News from Joni and Friends’ Christian Institute on Disability!

People with disabilities continue to be greatly encouraged by the many new treatments using adult stem cell therapies. For instance, Christopher Lyles, a Baltimore cancer patient, now has a new trachea — and scientists say the approach shows great promise for the future. The 30-year-old man was diagnosed with an inoperable tumor in his windpipe and the patient was out of options. “They tried chemotherapy and radiation, but they just couldn’t get rid of this tumor,” Dr. David Prentice of Family Research Council reported. “They couldn’t take it out because they had nothing to put back in in terms of his windpipe, and it was slowly going to choke him to death.”
But Christopher Lyles found Dr. Paolo Macchiarini who had developed a technique using the patient’s own bone marrow adult stem cells to build new tissue and save many lives. In this case, adult stem cells were used on a sort of scaffold. “The cells grew a whole new windpipe for him.” The case adds to the more than 70 different ways in which adult stem cells have successfully been used in a medical treatment, while embryonic stem cell research continues to yield no results. Read more about this story here.