I assume the baby didn't survive the process since there's no mention of that.
If, at some point in the future, scientists figure out a way to coax normal cells to become totipotent, will you consider amputation as murder?
Are they sure? They can now harvest stem cells from regular tissue and blood, as I understand it
There are adult stem cells which are differentiated or partly differentiated to particular systems, eyes, skin, blood etc, and there are induced pluripotent stem cells, where chemical or viral factors have been used to 'wind back the clock' for adult, differentiated cells back to completely non-differentiated (pluripotent) stem cells, equivalent to embryonic stem cells.
In the long run, it seems that embryonic stem cells won't be needed, but for the moment induced pluripotent cells are not 100% understood, everywhere apart from Japan clinical researchers are wary of using them in human trials, because they are not completely certain a particular preparation doesn't have abnormalities. Embryonic stem cells for the moment are the gold standard, and some work is needed to iron out the technology to standardize and check the process for inducing pluripotency.
But in principle any cure proven with embryonic stem cells could be 'ported' over to induced pluripotent stem cells once the iPSC process is standardized, it's just a question of whether you want to pursue these two research paths in parallel, or wait for the iPSC problems to be ironed out before even starting the process of running human trials.
Anyway, here's a publication about the study that makes it pretty clear that they got it right (abstract only, paywall):
https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4114
(I found the study by assuming a page like http://www.thelondonproject.org/ would exist and then following the link provided)
iPS stem cells from old cells will still be fraught with DNA damage and can be cancerous.
Think about that for a second. Nearly blind, or actually blind, to being able to read again.
I'm seriously debating specializing in ophthalmology, and sub-specializing in retina surgery just became an even more appealing career plan for me.
I had a retinal tear 4 weeks ago and then then retina detached and started sagging in front of my lens, blocking half of my field of view. Seriously scary, especially since my mother has lost most of her vision after a similar problem.
I got a pneumatic retinopexy a couple of days later. Amazingly, it only took about 30 minutes in a (nice) back-room of the retina clinic with local anesthesia, and the retina re-attached itself in the course of the next few days. Now I am just waiting for the gas bubble to dissolve while my vision is getting better each day.
Phase 1 trials typically get little publicity unless they either kill someone or turn in a statistically-significant improvement. (A phase 1 trial in which the controls do exactly as well as the experimentals and no side-effects are observed, which is highly likely for even excellent treatments because of the tiny sample size, will very rarely be written up because it's boring.) And because their sample sizes are always tiny, any statistically-significant improvement will always be an extremely large effect size. If the effect hadn't been improbably large, you would almost certainly not be reading about it now on HN.
And because of this selection bias, the effects you hear about tend to be massively overestimated. This is one of Andrew Gelman's points: the 'statistical significance filter' massively inflates effect sizes, a type M error, which then subsequently regress to the mean of the true smaller effect. This is why you're not supposed to take Phase I trials as meaningful estimates of the effect size, why statisticians emphasize they're supposed to be about safety, and why you don't do power analysis based on the observed results (either post hoc or for designing the next big ones). This is also part of why you hear about so many amazing pilot experiments in animals or humans but then the big followup trials are much more modest or nulls.
If you are magnesium deficient, you may also need calcium, vitamin D and vitamin K to fully resolve the issue.
I'm watching them like a hawk hoping that some day my 2 year old son might benefit from their work.
Anyway if the effect size is big enough, you don't need a really large study to get statistical significance. I mean, what are the odds of macular degeneration reversing by chance?
If this is a viable treatment method, it would help only the minority of macular degeration patients.
Feel free to correct if I'm wrong. I'm not an expert. This is just what I've gathered from having two family members with it.
While it turned out that my wife's issue was (fortunately) something less severe, it still makes me happy to see that this treatment has had some success.
results in this area of the field can't come fast enough!
So it is interesting to speculate on the degree to which the benefits here are signaling versus cell integration. Clearly the big difference between past attempts is that a tissue-like set of organized cells are delivered rather than just free-floating unorganized cells.
If researchers find a solution it will improve the quality of life of millions elder people.
I had one retinal detachment surgery and a subsequent cataract surgery (since vitrectomy almost always results in a cataract) on my right eye. It's fairly stable but my vision is not great.
I'm hoping for stem cell therapy sometime in my life to help repair areas of my right eye that are no longer great (retinoschisis and general rod/cone dystrophy) and to make sure I'm seeing well into my later years of life.
