Stem cells are the building blocks of life. Complete human beings develop from the first stem cell, the fertilized egg cell. Stem cells proliferate and differentiate into more than 200 different cell types.
Stem cells develop into a variety of cell types. They carry out important repair processes in the body by creating new cells and tissues.
Stem cells have three special characteristic:
These special characteristics make stem cells so interesting for regenerative medicine and therapeutic application.
Each of the approximately 100,000,000,000,000 (100 billion) cells in the body of an adult originates from one single stem cell. The natural tasks of stem cells are building, regenerating, and repairing. These abilities of stem cells, however, diminish – starting from the fertilized egg cell – already during the fetal development and become continuously less in the course of life. That is why especially young and viable stem cells are of particular interest for medical applications.
Stem cells are called the building blocks of life, because a complete human being develops from the initial stem cell."
The body of a newborn contains innumerable diligent, potent, and viable stem cells. Over nine months, they create a new human being from one small cell. Later, they will help to maintain the body’s repair mechanism for life.
Read the following pages to learn more about the special characteristics of stem cells and their potential in the application of successful stem cell therapies.
The Russian histopathologist Alexander Maximov postulated the existence of stem cells for the first time in 1909. He examined the human embryonic development and was mainly interested in the hematopoietic processes involved. His basic assumptions are still valid. Canadian scientists succeeded only in 1961 in proving the existence of blood stem cells.
For a long time, the dogma that nerve cells in the brain cannot renew themselves prevailed in medicine. Thus, there cannot be stem cells for nerve cells. This turned out to be a mistake as recently as in 1998, when the Swedish scientist Peter Eriksson discovered that new nerve cells form constantly from neuronal stem cells even in the brains of adults.
Stem cells have different sources. They can be extracted from blood or bone marrow. It is easier and entirely risk-free to extract them from the umbilical cord. Umbilical cord blood and umbilical cord tissue contain large quantities of unpolluted stem cells. Another source of stem cells, which is currently the object of intensive research, is the fatty tissue.
