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Comment by kylehotchkiss | Hacker News Reader

How does a stem cell with somebody else's DNA not trigger your own immune system? I'd understand if you could repurpose your own bone marrow (which is a type of stem cell, right?) or neurological stem cells, but I'd sort of expect the immune system to reject others similar to a bad organ transplant or wrong blood type transfusion.

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From the article:

> Recipients were given immune-suppressing drugs to prevent their bodies from attacking the cells for six months after the surgery.

Seems like it would need to be lifelong because those cells end up differentiating and fixing the damage so they will always be in there.

Unless the cells actually do nothing and once they are dead you no longer need immune suppression.

Immunosuppressive or immune modulating drugs are not that bad. Usually people can take them without too much issues. Yes: Your risk for cancer increases a bit and you have to be careful to not get sick etc. but overall its not that bad.

Most people who have autoimmune diseases also need to take those drugs usually for life – (smaller dosages but still)...

> and you have to be careful to not get sick etc.

Sooo easy.

Especially if you have kids.

or work in an office, one kid gets sick, guess what, now it's your problem

I have sympathy for people with autoimmune diseases on immunosuppressants who have family in developing countries, where a lot of complicated infections are easier to catch. They solve the problem in the context of our (generally? decreasingly?) sterile world, but not globally.

Biologics are phenomenal for this. Especially the selective ones.

Sadly, they are also inaccessible to people of lower socioeconomic status.

I take dimethyl-fumarate, and I have been at the hospital for a week getting very high doses of corticosteroid infusions, and thankfully I did not catch anything. I have not had common cold for almost a decade, yet I have been on steroids (both via IV and pills) and I have been on an immunomodulator (not suppressant, however) for almost a decade.

I have not even caught COVID yet been exposed to it (has been quarantined three times with someone with COVID).

These medications for MS are very expensive, but since in Hungary there are subsidies for it, it costs as much as 1 USD instead of 1500 USD per month.

Not all are "not that bad". Dimethyl-fumarate which I take for MS is not as bad (nor strong), but there are ones with a very serious side-effect profile. I am happy I could stick to dimethyl-fumarate. I still have to have blood tests done every 3 months to see if my liver is OK, but then again, I take Silymarin and NAC, so should be OK.

For the curious, NAC is given for people with acetaminophen toxicity which destroys your liver.

Silymarin is from Milk Thistle.[1]

[1] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/422884, https://web.archive.org/web/20250101032455/https://www.medsc...

It would seem worthwhile to bank things like umbilical cord blood so that if these therapies work in the future, you have a supply of your own cells. Immunosuppressive therapy isn’t that fun.

That would be cool, being able to generate stem cells with your own DNA dynamically later in life would be cooler (please pardon my elementary biology approach to this, I know that is an an Everest sized mountain to climb)

There are companies now offering stem cell culturing and storage from adult samples. Something I've been meaning to look into actually.

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