Posted on 11/22/2010 6:10:20 AM PST by Skeez
NEW YORK For only the second time, the U.S. government has approved a test in people of a treatment using embryonic stem cells this time for a rare disease that causes serious vision loss.
Advanced Cell Technology, a biotechnology company based in Santa Monica., California, said the research should begin early next year, following the green light from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Just last month another biotech company, Geron Corp., said it had begun preliminary testing in people for treating spinal cord injuries by injecting cells derived from embryonic stem cells.
Scientists hope to use stem cells to create a variety of tissues for transplant. But human embryos have to be destroyed to harvest those cells, which has made their use controversial.
ACT's experiment will focus on Stargardt disease, which affects only about 30,000 Americans. But the company hopes the same approach will work for similar and more common eye disorders like age-related macular degeneration, which affects millions.
Stargardt is an inherited disorder that attacks central vision used for tasks like reading and recognizing faces. Some patients go totally blind, even losing peripheral vision, while others are severely impaired and can only perceive light or see their hands moving in front of their faces.
The disease typically starts in adolescence. The key problem is that impaired scavenger cells fail to remove toxic byproducts from the eye, allowing them to build up and kill other cells. There is no proven treatment.
In the new study, 12 patients will be treated with healthy scavenger cells, created in a laboratory from human embryonic stem cells. This early phase of the research is primarily to test the safety of various doses, injecting only one eye of each patient.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Apparently, no price is too high for cure to our ailments. How sad.
Hey...it's only a few people and the government says it's okay so it must be good...right...just like abortion is good...
It's pretty sick if you have to kill human beings to get there. But they're anonymous...right??
That's just the "cover story".
The real agenda behind EMBRYONIC stem cell research is to de-humanize the human embryo.
Do you sometimes wonder why they are so adamant that EMBRYONIC stem cells be used instead of the proven advances in cures from ADULT stem cells?
It all is more like this.
All stem cells regardless of whether or not they are adult or embryonic are “treatments” rather than cures. They give you a temporary boost, and that’s about it. Neither treatment is cheap either. But the claims about disease cures are pretty much lies in the sense of people being used as poster children with cancer or heart disease, or whatever else. We’re a lot farther from immortality and literally “curing” many of these conditions. As far as I can remember religiously, rain falls on the just as well as the unjust, we will always have people suffer from various ailments, it’s part of what gives people character, and makes them what they are, it’s just an inevitable part of life for us because we are both mortal and destructible.
I agree with the de-valuing part as well, your putting I don’t know how much work and expense into making a temporary treatment for an illness, and not a cure. My great concern comes with who can honestly afford said treatments, or who will pay for who to get treated, especially when loads of people die from otherwise treatable or curable diseases. I would argue that it’s more than just devaluing embryos, it’s also potentially about making something that benefits a few at the expense of many more.
Even more sad part is this isn’t even a total cure for these ailments, it’s a treatment that lasts temporarily
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