• Question: I've recently seen a documentary by Dr Kevin Fong which talks about how to save a failing heart and it talks of using stem cells. What they did was they used a heart of a pig, flushed out all the previous cells with detergent so that they have a structure (ghost heart) on which they can plant the stem cells on and artificially grow a new heart. Days after, the scientists successfully made the heart beat. Can this not be done to an eye, that is, flush the cells out and then inject stem cells into the 'ghost' eye to grow a new eye? If not is it simply because the structure of the eye is different to the structure of the heart, which is a muscle?

    Asked by hswong96 to Steve on 21 Mar 2011.
    • Photo: Stephen Moss

      Stephen Moss answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      Hi hswong96

      I saw that programme too, and your question about the eye is just excellent! The difficulty is one you mentioned, which is that whereas the heart is mostly one type of cell – muscle, the eye contains numerous types of cells, and not only that, some of those cells are nerve cells that have to make proper functional connections in the brain. It would be no use having a perfect eye created from stem cells if it didn’t connect to the correct part of the brain, and making nerve cells join up is still a huge challenge in medical research.

      However, I believe there is now progress by a Japanese group in which they have at least managed to grow a retina from stem cells. Their work is due to be published in the next few weeks and I haven’t seen it yet, but if it’s true this would be a massive leap in the right direction.

Comments

  • Photo: hswong96

    hswong96 commented on :

    At the moment, how are surgeons reconnecting the broken ends of nerves in the spinal cord after the patient has suffered a spinal cord trauma?

  • Photo: 08wooda

    08wooda commented on :

    I saw somewhere that the problem is about the information passing through the nerve, if you cut a single nerve in half it cannot relay the information back to the brain, or not all of it is passed through. I believe that in the case of injury the nerve may be able to slightly regenerate, however as to completely impossible given the current medical examination. For example if a person sliced their leg in half the nerves would eventually grow back to the state that a person would be able to sense if something was touching their leg, but not how large or hard they were being touched. However, if we were able to grow an artificial leg from stem cells then I am pretty sure that we couldn’t make it move using the “conventional” nerve system. Also nerve networks are pretty complicated with thousands of nerve braches and there would be a lot of them to regenerate before you could feel anything…