Jan 24, 2012 Never go blind – stem cells FTW
Never ceases to amaze me at how awesomely fast technology and medicine continues to progress. Here’s a new story on probably the first (published) human trial with stem cells and its effects on blindness. Maybe its about time I can finally trust Lasik…
“This trial is more about assessing the safety of the transplantation than its efficacy; but the ambiguity surrounding Freeman’s improvements draws attention to the need for control groups and larger sample sizes in future trials. For now, however, these results are pretty much everything the researchers could have hoped for.
“This is very important for the field of human embryonic stem cell research,” says Dr. Steven Schwartz, director of the Diabetic Eye Disease and Retinal Vascular Center at UCLA and lead author of the paper. “It opens the door for multiple strategies in the field, and hopefully for everyone investigating [this technique], it puts some wind in their sails.”