information about stem cells

shall we have a look at your baby? - you're 27 weeks now, aren't you?- yeah.- okay. oh, that's a nice one, isn't it?that's always good, isn't it? birth defects represent one of the major causes of morbidity and mortality in children. there's about three in every 100 babies

which are born with a major birth defect. we are faced many times with a situation in which we don't know what to do for these babies. - it's a girl.- it's a girl. i collaborate with paolo de coppi.i look after the mums while they're pregnant. paolo visits the fetal medicine unit,and he sees the mums if the baby has an abnormality because he looks after the babywhen they're born. and we're trying to develop

treatments using stem cellsin the amniotic fluid around the baby. stem cells have represented a major breakthrough because it's the possibility of growing cellsoutside the body to make a repair to the children once the cells have been built in the laboratory. so what we have developed in the last few years and this has been initially the work we have done

with antony atala at the wake forest institute of regenerative medicine and is the possibility of deriving stem cell from the amniotic fluid. these are not embryonic stem cells but are neither adult stem cells. they have characteristics that are in between the two cell types, and for that, they present a bigadvantage for therapy. these cells would represent an ideal source

for building organ and tissue that are missing in the foetus. and this is because we can predict and diagnose very accurately these diseases before the foetus is born. once this diagnosis is made, however, we have about 20 weeks of gestation in which we can plan the engineered organ to be built outside of the baby,

that then can be eventually implanted once the baby is born. so we can correct that defect at birth using his own cells. here is where we do receive the samples from anna's. once the cells are isolated from the amniotic fluid,they can be easily expanded in this incubator

and eventually engineered in a three-dimensional structurethat can mimic the organs that the baby is missing. these organs can be expanded and grown in these bioreactors. we haven't got any treatments that will actually work yet. but we're working on this whole area. for instance, the mum that we scanned earlier onhas got a completely healthy, normal baby as far as i can tell on the scan. we're not looking to treat anybody right now.but we are trying to develop new

treatments which will improve already existing treatmentsor to develop completely new therapies, using the stem cells that are in the amniotic fluid. another situation in which we can intervene even before birth - we can use the same cells to treat the foetus. so if we know that the foetus has some malformation that can be corrected before birth,

we can use his own cells to, for treatment. so we can culture his or her cells outside the womb and expand them and eventually correct, for example, the gene that is altered or missing, using gene therapy technique. and we can inject back the cells

into the foetus before birth. and so somehow improving his option of life