Cord blood stem cells are obviously useful—you can use them to give perfectly matched bone marrow transplants and there has been VERY LIMITED success turning them into other cell types in laboratory research. The process for getting bone marrow stem cells from an adult is either painful (gigantic drill/needle into your hip bone) or dangerous (drugs that cause your bone marrow to overproliferate and leak into your blood) not to mention expensive so most people aren’t willing to go through with it on the off chance they need a bone marrow transplant, instead opting to give it only when someone else badly needs the cells.
De-differentiated pluripotent stem cells are dangerous. Think teratomas. They’ve been genetically modified to de-differentiate and are thus prone to going all weird later. Amazing for research purposes though even if there’s recent work to the effect that not all IPSC cell lines are exactly like natural pluripotent cells.
Cord blood stem cells are obviously useful—you can use them to give perfectly matched bone marrow transplants and there has been VERY LIMITED success turning them into other cell types in laboratory research. The process for getting bone marrow stem cells from an adult is either painful (gigantic drill/needle into your hip bone) or dangerous (drugs that cause your bone marrow to overproliferate and leak into your blood) not to mention expensive so most people aren’t willing to go through with it on the off chance they need a bone marrow transplant, instead opting to give it only when someone else badly needs the cells.
De-differentiated pluripotent stem cells are dangerous. Think teratomas. They’ve been genetically modified to de-differentiate and are thus prone to going all weird later. Amazing for research purposes though even if there’s recent work to the effect that not all IPSC cell lines are exactly like natural pluripotent cells.