate new tissue to repair damaged regions. More than 1,500 race horses have been treated using the same process and follow-up data suggests a 50 percent reduction in re-injury over a three year period, compared with conventional treatment.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 3:28 PM
5 Comments
5 Comments:
Don't worry, I remember Mr. Ed from early morning Nickelodeon!
Great news!
SAFEpres: Ouch.
Mr. Ed wasn't conceived by artificial breeding methods, gene-selected, more prone to injury as a result, and forced to race when he did not want to (many racing injuries and breakdowns are the result of all this); he's not pleased about that stuff going on. He has horse sense.
We never hear the phrase "human sense," now, do we. There's a reason for that, and it's not unrelated to the arrogance that finds it necessary to remark on the sense and intelligence other animals have as if it were a surprising, remarkable phenomenon.
I'm referring to the arrogance of humans in general, and along with arrogance goes stupidity and lack of awareness. If we want to be considered exceptional, the proper and productive comparison is not to the other animals, it is within our own species, to ourselves. If we could adhere to our own best standards and measure ourselves against them only, we wouldn't be concerned about our "status" re the other animals -- wouldn't feel feel a need to be -- and also there won't be a death culture. It counts to get it right, not to make excuses for ourselves based on religion and ideologies that we ourselves have invented.
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