• Question: how much do you think your experiments are going to help people in 10 years time?

    Asked by lizziebee to Emma, James, Jayne, Kara, Sharon on 22 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Sharon Sneddon

      Sharon Sneddon answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      Hi Lizziebee,

      Hopefully the stem cells that I have been making will help lots of people, there are already scientists using my cells to make insulin producing cells to help people with diabetes, nerve cells to help people with brain and spinal cord damage and cartilage cells to help people with arthritis. I hope in the next 10 years, these will have developed through clinical trials and will be actually used for treating lots of people

      As well as that, I am using the cells to look at breast cancer and hopefully in 10 years time, we will have a better understanding of why some cancers spread and better still how to stop it happening.

    • Photo: Jayne Charnock

      Jayne Charnock answered on 22 Mar 2011:

      HI lizziebee

      Quite a bit hopefully, certainly we should know ALOT more about what goes wrong when diabetic wounds dont heal properly, but we are already starting to try different approaches involving changing gene expression and applying certain proteins to the wound and seeing if they have any effect. One compound we have just tested gave fantastic results so we are going to start a much bigger study and see how it goes- we’re keeping our fingers crossed!!!

    • Photo: James Chan

      James Chan answered on 22 Mar 2011:

      Hi Lizziebee,
      I would very much hope that our way of helping broken bones heal quicker in mice will translate to humans in the next few years. Then we’d be able help all those thousands upon thousands of people who have broken their bones, especially the elderly people or young people who’ve had nasty fracture that don’t heal properly – we may even be able to get many of these people walking again and avoid them needing their legs getting chopped off. The other thing is that maybe our way of doing things will be relevant in other areas of stem cell technology and help other areas develop as well.

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