Posted on 02/20/2009 5:32:13 PM PST by Kaslin
Medical Advancement: It's the supporters of embryonic stem cell research who have politicized science. The desperation of a family and the pressure to produce results may have produced a medical tragedy instead.
As we noted then and do again, ESCR was not the "most promising" avenue of stem cell research. And no, that's not because of a lack of federal funds, but rather with the difficulties of controlling the embryonic stem cells and what they turn into.
Unfortunately, it's been almost impossible to have a rational debate about this. ESCR supporters view adult stem cell research as something pushed by pro-lifers whose real target is Roe v. Wade.
Adult stem cells culled from a patient's body solve the rejection problem of ESCs and have already been used in hundreds of treatments and therapies of patients. But embryonic, or pluripotent, stem cells can't seem to make it out of the laboratory.
They are called pluripotent because they can develop into any and every type of human tissue. That's why some scientists prefer them. Problem is, they're hard to control and tend to develop into one of the most primitive and terrifying forms of cancer, a tumor called a teratoma.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
The first human safety trial using embryonic stem cells has only just recently been approved. Kinda hard to compare “cure” numbers when one side hasn’t gotten onto the field.
Scan the available info and see ya around.
I guess you're not familiar with GWB's restrictions.
Well, despite them, and despite contamination of some of the extant lines, work has been progressing.
Because after millions of dollars spent and cutting-edge experiments on 5 continents, all it's been able to produce in vivo is tumors.
Wow...blood cells are tumors?
Scientists Make Red Blood Cells From Human Embryonic Stem Cells
And I am sure you're aware that research into embryonic stem cells was what allowed the de-differentiation work to go forward.
BFL
Do you know what "in vivo" means?
Yes, and you're right, I overlooked that part.
How about "Endothelial cells derived from human embryonic stem cells form durable blood vessels in vivo"?
The last link is fairly technical. I suggest reading at least up to the "Editors' Summary."
> I guess you’re not familiar with GWB’s restrictions.
If embryonic stem cell field was so promising it would be overflowing with private money and Bush’ funding restrictions would have been irrelevant.
LOL!
You do realize it’s not just funding restrictions, right?
> You do realize it’s not just funding restrictions, right?
Are you sure? Please clarify.
> How about “Endothelial cells derived from human embryonic stem cells form durable blood vessels in vivo”?
I am assuming that you did not actually read the article. This kind of publication is known as a “brief communication”, which means that while the results being reported are very exciting, they are preliminary. For example, there is no information whether any of the mice developed cancers.
Interestingly, Dr. Scadden, who was the senior author on this publication (the web site you referenced messed up the order of the authors), had a Newsweek article where he is very upbeat about the potential of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), which are a type of adult stem cell.
Any restrictions that GWB was able to put in place were only applicable to the US. If embryonic stem cells were so wonderful, research performed in other countries would have produced some positive results (i.e. something other than tumors).
It also reminded me of a passage from the book When The Air Hits Your Brain by Frank Vertosik, MD (a neurosurgeon), which I cannot track down at the moment, in which he explained this kind of thing was likely due to the nature of fetal development.
Cheers!
There’s never been any funding from the Federal government for in vitro fertilization, and that industry has really suffered, hasn’t it?
Many of us did not want any funding for embryonic stem cell research, either. President Bush allocated the first money for human embryonic research from US taxes, playing Solomon by paying for those destroyed (without funding) under the Clinton administration’s policies, but saying in effect, “this much and no more.”
The only restrictions placed on human embryonic stem cell research were on Federal funding. Research on embryos created for the purpose of harvesting embryonic stem cells has continued with private funding all over the US and the world. None of them have done more than confirm or repeat previous work done either with the Federally funded lines, in animal models, or with non-destructive non-embryonic stem cells.
In fact, those limited Federally funded cells were used to confirm knowledge from animal experiments and then for the induced pleuripotent stem cells. No limitation proven, there.
Lanza’s article last month on human cloned embryos using human and animal oocytes was an eye-opener for some of us, because of the number of research centers and researchers credited. (As well as surprising us that ACT had indeed successfully cloned at least 50 human embryos, with 19 going to the stage at which it was possible to harvest stem cells.)( http://www.lifeethics.org/www.lifeethics.org/2009/02/human-cloned-embryos.html and http://www.lifeethics.org/www.lifeethics.org/2009/02/human-animal-embryos-dont-work-for-stem.html )
Interestingly, Dr. Scadden, who was the senior author on this publication (the web site you referenced messed up the order of the authors),
You're right, it did...that's bizarre. Sorry for posting that one instead of the actual publication link. Actal citation is:
Wang ZZ, Au P, Chen T, Shao Y, Daheron LM, Bai H, Arzigian M, Fukumura D, Jain RK, Scadden DT. "Endothelial cells derived from human embryonic stem cells form durable blood vessels in vivo." Nat Biotechnol. 2007 Mar; 25(3):317-8. Epub 2007 Feb 25. doi:10.1038/nbt1287[...] he is very upbeat about the potential of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), which are a type of adult stem cell.
