A team of Indian doctors Wednesday announced that they have finished 100 clinical cases of human embryonic stem cell transplantation, a controversial frontier therapy to diseases like Parkinsonism, leukaemia and spinal cord injury.

About 90 to 95 percent of the patients have undergone improvement, said Dr. Geeta Shroff, director of Nu Tech Mediworld and the team leader, at a press conference here Wednesday.

The doctors have applied human stem cell transplantation on clinical cases like head injury, post stroke syndrome, kidney and liver diseases, spinal injury and diabetes since 1998, Geeta said.

Stem cells have the potential to develop into many different cell types in the body such as a muscle cell, red blood cell or brain cell.

"The ability to grow human cells of all kinds opens the door to treating a range of cell-based disease by replacing damaged or diseased cells and to growing tissues that can be used for transplantation purposes," Geeta said.

However, the promising therapy has roused great ethical concerns across the world as stem cells must be collected from human embryos that are a few days old. Some scientists have collected stem cells from abortive embryos.

"We don't need one embryo for one patient. Only one for many patients," Geeta said. Once a stem cell was collected and developed into a stem cell line, it can be grown in the laboratory indefinitely and frozen for storage or distribution.

But she did not release where the first one stem cell came from and what happened to the human embryo where the cell was collected.

The Indian government has not issued rules over such therapy and neither the laws.

The administration is working on a draft regulation over the human embryonic stem cell transplantation, said Prasanna Hota, secretary of health and family welfare. "These (clinical cases) are very important experiments. We will figure out a supportive structure for such efforts."

Source: Xinhua