It's time to love your saddle bags, love handles and flabby arms. All that fat could come in handy some day. This may open the way, they say, for new procedures for repairing and replacing damaged tissue throughout the body.
Stem cells are essentially a clean slate for producing other cells that serve a specific purpose.
Until now, says Patricia A. Zuk, lead author of the UCLA study, the primary sources for stem cells have been from fetal cells, the use of which raises ethical issues, or, in adults, from bone marrow or brain cells, which are in short supply. Being able to use fat cells means scientists would have an unlimited supply of stem cells for repair work. All the cells successfully regenerated into healthy tissue at each site. Their work is similar, Zuk says, to that being done at Duke University, where doctors also were able to produce cartilage cells from the stem cells harvested from fat. The results of that study were reported in February at the annual meeting of the Orthopedic Research Society.