...as am I. I hope you realize that one path of research does not preclude the other. In fact, the results of embryonic stem cell research has led to advances in adult stem cell research, and we might find different uses for the two sources.
At no point did GWB restrict embryonic stem cell research. He was the first President in history to fund it, for researchers working with extant cell lines. If researchers wanted to find funding from Universities, States, investors, private industry, whatever, there were no restrictions at all on ESCR.
Do you think the Federal taxpayer-funded trough is the only font of scientiifc inquiry?
And don't you think there would be investors scrambling to put up their own money for ESCR if there were a decent chance it would result in valuable and profitable therapeutic advances?
From the Wall Street Journal:
James Thomson, the first scientist to derive stem cells from a human embryo, made this point clearly just a few weeks ago: "I don't want to sound too pessimistic because this is all doable, but it's going to be very hard." He added, "those transplantation therapies should work but it's likely to take a long time."
"Leading British stem cell expert Lord Winston has been even more blunt: "I am not entirely convinced that embryonic stem cells will, in my lifetime, and possibly anybody's lifetime, for that matter, be holding quite the promise that we desperately hope they will."
Bottom line: private investment money for ESCR has been, at best, a trickle because of the remoteness of the possibility that it will ever pay off. Because as I said, after millions of dollars spent and cutting-edge experiments on 5 continents, all it's been able to produce in vivo is tumors.
Wow...blood cells are tumors?
I said "in vivo".
From the article you cited: "US scientists have developed an efficient way to make mature red blood cells on a large scale using human embryonic stem cells to make young red blood cells and then maturing them in the lab. "But they haven't given them to people and see if they survive," added Shurin.
Later in the article: "One big problem will be the immune system, which will pick up things like the wrong kind of sugars on the surface of the red blood cells. If they don't match what it is expecting, it will treat the red blood cells as unwanted foreign agents and kill them. There's a lot of work to do, said Shurin..."
There's a certain fey humor in the fact that the de-differentiation work they did with these embryonic cells was, in a sense, irrelevant because it was followed by a series of complex procedures to make the cells behave like adult cells and then remove the immune-triggering characteristics. Which wouldn't have been necessary in the first place if they had started with the hypothetical patient's own autologous hemotopoietic stem cells.
Snort.
> Sorry, but science often operates incrementally and if you are going to play games with the wording to keep backing away from statements, then we could have done the same with adult stem cell research.
The science does operate incrementally and not without mistakes. The problem with the publication you cited is not that it was a brief note, but that it has not been followed-up by a full article. I did a search on Scadden and could not find anything relevant. It is, of course, possible that some of his collaborators took it upon themselves to do follow-up research without his participation. That would be highly unusual and would raise another red flag. However, you are welcome to do your own search and prove me wrong.
BTW, that citation link was cool - I did not realize you could embed EndNote links.
This is not my field of study and I am not on top of what is being followed up by whom. My point is simply that many of those against hESC research give a misleading picture. There are advancements, and though there haven't been floods of cures, there hasn't been nearly enough done to claim the research path is not succeeding.
BTW, that citation link was cool - I did not realize you could embed EndNote links.
:-)
I doubt it. Let some poor institutionalized soul be the guini pig.
Subtle twisting of the wording there. I have to hand it to you, your deviousness is more clever than most who post on the topic!
First of all, the claim that two paths of research of equal potential should advance at the same rate if one receives public funds and the other does not, is absurd.
Second, the possibilities that research might take a while and there might not be as much promise as earlier hoped don’t mean they are paths that shouldn’t be pursued.
And as humorous as it is to hybrid techniques, that often is what leads to successes or to broadening of the application of technologies. A person advocating magnetic storage or optical storage could point to the magneto-optical drive as “not pure,” but it is still in use today—and so are both the magnetic and optical storage technologies.
How ignorant. Embryonic stem cell research has been privately and state funded for years and produced virtually nothing useful in regard to medical advancements.
There hasn’t been a single human safety trial approved in this country prior to the Geron one that just went through.
Oh, quite true. A wealth of public subsidy going to one option will often dry up funding to other options, simply because the amount of money is not infinite. By way of analogy, if Obama succeeds in getting huge subsides for his fave energy options (wind, photovoltaics, whatever) do you suppose there will be much money left over for new efficient coal technologies?
Obviously not. Even the "old" efficient coal technologies, like fluidized bed combustion, will be forced out when the Obamagreen choices are fully funded, cost-effectiveness be damned.
