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Asked by abbeybedford to Emma, James, Jayne, Kara, Sharon on 16 Mar 2011 in Categories: Stem Cells.
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Sharon Sneddon answered on 15 Mar 2011:
Hey,
I don’t think that stem cells could be used for anything else apart from our body, thats the aim of stem cell research, so I don’t know why we would want to do anything else!What kind of things were you thinking of?
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Emma King answered on 16 Mar 2011:
Hi abbeybedford thanks for your question. I’m not sure what you mean about using stem cells for something other than our body. We can certainly use them to grow things outside the body – like blood cells or skin for skin grafts.
And if we get the technology right then we might be able to use stem cells from one person and use them to treat other people.
I’m not sure if I’ve answered your question at all! -
Jayne Charnock answered on 16 Mar 2011:
Hi Abbey,
great question!!
yeah there are loads of things i think we could do with them. One of the most important things would be to be able to test drugs on them to check they are not harmful, or even produce organs with them and see what effects drugs have then. Cancer stem cell lines, for example, are used to screen potential anti-tumor drugs. Hopefully this might reduce the number of animals we have to use in drug development.
another thing is they can tell us ALOT about human development, how cells interact with each other and which genes are involved when development goes wrong- again something that we might then be able to fix in the future.
Comments
abbeybedford commented on :
thankyou for answers, yes that does answer my question, so do you think that means we could use them to help or produce plants?