Re: Can stem cells harvested from primates work in humans?

Embryonic stem (ES) cells are the most controversial cell type derived 
from humans and have also been derived from a range of other animals, 
including primates. However, it is unlikely that ES cells derived from 
primates will be useful in humans since the human immune system will see 
the primate cells as foreign and destroy them. There are ways of getting 
round this problem, for example, cloning a patient's cells to enable 
isolation of ES cells identical to them. However, this technique will be 
very costly and is still controversial as human embryos are used for the 
cloning procedure. 

It has been proposed that bovine embryos be used as a surrogate embryo to 
isolate human ES cells. In this method, a human nucleus is placed into an 
enucleated bovine oocyte and cultured in vitro to blastocyst stage to 
isolate ES cells from the inner cell mass/epiblast. Contaminating bovine 
mitochondria could be inactivated before the human nucleus is inserted and 
human mitochondria could then be added. This technique, however, is 
contoversial as it is a form of xenotranplantation. (See Ward CM (2002). 
The isolation, culture and therapeutic application of pluripotent stem 
cells derived from human embryos. Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents. 12
(9):1395-1402)

The most likely method to be focused on in the next few years is the 
dedifferentiation of somatic cells from patients to produce a pluripotent 
cell type capable of differentiating into a range of cell lineages. As 
these "stem cells" will be identical to the patient their immune system 
will not see the cells as foreign. 

I hope this has answered your question.