Surprising finds
After millennia of putting up with red tents and Aunt Flo jokes, your menstrual blood could actually provide the key to curing killers such as heart disease, diabetes and multiple sclerosis, and end one of medical research’s thorniest debates.
Last year, researchers at Medistem Laboratories in San Diego and at the Universities of Western Ontario and Alberta and the Bio-Communications Research Institute in Wichita discovered that viable stem cells can be extracted painlessly and ethically from menstrual blood.
“We’re still a long way away from building a brand new heart or liver,” says Medistem’s head researcher and CEO Thomas Ichim, “but we will be able to regenerate new tissue with menstrual stem cells and enable people to live much longer.”
No need for ethics debates
The added bonus of menstrual stem cells: They don’t require drilling into a donor’s bone to extract marrow, or the destruction of an embryo, as in the cases of bone marrow and embryonic stem cell transplantation. “We have screened adult donors collect their blood in an insertable silicone DivaCup, made in Kitchener, Ont.,” says Ichim.
The sample cells are then washed and centrifuged, and the regenerative stem cells cloned and frozen. In theory, the cells can then be injected into almost any tissue to restore, for instance, damaged blood vessels (as in the case of advanced diabetes and heart disease) or potentially regenerate and protect brain or nerve cells being destroyed by MS.
“These cells can make liver, lung, brain or pancreatic tissue,” says Ichim, “but we’re only in the early stages of investigating the area that promises the most success, which is advanced diabetes or peripheral artery disease.” Considering that our diabetes risk begins to escalate at 40, and that a one-third of Canadian women will eventually die of heart disease, it’s good news, even if you’re PMSing.
This article originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of More
