The first therapy using stem cells was a bone marrow transplant performed by French oncologist Georges Mathé in 1958 on five workers at the Vinča Nuclear Institute in Yugoslavia who had been affected by a criticality accident. The workers all survived.[10]
In 1981, embryonic stem (ES) cells were first isolated and successfully cultured using mouse blastocysts by British biologists Martin Evans and Matthew Kaufman. This allowed the formation of murine genetic models, a system in which the genes of mice are deleted or altered in order to study their function in pathology. By 1998, human embryonic stem cells were first isolated by American biologist James Thomson, which made it possible to have new transplantation methods or various cell types for testing new treatments. In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka‘s team in Kyoto, Japan converted fibroblasts into pluripotent stem cells by modifying the expression of only four genes. The feat represents the origin of induced pluripotent stem cells, known as iPS cells.[7]
In 2011, a female maned wolf, run over by a truck, underwent stem cell treatment at the Zoo Brasília, this being the first recorded case of the use of stem cells to heal injuries in a wild animal.[11][12]
