|Aug 09, 2018 08:52 PM||By: Ben Noble | 7808 Views|
Kyoto University research team is ready to conduct first-ever clinical trials of stem cell treatment for Parkinson's disease by putting healthy nerve cells into the patients' brains to supplement their damaged ones. Isn’t that a miracle? The scientists are making their next step in fighting diseases using stem cells. Will we all become younger soon and get a key to a longer life? Let's see what these magic stem cells are.
One Direction’s Harry Styles has recently joined stem cell facial fans including such stars as Kim Kardashian, Simon Cowell, Margot Robbie, and David Beckham. Why do famous people choose such procedures?
Stem cells are unique. They can change into other types of cells and divide to produce more of the same type of stem cells. When we are young, we have a plenty of these cells, and they help our organism to heal and recover itself. While we grow old, our reserves of stem cells reduce by 100 or even 10k times depending on tissues and organs. Besides, stem cells mutate, which also lowers their quality and effectiveness.
Stem cell therapy offers a solution: human stem cells are grown in the lab and then artificially injected into the patient’s body.
Celebrities and stars actively use stem cell procedures because these wonderful cells can recover not only skin making it younger and fresher, but the whole body. It is scientifically proven that stem cells can reduce inflammation, struggle with autoimmune diseases, increase muscle bulk, repair joins, and recover skin and hair.
Scientists have already learned how to grow new organs using stem cells and made great progress in this field. They began to apply stem cells in practice and continue to study the properties of these unique cells.
This innovative treatment makes encouraging and hopeful promises, but so far stem cell therapy is costly enough and accessible only to well-to-do people in highly advanced countries. Nevertheless, the solution indeed exists.
A group of ambitious specialists from Japan intends to make this tremendous innovative therapy available and affordable. They've launched a project called Stem Cell, which will deeply study stem cells and ways of their application in the field of regenerative medicine.
To achieve this goal, the Stem Cell Project team plans to cooperate with a wide range of medical institutions, including the Japan Society of Beauty Regeneration Medicine (about 1,800 hospitals), to make joint research in the field of stem cells, conduct clinical trials, and share their experience and scientific results. At the same time, the obtained data will be put into the blockchain-powered healthcare system to be developed by the project specialists.
This system also aims to solve the problem of the lack of qualified medical staff, which is observed in both advanced and developing countries. Using machine learning and blockchain technologies, the system will share automatic diagnoses with images and pathological data with clinics and hospitals from around the world.
Due to big data and AI this blockchain-based virtual clinic platform is expected to help doctors to detect rare diseases or diseases which are difficult to reveal, make exact diagnoses and prescribe an appropriate treatment. Thanks to blockchain, all the personal data will be secured and nobody will be able to change, steal, or use it for fraudulent purposes.
Using the virtual clinic platform, the patients will have an opportunity to get in touch with any doctor from an available list and get a professional medical care while not having to leave their houses. Doctors, in turn, will be able to draw up a comprehensive picture based on the patient's data and case history. This virtual clinic platform will be equipped with a remote medical checkup system, AI chatbot, and translation function.
Thus, cutting edge technologies will benefit doctors, patients, and the economy as a whole. Isn’t it a dream?
Another distinctive feature of the Stem Cell Project is that people will be able to pay for the treatment with cryptocurrency, which makes the payments instantaneous, safe, and transparent thanks to blockchain. This payment method also significantly simplifies the money transfer procedure. For this reason, the stem cell treatment promises to become more available.
At the same time “pharmaceuticalization” of stem cells is expected to give more opportunities to people in the field of regenerative medicine and optimize the treatment costs. The Stem Cell Project team will work on the creation of stem cell-based therapeutic formulations, i.e. a special technology for a quick and precise stem cell production. This work will help to create a unique Cell Bank to store healthy cells and then use them for treatment when required.
Stem cells promise to change the medicine once and for all in several years, prolong healthy live, return youth and beauty while the Stem Cell Project offers particular steps that seem to be realizable. We are living in an era of opportunities, when the elixir of life seems to be just a matter of time.