Replacing Cells - Biotechnology and Your Health: Pharmaceutical Applications - page 115

The ability of adult stem cells to become something other than
what they were destined to be is controversial. One team of scien-
tists has reported that a particularly promising adult stem cell,
isolated from bone marrow and called a multipotent adult progenitor
cell ( MAPC ), appears able to develop into many different kinds of
specialized cells in the laboratory. Other scientists have not been
able to reproduce these results. Additionally, scientists have
reported that stem cells found in fat can become muscle cells,
nerve cells, or even pancreas cells able to make insulin, under the
right laboratory conditions.
Researchers in Germany treated a girl who had a massive skull
injury from a fall with bone-repair cells grown from her own fat
plus a graft of her own bone. The story is an example of both the
heroic efforts made on behalf of a patient when standard treatment
fails and also of the uncertainty of whether these uses of the stem
cell make a difference. Immediately after the fall, the child had
developed increasing pressure in her skull and the surgeons had to
remove pieces of her skull bone. They stored the pieces in a freezer
for three weeks and tried to use them with plates of titanium to
provide a protective covering for her brain. But the repair became
infected and the bone graft failed. Next, a team of surgeons and
technicians worked in the operating room to build an ingenious and
novel graft. They spread a paste made from a piece of the girl's hip
bone onto a mold made of sheets of dressing that would eventually
be broken down. They put the paste-covered mold in place, and
covered it with more protective dressing. None of this was new
technology—but then they added stem cells. During the surgery,
they had taken a little bit of fat from the girl's hip and had isolated
stem cells from it. When the molded graft was in place, the doctors
injected the stem cells into holes in the protective sheet and then
sprayed the whole thing with a sticky spray made from the girl's
own fibrin, a blood protein involved in blood clotting and wound
healing. After six weeks, the patched area was strong that the