SINGAPORE - Stem cell therapy, a type of regenerative medicine which is able to repair injured tissues and treat disease, has long been touted as the future of medicine.
Like a blank canvas, stem cells can be "programmed" to create new skin grafts, bone and a range of other body parts, such as the cornea in the eye.
A large reserve of some three million stem cells can be found in the bone marrow, though extracting them for use can be a painful, intrusive process that carries a health risk for the donor.
But scientists from local biotech firm CellResearch Corporation have discovered that the umbilical cord lining serves as an even richer source of stem cells - with each cord yielding around 12 billion stem cells for extraction.
Its group chief executive Gavin Tan told The Straits Times that stem cells from the umbilical cord lining are much younger compared with adult stem cells, and are therefore higher in quality and can withstand the cultivation processes needed for the creation of different cell types.
"They can also be extracted at lower production costs, as the umbilical cord is considered medical waste and will be discarded anyway," said Mr Tan.
The company has since pioneered a stem cell therapy to treat chronic diabetic foot ulcers, which affect more than 30 million people globally.
These ulcers are open sores or wounds that may result from poor blood circulation or a lack of sensation due to nerve damage caused by elevated blood glucose levels.
Diabetes makes it hard for the body to heal itself, increasing the risk of wounds becoming chronic and raising the risk of infection.
"However, the regenerative effect of the stem cells can help to stop the inflammation, giving the blood vessels a chance to heal," said Mr Tan.
The treatment is undergoing phase one of clinical trials with the US Food and Drug Administration.
For its novel treatment, CellResearch was also the first Singaporean company to have recently been awarded an Innovation Passport in Britain, which is given to innovative drugs to reduce the time needed for the treatment to be approved and brought to market.
Prior to conducting the clinical trial, the company had collaborated with two hospitals in Vietnam around a decade ago, where patients with chronic wounds, burns and ulcers were given the stem cell therapy and were finally able to heal - after all conventional treatments had failed.
This initial success gave the company confidence to begin formal clinical trials for the treatment in wound healing.
To date, the company has a total of 44 patents, and is worth at least $700 million.
Other projects in its research pipeline include the possible use of stem cells for lupus - an autoimmune disease where the body's immune system attacks its own tissues and organs, and Parkinson's disease, a progressive brain disorder which affects movement.
"Stem cells too, have an immunomodulatory effect - where it is able to normalise or regulate the immune system, such that the autoimmune response is dampened. The same overarching mechanism also works for Parkinson's disease," he added.
Another use for stem cells is in the area of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) - an eye disease that blurs one's central vision, and is one of the biggest sources of blindness.
"As AMD is caused by the degeneration of a type of cell known as the retinal pigment epithelial cell, what we're aiming to do is to process the cord lining stem cells into these epithelial cells, and transplant them into the eye, to reverse this degeneration effect," said Mr Tan.
