A new book edited by Prof. Raphael Gorodetsky, PhD, Head of the Laboratory of Radiology and Biotechnology at Hadassah’s Sharett Institute of Oncology and Richard Schafer, of Harvard University’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, calls for closing gap between the great theoretical expectations of stem cells and the actual capabilities of stem cells for regenerative medicine and technology.
“Stem Cell-Based Tissue Repair,” just published by Great Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry, is a compendium of the views of leading researchers in this rapidly expanding field of research. It is considered one of the few books to address the promise of stem cells from a proper perspective.
The book notes that researchers hope to use stem cells combined with a variety of materials as a tool for tissue regeneration and healing, which has created great interest and expectations – and increasingly greater budgets for stem cell research. Though modest success was achieved by a few researchers in the field the failure of scientists to reach a major breakthrough in transforming stem cells in the laboratory into fully functional viable entities to build tissues and organs for implants has also caused disappointment.
Research has enabled the identification of different stem types of cells, including human embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells from tissues, as well as cells that were engineered to become potentially tissue regenerators. The hope this progress generated has not been matched by the limited results published so far.
Strangely, the book points out, there has been an almost complete ignorance of the gap between the expectations of stem cells and their myth, and the ability to combine them in tissues engineering for healing purposes.
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Raphael Gorodetsky is Professor at the Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, where he heads a multi-focus research group at that investigates issues in tissue regeneration and adult stem cell isolation, expansion, differentiation and implantation. He was also the Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Hapto Biotech Israel, Ltd, a startup company of Hadasit, Hadassah’s technology transfer company, which has now merged with Forticell Biosciences of New York.
Dr Richard Schäfer is a specialist in internal and transfusion medicine. A scientist in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, He also heads the Mesenchymal Stem Cell Laboratory of the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Transfusion Medicine at the University Hospital Tübingen in Germany. His work there centers on tissue regeneration and adult stem cell isolation, expansion, differentiation and transplantation. He is also head of an interdisciplinary working group on Molecular Stem Cell Imaging (MSCI).