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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