- When Taylor Binns slowly began going blind because of complications with his contact lenses, he started to prepare for living the rest of his life without vision. But an innovative treatment using stem cells has changed all that, and returned to him the gift of sight.
First off, I'm proud to be an Ontarian at the moment! Secondly, I have been having conversations about stem cells with some interesting people lately: http://cadelllast.wordpress.com/2012/12/16/building-a-heart/ Including a professor at UofT (University of Toronto) who is building a heart out of stem cells. The application of stems cells is going to transform medical care in the next decade throughout the developed world, and hopefully the rest of the world after that. I remember reading about stem cells when the research was still in its infancy five or six years ago. There was a lot of promise, but the application was just an impossibility. Researchers were having trouble finding stem cells in an adult host's body and differentiating the cells into the types of cells they wanted. Now researchers can do this quite easily. Applying healthy stem cells to damaged organs is the first step (like this article reveals). This year has been a break through for such applications: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17012688 http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-stem-cells-aid-vision-... When I say that stem cells could transform medical care I mean that any organ-related failure in the future may be easily curable (as many communicable disease that used to cause death are now easily curable). The future development of this research will be our ability to have our own backup organs. Yay for science! And yay for future awesomeness!