In the future, thyroid medication and the problems that necessitated it, may be a thing of the past.
Thanks to some groundbreaking work by Sabine Costagliola at the Free University of Brussels, our old friend the Stem Cell has slain yet another dragon.
What Sabine’s team did was to get stem-cells to produce 2 compounds only found in the thyroid.
They then grew these special cells in petri-dishes, coated them in thyroid hormones, and VIOLA! -The stem-cells turned into real honest-to-goodness thyroid cells.
The next most fortunate & amazing development was the research team didn’t really need any of the fancy techniques they should have after that.
-For Example: Awhile ago, we told you that one of the secrets to regenerating the notoriously-hard-to-culture hair-follicles was a spinning & turning trick that Angela Christiano came up with.
Well strangely-enough, thyroid cells are very similar. They need to form groups of round follicles that can concentrate substances for use in making hormones.
But by some freaking genius miracle, the stem-cell-derived thyroids turned into follicles & started making actual, real, working hormones; -all on their own!
And next came the Acid-Test: Trials on Living Animals. I mean, what good are thyroid cells if you can’t easily & portably use them, right?
-Well, that worked even better than Sex Panther Cologne. The team had an 89% Success-Rate on their very first run.
Oh yeah, by the way; one more thing… because of the way the researchers decided to run the tests? -You know, just to make sure?…
They also demonstrated they can Reverse Hypothyroidism.
-Even after The. Entire. Gland. Is Dead.
Yup.
They killed thyroid glands in the mice, installed their engineered-cells,
-And then made those thyroids work like new again.
BOOM!
Now all they need to do is get this thing going for people. -Like women & the elderly, who are more prone to develop these problems as time passes.
Check out the details at the Links:
Photo Credits: “Vulcania 1”, by ezagury
Links:
• Source: Nature-Thyroid is latest success
• More Coverage: Sabine Costagliola Lab | The Centre For Regenerative Medicine | Wikipedia-Hypthyroidism | LabTimes-Building A Thyroid Gland From Scratch[PDF]
• Source Study: Nature-Generation of functional thyroid from embryonic stem cells
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