Stem Cell Awareness Day: The potential of amniotic fluid stem cells

Today is Stem Cell Awareness Day, a day dedicated to providing accurate information about stem cell therapy for treating or curing incurable diseases and injuries

Even as we celebrate the scientific advances that are being honoured by the Nobel Prizes, let's not forget current research that will be winning the Nobel Prizes a few short years. One of those research areas could be stem cell research and technology.

Millions of people around the world suffer from incurable diseases, like cancer, and injuries, such as spinal injuries. Stem cell research is providing ground-breaking advances in science and medicine -- advances that represent the best hope for healing treatments that people have who are suffering from these diseases or injuries.

This video provides a brief glimpse into one of the many illnesses that stem cell technology is being developed to address:

But what are stem cells? Here's a short video by the Irish Stem Cell Foundation that provides information about this:

Stem cell research could provide promising treatments or cures for more than 70 incurable diseases, genetic conditions, and injuries including a variety of cancers, spinal cord injuries, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis.

Already, stem cell therapy has touched my life. My brother, a beloved husband, father, provider, friend, colleague and avid marathon runner, is alive because of a stem cell transplant. Less than six weeks after he ran his first New York City Marathon, we were stunned to learn that my brother was dying from a rare, aggressive and incurable cancer, mantle cell lymphoma. An intense medical intervention followed, including lengthy hospitalisations, chemotherapy and radiation treatments. He nearly died several times. But thanks to a stem cell transplant obtained from a small sample of an anonymous donor's "matching" bone marrow, my precious brother is still alive today. My brother deals daily with physical and health problems caused either by the cancer or by the treatments, but nonetheless, he is not letting that defeat him: he has been training to run his second New York City Marathon which will be run in a few weeks, and is using his experiences and passion for marathons to raise funds to help children with cancer. His goal is to stay in remission long enough to see his own children graduate high school.

None of this would have happened without an anonymous donor's gift of life -- a stem cell transplant. But the stem cell transplant would have been meaningless without the basic research that led to these life-prolonging medical advances.

So today, take a moment out of your busy day to donate some money in support of stem cell research, to register as a bone marrow, tissue or organ donor, and to let the people around you know that you support stem cell research. Who knows? Perhaps one day, someone you love may owe their life to stem cell therapy.

Learn more about Stem Cell Awareness Day.

International stem cell foundations:

Australia: Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Laboratories

Register to donate bone marrow, tissue or organs:



twitter: @GrrlScientist
facebook: grrlscientist