Stem cells could deliver tumor-busting drugs, repair damaged brains, and even mend a (literally) broken heart. But first, scientists must figure out how to get these jacks-of-all-trades where they’re needed and ensure that they survive long enough to do their work.
Achieving this objective requires being able to observe the cells after they’re set loose inside a living, breathing animal. Of course, scientists can make tissue slices and use histology to look for the cells, but that offers only a snapshot of one final time point.
“If you want to understand what happens to these stem cells, it’s important to track the fate of these cells without having to kill the animal,” says Joseph Wu, a cardiologist at Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California. Stem cell transplants may settle down, proliferate, and differentiate as desired; they may form dangerous tumors; or they may simply falter and die.
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