Thursday, March 12, 2015

A Possible Cure for Sickle Cell Anemia


                Sickle Cell anemia is a blood disorder that affects 100,000 people in the United States alone. Sickle cell is an inherited genetic disease that results in an abnormal amount of hemoglobin causing blood cells to be  crescent shaped. While normal red blood cells live for about 120 days, sickle cells only live ten to twenty days max.

                 The current treatment for sickle cell anemia is blood and marrow transplants. However many complications arise with these procedures. Some patient's body's simply cannot handle the transplant procedure, while others begin to develop an immune response to the foreign blood.

                In response to the problems regarding sickle cell treatments, researchers at John Hopkins University  are looking for new ways to cure the disease. By extracting stem cells from sickle cell patient, researchers have successfully corrected the genetic mutation that cause sickle cell. Linzhao Cheng, one of the researchers explained how the process occurs.  The patient's own blood cells are extracted and then  reprogrammed to act as stem cells. By making these stem cells and reproducing them, the researchers can cut out the sickle cell defect and replace it with a healthy gene. The last step of the procedure is to create an environment in which the stem cells would grow into healthy red blood cells.

                This is an amazing breakthrough in science however it is extremely time consuming. Before this treatment is available to sickle cell patients everywhere, the side effects of the lab grown blood cells must be tested and a much more efficient way to create these cells must be determined. Although this research is still in its early stages, the discoveries that comes from this could help people avoid other blood diseases such as malaria.

Original Article: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/290673.php

Second Article: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/healthtopics/topics/sca/treatment

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