Before I delve into the details of what my thoughts are on the use of Stem cell therapy for the treatment of kidney damage, a brief summary of the background information regarding acute kidney injury (AKI) has to be put forward.
Acute kidney injury (AKI), also known as acute renal failure refers to the severe deterioration of kidney functions, which is notable in the substantial increase in levels of serum creatinine within 48 hours or within the preceding 7 days, or a decrease in urine volume (output) for 6 hours. AKI occurs when the kidneys of critically ill people (especially those in the ICU) suddenly lose their filtering abilities (Koza 2016). Several factors cause AKI, but they are categorized into pre-renal causes, which include arterial hypotension and acute glomerulonephritis, intra-renal causes such as acute tubulointerstitial nephritis, acute tubular necrosis and acute vasculopathy, post-renal causes that is the urinary tract obstructions. Additionally, according to Sawinski (n.d), "AKI is an extremely common complication of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). The incidence of AKI varies in the literature and depends on the definition of AKI used and the type of stem cell transplant performed" (P. 97).
Hematopoietic stem cells are blood stem cells that differentiate into other specialized blood and immune cells. They are found in both adults and children. And they can be derived from peripheral circulating blood, umbilical cord blood, bone marrow, etc. These cells can renew themselves and can undergo programmed cell apoptosis (NIH, n.d). Hematopoietic stem cells belong to the embryonic stem cell (ESC) subclass, of the pluripotent category of somatic stem cells. When tried in mice, ESC showed great potential in cell therapy that involves kidney regeneration due to their self-renewable abilities and multilineage differentiation (Cheng et al, 2020). This indicates that there is a great promise in the human therapeutic kidney repair through somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). But the problem is that for decades, somatic cell transfer (SCNT) has remained an issue of controversy.
Somatic cell Transfer (SCNT) or therapeutic cloning is the process of making cloned embryos for therapeutic or reproductive purposes. The process involves the transfer of a diploid nucleus of a somatic cell to the cytoplasm of a denucleated egg (oocyte). Thereafter, the diploid nucleus is placed inside the cytoplasm of the egg and is allowed to fuse. An electric charge is then used to activate the zygote nucleus i.e. the preimplantation embryo. The zygote, which is the fertilized egg (already), is now allowed to develop into a blastocyst that is made up of an inner mass of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) (Stocum 2020) that can be used for any restoration therapies like the kidney. Going a step further produces reproductive clones, which is implanting the derived SCNT blastocyst in the uterus of a surrogate mother for a complete fetal development
However, I'm a little bit inclined to think that therapeutic cloning is still an amateur field that needs further research. Thus, these are my reasons against therapeutic SCNT.
First of all, the