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[Spinal Hub]

I have heard that there is some research going on at Royal Talbot about exercise. Does anybody know if this has anything to do with research in the U.S about stem cells?

[stainless]

SCIPA (Spinal Cord Injury & Physical Activity): Intensive Exercise from Acute Care to the Community.
M Galea, S Dunlop, GT Allison, L Harvey, GM Davis, L Dennehy, A Nunn, R Marshall, R Ackland, T Gerahty, I Mareels.
Victorian NeuroTrauma Initiative,
2009-2013, $4,699,984
http://www.scipa.unimelb.edu.au/

[Serge]

What are the potential applications of stem cell research?
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David Belair
David Belair, Stem cell scientist since 2010; PhD BME 2015
244 Views • Most Viewed Writer in Stem Cells with 30+ answers
Great question. Stem cells are informative for biologists because they can differentiate into several other cell types (pluripotent stem cells can differentiate to nearly every cell type of the body, while multipotent stem cells are somewhat specialized and can only differentiate down a limited number of lineages). In this way, stem cells can inform the molecular changes that occur during development of various tissues. This property is incredibly valuable for drug screening and toxicity assessment applications wherein the goal is to study the effect of a chemical on the development of a particular tissue or organ. Models of developing or mature human tissues can be useful for screening drug candidates to assess safety or efficacy in treating developmental or tissue/organ defects/disorders or for screening putative toxicants to determine if a chemical poses a risk to a particular stage of development of a growing embryo. [1] [2] [3]


Stem cells also hold tremendous value for regenerative medicine applications. Below are some examples of cell types, derived from pluripotent stem cells, that are currently being explored in clinical trials. For example, embryonic stem cell-derived oligodendrocytes have been explored clinically for the treatment of spinal cord defects. [4] [5]


Clinical trials are also underway to study the influence of multipotent stem cells in wound repair and regeneration. For example, multipotent mesenchymal stem cells have been explored clinically for repair of musculoskeletal defects, neural progenitor cell injections have been explore pre clinically and clinically for treatment of several neurological disorders, retinal pigment epithelial cell injections have been explored clinically for the treatment of macular degeneration and macular dystrophy.

These are just some of the applications of stem cells in health, but several other applications relate to the possibility of modeling disease. Induced pluripotent stem cells in particular can be derived from patients representing various genotypes, and through differentiating the cells to particular cell types, it may be possible to recapitulate disease phenotypes in a dish for drug discovery and drug screening applications.