One more for adult stem cells

You might not be able to tell it from the media coverage, though.

Professor David Williams of the UK is in the news today for a $32 Million (17 million Great Britain Pound) push to grow human tissues suitable for transplant from adult stem cells.

Unfortunately, most of the stories about the multidisciplinary research effort never mention that these are adult stem cells. Here's a quote that supports that very important fact:

Professor David Williams, director of the UK Centre For Tissue Engineering at the University of Liverpool, said: "Nobody has been really successful at tissue engineering on a consistent basis yet and what this programme is hoping to do is bring together these complementary expertises and build a system from which we can take cells and stem cells from patients and use them to regenerate new ones."

I'm still convinced that the study of adult stem cells will lead to treatments at the site of injury and the goal should not be transplant, but healing in situ. Such treatments would be more specific to each patient and each wound or disease, and it would be more likely to avoid the problems of genetic mutations in stem cells grown in the lab, as well as the ethical problem of the necessity to destroy human embryos to obtain embryonic stem cells.