But check this out: the "wealth" of public funding is going to ECSR, not to provably therpeutic Adult Stem Cell research.
California (now in dire financial straits) committed three billion dollars to ESCR.
The disgraced former Governor of New Jersey, James McGreevey, established the state-funded Stem Cell Institute of New Jersey with tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds. Even in 2008, Massachusetts authorized one billion taxpayer dollars to fund ESCR.
They have produced nothing, not one damn thing, of therapeutic value, and yet those are funds that truly promising Adult Stem Cell rsearchers are NOT going to get.
Ordinarily, such a bias in public funding enriching one option (ESCR) would starve the other options (like Adult Stem Cells) into garbled, fragmentary projects. But interestingly, Adult Stem Cell research is so dramatically productive, that they are surging ahead without the kind of "technology-whiskey-sexy" government-funded glamor which has been pumped into ECSR.
The fact that private research centers and investors are still going gung-ho for the Adult Stem Cell research is truly stunning testimony to the fact that they know where the cures are coming from.
Fetal stem cells cause tumor in a teenage boy
By Coco Ballantyne in 60-Second Science Blog
Feb 19, 2009
In May 2001, Israeli parents of a nine-year old boy with a crippling disease that left him wheelchair-bound took their child to see doctors in Moscow. In a highly experimental procedure that was presumably unavailable in their home country, those doctors injected fetal stem cells into various regions of his brain.
The boy’s parents—they aren’t named in a report describing the case in this week’s PLoS Medicine—must have been desperate. The nine-year old suffered from ataxia-telangiectasia, a childhood disease that causes degeneration of parts of the brain that control muscle movements and speech. The symptoms include slurred speech, poor balance, impaired immune function, and the appearance of red spider veins called telangiectasias in the eyes, ears or cheeks.
There are no treatments for the disorder and the prognosis is dim; patients usually only make it into their teens or early twenties, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. While it's unclear exactly what the Russian doctors were trying to achieve (the researchers who wrote the case report were not involved in the stem cell therapy), they must have been hoping that the injected cells would restore some function in his brain, or at least slow the disease progression. The boy went back for injections in 2002 and 2004, although it's not clear from the report whether his condition improved as a result.
Then he was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2005. That tumor, it turns out, grew out of the stem cells, obtained from at least two aborted fetuses, used in his brain.
The tumor was benign, doctors safely removed it, and it has gradually been growing back since the surgery. But this is the first-known case of a brain tumor caused by a brain stem cell therapy, according to the report—a phenomenon scientists have predicted in the pages of Scientific American and elsewhere. The theory is that because these stem cells are fetal cells, they are designed to proliferate and give rise to new tissue, which means they have the potential to produce tumors. The case, write the authors of this week’s case study, should serve as a warning that more research is needed to gauge the safety of these novel therapies.
Other stem cell experts echo their concerns and worry that scientists don't yet understand exactly how stem cells used in such treatments behave once inside the body. Treating neurological disorders with stem cells from fetal brains is a "great scientific goal to pursue," but there is simply not enough evidence from animal studies, let alone human studies, to prove it is safe or effective for treating these diseases in children, says Sean Savitz, a neurologist at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston.
I don't know if I agree with your source because of ethical concerns, but I'll consider it.
> My point is simply that many of those against hESC research give a misleading picture. There are advancements, and though there haven’t been floods of cures, there hasn’t been nearly enough done to claim the research path is not succeeding.
I would say that the ESC field has brought this problem onto themselves - too much hype, too many promises mostly unconnected to reality.
Long term, even if science manages to catch up to the hype, it is extremely unlikely that ESC will ever become a viable therapy. The problem is economics. ESCs require human oocytes, probably many human oocytes (no one knows how many because the procedure is not working yet). If the patient happens to be a reproductive-aged female, she will be able to contribute her own oocytes. Every one else will rely on donations.
On the other hand iPS have the same potential as ESCs without any moral issues and without the problem of oocyte donation.
ESC is interesting scientific research and when it’s done on animals it does not have to include any moral issues. The work on ESCs generated a lot of useful knowledge that can now be applied to iPS. Ultimately, however, it is iPS and not ESC that will become medically viable.
> Read the article and wonder if based on this research if Michael Fox would be a willing participant to be injected with stem cells?
That particular experiment was done on mice not humans. But you are correct, the ESC therapy is not ready (and probably will never be ready) for medical applications.
Why do you say this? ESCs aren't necessarily derived from oocyte directly. iPS has promise, and might or might not be a 100% replacement. Thank you for your sane and fact-based discussion on this topic.
> Why do you say this? ESCs aren’t necessarily derived from oocyte directly.
Really? How do you think ESCs are derived?
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