One Mother Rambling Through Life

So having been touched by cancer through my step-fathers battle and also seeing people in my little bloggersphere being touched by cancer as well it got me thinking about what is going on and what technology is out there to further the fight for the good. Most people are well versed in chemo and radiation having been Saint Jude commercialed to death in our life times with the sweet and sad faces of little cancer fighters on the front lines of the battle. So what is out there. I have some knowledge of this as my stepfather recently went through some of this.



This is a relatively new treatment in all areas. Stem cells are the frontier of treatment for a wide variety of things. And before you get all killing babies and fetuses maybe I should remind all that apposed to what the stem cell protestors have communicated the stem cell as the horrid things stem cells are throughout our body. As urbandictionary.com defines it: "Cells that maintain the ability to replicate them selves as well as form other cells of the body. Two major classifications exist; embryonic stem cells which are tot potent or pluri potent and can make any cell of the organisms body and adult or tissue specific stem cells which are multipotent and can produce only a limited range of cell types. Often confused by the laymen and stupid right-wing politicians as tiny little babies but really more similar to dandruff than babies." So we are talking about the cells throughout our body. Such as in bone marrow. They can now extract the bone marrow from your body, use cell isolation technology to clean it, and put it back in. This is safer than the old methods of user donor marrow because it is more likely to be accepted by your body. This treatment has had very positive outcomes in helping cancer patients and providing longer periods that are cancer free and possibly taking it out of the picture in the future for good.

The company STEMCELL technology has a lot of different ways that they offer to utilize cell isolation to use positive and negative selection to isolate the cells. In positive selection they label desired cells and then using negative selection they target the bad cells and leave the labeled cells untouched. So basically it is similar to the student labeling we see in some school where they label children as gifted and accelerate them, label the troubled students ad put them in a corner, and leave those who have no label untouched to succeed or fail by their own devices. But that is for another blog and is not advisable where what STEMCELL technology is doing is excellent.

Some of the products that STEMCELL technology offers are:

"EasySep®
EasySep® is a powerful immunomagnetic column-free cell isolation system that uses specific antibodies to target cells and crosslink them to magnetic particles. Cells can be magnetically labeled either for selection (of desired cells) or depletion (of unwanted cells), and are then separated using an EasySep® magnet.

"RoboSep®
RoboSep® is the first instrument to offer true walk-away automation of immunomagnetic cell isolation by performing all EasySep® cell labeling and magnetic separation steps. Set-up is simple: just load your samples and reagents and return to separated cells in as little as 25 minutes.

"RosetteSep
RosetteSep® is a rapid cell separation method for the isolation of highly purified cells directly from human whole blood. RosetteSep® turns a simple density centrifugation step into a specific antibody-mediated cell enrichment procedure.

"StemSep®
StemSep® is an immunomagnetic column-based cell isolation system. Cells are labeled with specific antibodies and are crosslinked to StemSep® Magnetic Particles, then separated using a column held in a magnet. StemSep can be used for both positive (selection of desired cells) or negative (depletion of unwanted cells) selection."

Basically what all of that is saying is that STEMCELL technology is working hard to utilize cell isolation to help you. Not only with cancer but that is the easiest example of how cell isolation helps you and me. Imagine what is on the next wave of technology. For me I will leave these things to the expert and will trust in them to help me and mine stay healthy and happy for a long time an keep "one disease to rule them all" or cancer as defined by UrbanDictionary away.