The prediction for 2020 is very interesting (in bold below)
Fight Aging! Newsletter, December 19th 2011
"Parkinson's researchers were among the first to earnestly attempt to
create a specific cell type for transplant, and have continued to work
at this. The obvious symptoms of Parkinson's are caused by the
progressive loss of a thin population of dopamine-producing neurons,
and therefore a way of replacing those specialist cells wholesale
would be a way to temporarily reverse the course of the disease -
perhaps for years or even decades in the best case. Thus these
researchers now make up one of the more experienced scientific
communities involved in cell therapy research, and can be counted on
to rapidly pick up promising new developments in the control and
reprogramming of cells.
"Once researchers have demonstrated control over cellular
reprogramming, the ability to turn one cell type into another by
providing suitable signals, the focus starts to shift away from
transplants and on to reprogramming cells in situ: instructing the
body - or the brain in this case - to directly produce more of the
needed cell type. ... I'll go out on a limb and suggest that
transplants are probably not the be-all and end end-all future of
tissue engineering. By the time the 2020s roll around, I'd guess that
most of the new therapies moving into US trials and clinical use
overseas will be based on delivering increasingly precise and targeted
reprogramming instructions into the body rather than introducing new
cells or taking the patient's cells and working with them outside the
body to produce tissue for transplantation."
Fight Aging! Newsletter, December 19th 2011
"Parkinson's researchers were among the first to earnestly attempt to
create a specific cell type for transplant, and have continued to work
at this. The obvious symptoms of Parkinson's are caused by the
progressive loss of a thin population of dopamine-producing neurons,
and therefore a way of replacing those specialist cells wholesale
would be a way to temporarily reverse the course of the disease -
perhaps for years or even decades in the best case. Thus these
researchers now make up one of the more experienced scientific
communities involved in cell therapy research, and can be counted on
to rapidly pick up promising new developments in the control and
reprogramming of cells.
"Once researchers have demonstrated control over cellular
reprogramming, the ability to turn one cell type into another by
providing suitable signals, the focus starts to shift away from
transplants and on to reprogramming cells in situ: instructing the
body - or the brain in this case - to directly produce more of the
needed cell type. ... I'll go out on a limb and suggest that
transplants are probably not the be-all and end end-all future of
tissue engineering. By the time the 2020s roll around, I'd guess that
most of the new therapies moving into US trials and clinical use
overseas will be based on delivering increasingly precise and targeted
reprogramming instructions into the body rather than introducing new
cells or taking the patient's cells and working with them outside the
body to produce tissue for transplantation."