To What Extent Is Regenerative Medicine The Most Effective Way Of Treating Multiple Sclerosis?
Candidate name: Joshua Carter
Candidate number: 7125
Centre number: 61425
Contents
Abstract- page 3
Introduction and research- page 4
Discussion- page 10
Conclusion- page 15
Bibliography- page 17
Abstract
Stem cells are going to be a major point of interest in a large part of modern day biology. They already dominate many of the headlines of newspapers nearly every day and this will only continue. With the continued research going on into this new, potential way of curing many diseases that 20 years ago we would never have thought could have been cured, can it do the same for the neurological …show more content…
This means that the body’s defence against harmful diseases (the immune system) is affected in some way and that causes the immune system to change from attacking foreign viruses to attacking healthy body tissue- in multiple sclerosis this is the healthy Myelin that surrounds nerve cells in the body. The myelin is broken down by the body’s own immune system, nervous impulses are less efficient in travelling to the body’s Central Nervous System. As a result of this, in the places where the myelin on the myelin sheath has been thinned or destroyed, a hard region or scar is left in its place, often referred to as a sclerosis. Where there is multiple of these hardened scars on different places on the brain or spinal cord is where the autoimmune disease gets its name from- Multiple …show more content…
For example, the guardian reported a recent trial on 18 people suffering with two different types of macular degeneration, the leading causes of blindness in adults and children in the world, Stargardt’s macular dystrophy and dry atrophic age-related macular degeneration[6]. The patients had embryonic stem cell therapy on their eyes and were cured of sight loss without any side effects. Whatever sources of potential bias the guardian may have, being a politically left leaning newspaper, the point still remains, stem cell therapy and regenerative medicine has and will continue to provide a big source of hope in the fight against many different deadly diseases. Regenerative medicine mainly comes in the form of stem cell treatment, allowing scientists to use undifferentiated cells and turn them into any cell in the body to serve any function. This is a huge breakthrough in science and medicine as it enables anything to be made, it solves the problem of organ storage or a lack of organ donors, as hearts and lungs can just be grown in a lab and