Rick Raw: Stem Cells Restore the Sight of Ocular Burned Patients–This Advance Substantiates The Miracle of Stem Cells

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net

Most people remember the outcry from then president Bush Jr. (W) when the late Christopher Reeves sided with the scientists using embryos to harvest stem cells. The religious right had a hissy-fit. W pushed through a bill to outlaw using embryos to harvest stem cells.

Nitwit W and his ultra conservative dunderheads envisioned mothers selling their embryos for research. But at the time, stem cells were considered the next miracle of medicine. Reeves envisioned stem cells repairing his severed spinal cord. That day will come, I’m sure, but it’s too late to help Reeves.

Since then, the research has advanced exponentially. Scientists no longer use embryos to harvest stem cells. They discovered they can take stem cells from the organ that needs to be repaired and inject these cells into it and achieve astounding results.

So what is a stem cell exactly? It’s a cell that has the potential to develop into many different cell types in the body-- say (in the future) a new liver, pancreas, or heart. More significantly, they serve as an internal repair system, dividing without limit to replenish other cells as long as the person is still alive.

In a real case scenario, a man’s heart is failing. The surgeons injected stem cells from his heart into his ailing heart, and he made a remarkable recovery.
Exactly the mechanism of how the stem cells repaired his damaged heart is still being studied. But it was a true life miracle.

Now, in another real case scenario, people who were blinded by burns or corrosive liquids can have their sight restored using stem cells taken from one of their eyes. The caveat is: Treatment only works for patients who have at least a fragment of viable gimbal cells left in one of their eyes.

This story interested me because I have a damaged cornea on my left eye and glaucoma, which is pressure on the optic nerve which left untreated can cause blindness.
Of course, this stem cell treatment would not help me, but if the sight in my right eye goes, my doctor can give me a cornea transplant in the left eye to save my sight. It’s a hail-mary solution. I take eye medication to reduce the symptoms of glaucoma.

Under certain experimental conditions, stem cells can be induced to become tissue-or organ-specific cells with special functions. In some organs, such as the gut and bone marrow, stem cells regularly divide to repair and replace worn out or damaged tissues. It’s still not possible to rebuild a liver or heart–yet!

However, that day will come in the near future. Now, stem cells can be injected into a damaged heart and in an unknown method, these cells repair the damage. So, it doesn’t take much visionary thinking to predict that stem cell therapy will help burn patients, since the skin is an organ.

This breakthrough of stem cells repairing damaged corneas is a quantum leap in stem cell research. It’s a giant step in getting to better and simpler ways to successfully transplant tissue from living and deceased donors for patients whose eyes are too damaged to provide culture material.

These remarkable advances in medical science get very little press or hoopla. But stem cell research is finding new and miraculous ways to regenerate tissue and eventually replace damaged organs. If this subject bores you, then you’re like W–a dummy.