We would like to share with you a flyer that Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd brought back from one of their Back to the Future ventures. By the looks of it, this future is not too far off. Some doctors are already offering similar services in their offices today.
Stem Cell Therapy at home,
The eye is such a complex mechanism that it can’t be dealt with effectively in blog posts. The more we know about it, the more we know that we don’t know. And, of all our five senses, vision is the one we know the most about. Here at ProgenCell, we have successfully treated many cases of macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa,
The short answer is that we still don’t know.
In saying that, ProgenCell takes a very conservative approach to the meaning of “cure”. We generally use the terms “treatment” and “therapy” to describe our work. When stem cell therapy is successful, all it really does is to help the patient’s body heal itself.
As scientists,
People who remember the cancer scares from the 1950s to the ’70s avoid diagnosticians because they don’t want to be told they have a fatal, incurable disease. The kindly doctors in the soap operas and Hollywood movies of that era were forever summoning up the courage to deliver the death sentence, and the people who remember those scenes would just as soon not be on the receiving end in real life.
We believe they’re for patients who want to get well.
The most famous precursor to modern stem cell therapy was pioneered by Dr. E. Donnall Thomas in 1956, when he treated a case of juvenile leukemia by completely replacing the child’s bone marrow. His risky, painful, and complex experiment immediately became associated with children and leukemia.
Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that often impairs speech and other motor functions. Its symptoms include muscle rigidity, tremors, and the slowing of physical movement to a total loss of physical movement in the worst cases. Secondary symptoms may include autonomic, cognitive, and linguistic impairment. Parkinson’s disease is chronic,
Retinitis pigmentosa is the name given to a group of genetic, usually hereditary, disorders of the retina. (The retina is the part of the eye that converts light to nerve impulses.) About one in 3500 people suffer from retinitis pigmentosa throughout the world. It is a progressive disease ending in tunnel vision or complete blindness and for which there is no known cure.
In adults, stem cells are created in the bone marrow and then distributed to the rest of the body through the blood system. It stands to reason that stem cells might be harvested from either location, but there is an important difference both in quantity and in quality between the stem cells found at the source and those found on the periphery of the body.
Luis Romero Guerra, M.D., the president of the ProgenCell ethics committee, and Norma Niño Sulkowska, M.D., ProgenCell’s staff ophthalmologist, were invited by Tijuana Innovadora to present “Vanguard of Medicine: Stem Cells in Ophthalmology” on 16 October 2012. By way of introduction, they were praised as stem cell pioneers by Patricia Aubanel, M.D., the cardiologist who achieved international recognition when she saved Mother Teresa’s life with an experimental stent.