Culture of stem cells and cancer cells
Most of us probably do not know it, but it is possible to actually cultivate stem cells. This has to be done with care and in a particular environment in a laboratory, but it is something that a lot of scientists do.
It is important when doing so to bring all the right things to guarantee that stem cells will grow correctly, and that it why scientists need to give them the correct amount of nutriments and cultivate them at the right temperature so they do not die.
The first thing that a scientist would need to do is to extract the stem cell and isolate it to transfer it to its new environment, which is usually a plastic laboratory dish already containing all the necessary nutriments that will help the stem cell grow.
Once in their new environment, the stem cells will spread all over the surface of the plastic dish and divide themselves. Most of the time, the laboratory plastic dishes used are covered with treated mouse embryonic cells that will provide the sticky surface on which the human cells will grow.
Some scientists have found a way to avoid using this sticky surface as even if the mouse embryonic cell is treated, it is safer not to use it as there are risks of virus transmission for example.
Once the stem cells start to develop and crowd the surface, the cells are taken out and placed in other separate dishes. After a few months, the first stem cells will have developed millions of embryonic stem cells.
We often hear of cancer stem cells, but it is important to note that these cells are different from the stem cells used to cure diseases and help patients. These cancer stem cells become what they are because of mutations developing over years and years in the body, and this is these mutations that help the proliferation of the cancer.
These cancer stem cells can be found in various cancers like breast cancer for example.
As the use of stem cells is becoming more and more frequent, we have seen an explosion of the number of stem cell banks and cord blood banks, whether they are public or private stem cell banks. These banks do stem cell storage, cord blood storage and stem cell collection and cord blood collection.
These stem cell banks store the stem cells and often the cord blood with cord blood banking in special places.
