Out of South Korea comes a report that a woman paralyzed for 20 years has regained the ability to walk spinal repairs performed using stems. As noted in the article, this was accomplished using an intermediate source of stem cell: umbilical cord blood.
Back on October 14th was the last time I found myself talking about stem cell therapies and ethics, arising primarily from comments and questions raised by Tony Collett (the specific link is found back on the Oct. 14th entry) concerning types and sources of stem cells. That the questions were raised in the wake of the death of Christopher Reeve's death, whose own spine injury ultimately led to his death, cannot be overlooked.
It's important to keep in mind that this umbilical source represents a more differentiated form of stem cell, which is to say that similar to adult stem cells these umbilical cells are less flexible than embryonic stem cells, which are capable of becoming any structure in the human body. The ethical emphasis brought up by all this is that this could provide a limited avenue that would allow some progress even in the face of the blocks put in place by the Bush administration against the use of embryonic stem cells. This should not be viewed as a solid ethical "way out", as previous research indicates that not only would this umbilical source of stem cells share the problems found in adult stem cells (primarily that they have relatively limited flexibility in terms of which types of tissue they can become, and are extremely difficult to grow as tissue cultures) but the success being reported yesterday has yet to be examined and replicated.
Addition: Today there's an even more dramatic - though less detailed - story out of Brazil of successful stem cell therapy.
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