Software Program Foresees Stem Cell Behavior
Stem cells are crucial for human development and play an essential role in tissue and organ repair due to injury or disease. The progress in stem cell science has achieved a tremendous progress but the scientists and biologists still do not have all the necessary means to control the differentiation of stem cells that is required for the use of stem cell therapies for therapeutic purposes. Andrew Cohen who is an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has developed a software program foretelling which specialized cells will be developed by a stem cell and their future behavior even before the division of stem cell takes place. The software program bases on analyzing of time-lapse behavior of live stem cells.
Cohen’s software will help the scientists in search for methods to control the specialization of stem cells which is the leading obstacle in furthering the use of stem cells for treatment of diseases. His software predicts the production of specialized cells with 87% accuracy and foresees when self-renewal will result in specialization with 99% accuracy which may make the software very useful for research of cancer cells characterized by continuous self-renewal.
The problem of unpredictability of the outcome of cell division is perhaps best best expressed in stem cell treatment of age related macular degeneration. In order to treat the eye disease with stem cells these would need to develop a larger amount of photoreceptive cells. However, once implanted into the retina they can produce other types of cells and potentially worsen the patient’s vision. The Cohen’s software which was designed for isolation of the genes, proteins and other factors that are responsible for control of cell specialization could enable both identification and manipulation of stem cell differentiation.
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