These disease-specific stem cell lines will also be invaluable in testing out new therapies.
BBC: Embryonic stem cells can be turned into any kind of cell
Patel has pioneered the use of adult stem cells to treat heart disease.
Health-related errors also stem from misapprehensions about health and disease, many of which are readily obtainable from the Internet.
FORBES: A Baker's Dozen Of Medical Myths That Concern Your Eyes
The science director of the Fight SMA organization, Chris Lorson, told CNN there is no proven stem-cell treatment for the disease.
As simply one example of many, the Broad Foundation invests in advancing innovative scientific and medical research in the areas of human genomics, stem cell research and inflammatory bowel disease.
Eggan's technique, which is the subject of a paper in the current issue of Nature, creates stem cells specific to a particular disease, like cancer or diabetes, without a supply of human egg cells.
For an academic scientist, Lee Rubin at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) has a great deal of biotech industry experience, and this has inspired some ingenious experiments with induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) for disease modeling and drug discovery.
FORBES: Using Stem Cells To Identify Better (And Cheaper) Drugs
Embryonic stem cells have great potential for treating human disease because of their ability to generate almost all the cell types found in the adult body.
Wheat Stem Rust is a devastating wind-born disease affecting cereals that has spread across Africa and is now in the Middle East, and migrating further eastwards.
Fox sways and twitches with the effects of Parkinson's disease while he speaks in support of stem cell research.
These cells are then cloned to create an embryo, and then embryonic stem cells that are genetically inclined to discover this disease.
They're quite convinced in Korea, as a lot of scientists around the world are, that cloned embryos will wield cloned stem cells and that these cloned embryonic stem cells will become extremely important both for understanding disease and perhaps even treating disease.
We wrote about stem cells and politics, about genomics, about heart disease.
Reagan painted a picture where he envisioned a Parkinson's disease patient being cured as the result of stem cell research.
Mass producing stem cells to screen drugs and study the progress of disease is not the sexier side of the field.
Professor Azim Surani, of the University of Cambridge, said the research should allow scientists to create a large range of human stem cell types, which could prove invaluable in studying disease.
Obama's move will be hailed by advocates for those suffering from a host of afflictions, ranging from diabetes to Parkinson's disease, who believe that an expansion of stem-cell research could boost medical progress toward eradicating the debilitating diseases.
He had found with a collaborator at Johns Hopkins that stem cells in mice genetically altered to have a similar disease did not respond normally to a signaling pathway called hedgehog that had an important role in brain development.
And Geron of Menlo Park, Calif. is performing animal studies on a variety of different cells derived from human embryonic stem cells, aiming to treat spinal cord injury, heart disease and diabetes.
"It will completely change the search for new treatments and the way we think about the disease, " says Irving Weissman, a renowned stem cell expert at Stanford University, who says several big drug firms have taken an interest in the latest findings.
And Geron (nasdaq: GERN - news - people ) of Menlo Park, Calif. is performing animal studies on a variety of different cells derived from human embryonic stem cells, aiming to treat spinal cord injury, heart disease and diabetes.
Another is that planting stem cuttings, the usual way of propagating cassava, passes down disease more readily than propagation by seeds.
A. Scientists hope that stem cell research will lead to cures for such diseases as heart disease, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes, and perhaps even spinal cord regeneration, to name a few.
Osiris Therapeutics of Baltimore has several trials under way using adult stem cells to treat the intestinal inflammation known as Crohn's disease, repair damaged tissue following a heart attack and prevent the progression of arthritis.
There aren't enough stem cells in an umbilical cord to serve as a treatment for a disease like cancer or heart disease.
The trust fund was originally set up to help fund stem cell treatment for Michael Emms when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease when in his teens.
Memorial Sloan-Kettering's Studer spent years trying to transform adult stem cells into neurons to study why they die off prematurely in Parkinson's disease.
Coscioni is campaigning for a change to Italy's laws on stem cell research, which some scientists believe could speed cures to Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's and even some forms of cancer.
And every one of these patients had some disease that theoretically might be cured or they could help cure it with these stem cell lines.
Researchers also hope that stem cell research will provide them with more information about human development and the causes of disease, and lead to changes in the development and testing of drugs.
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