Team:SYSU-CHINA/HumanPractice/Survey

How do people concern about Stem Cell Therapy

     Stem cell therapy is receiving more and more attention. As biological majored students, we have background knowledge and interest in improving and introducing stem cell therapy, but we want to know other people’s opinions: how well do they know about stem cell therapy? What is the main concern of stem cell therapy for them? How can this concern be eliminated? How well can our project help? Thus, we carried out a survey. Since we wanted to discuss this question more detailedly, many terminologies were used that might be hard for everyone to understand, so the survey was mainly carried out upon people that received higher-education.

     The following is the analysis of the survey.

Part 1 Educational background of informants.

Figure 1. Education background of informants
Figure 2. Major of informants

     From these two pie charts we could see our informants were mostly highly educated (About 93% were in university), and a lot of people were majoring in biology, physiology or medicine (64%). There were also people from other majors who were interested in this issue and took part in filling our questionnaire. Generally, we had a reliable feedback to support our result.

Part 2 How well do these people know about stem cell therapy.

Q1: All you familiar with stem cell therapy?

Figure 3. Pie chart for question 1

     More than half of the participants were not familiar with cell therapy (51%). From feedbacks after filling the questionnaire, we knew that many people came into this word many a time, yet had not looked detailedly into this issue. Therefore, it is helpful to introduce more about stem cell therapy to the public. So we carried out the Bio-festivals.

Q2: What kind of problems of stem cell therapy do you concern about most?

Figure 4. Pie chart for question 2

Q3: What will affect the feasibility of stem cell therapy? (Multiple Selection)

Figure 5. Histogram for question 3

     Immunological rejection (35%) and stability of stem cells (31%) were two core problems that people concerned about. “Homing or not” (8%) might be unfamiliar for most people. Specified studies (125 in number) and assessment system (94 in number) were both needed to be perfect. On the other hand, ethic issues were not a severe problem (60 in number).

Part 3 Problems in stem cell therapy.

Q4: What do you think is related to the curative effect of stem cell therapy?

Figure 6. Histogram for question 3

Q5: Considering stem cells proliferate with the effect of stem cell therapy, it is?

Figure 7. Pie chart for question 5

Q6: What do you think about such technology that can tell if a stem cell proliferates and the numbers of cell-cycle it undergo?

Figure 8. Pie chart for question 6

     This year, SYSU-China wanted to develop a system that could be used for counting the cell-cycle numbers the cells undergo. Although the cells we used for the project are tumor cells, our intention goes for stem cells.

     As for the comments on proliferation of stem cells, 54% of the people thought that it was valuable for reference and 42% of them thought it was vital and necessary. This pointed out that the majority of people had the same thought with us, and that our project would be meaningful if put into usage.

     We carried out question eight to further specify the significance of our project to stem cell therapy, and found that our project was thought to have a practical meaning for both safety (30%) and feasibility (35%) issues. Nevertheless, 7% of the people believed that our project would be significant for fundamental researches.