Good News Is No News: Why the Media Ignores Adult Stem Cell Research

Wesley Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, recently spoke at an “educational symposium” to support a human cloning ban in Kentucky. At the symposium, Smith and his fellow scholars discussed the ethical and scientific problems with embryonic stem cell research, which creates cloned humans for the purpose of harvesting cells. But they also spent nearly forty-five minutes talking about “exciting” developments in the “morally non-controversial” field of adult stem cell research. And they had plenty to talk about.

Scientists have experimented using human umbilical cord blood stem cells in mice and creating human blood vessels that might restore eyesight to patients with diabetes-related blindness. Some diabetes patients have been treated with pancreatic tissue from cadavers, and 80 percent have achieved insulin independence. Muscle tissue has been regenerated in mice with muscular dystrophy. Even spinal cords have been regenerated using gene therapy. All of this happened with adult stem cells.

So there was plenty of good news to report. But the Louisville Courier-Journal’s article on the symposium downplayed this, giving very little space to what adult stem cell research has accomplished. On the other hand, cloning advocates’ dubious claims about what they think they might someday be able to do were reported in detail. Smith adds, “In a curious journalistic approach, cloning supporters from the Universities of Kentucky and Louisville were quoted extensively rebutting our wholly unreported remarks . . . ”

Wesley Smith generously refuses to speculate on the reasons, but I’ll speculate.

First of all, much of the drive to protect human embryos comes from a pro-life coalition. If there is any disfavored class in American society, it’s pro-lifers.

Second, the biotech industry and scientists generally are vehemently opposed to any restrictions on research—forget about moral objections. They believe that there should never be limits on what they can examine. Anybody who proposes any kind of limitations is seen as trying to take away scientists’ freedom.

This attitude plays right into the hands of the mainstream press, because it fits their cherished stereotypes about the courageous benefactors of mankind fighting for their independence from narrow-minded, anti-research religious cranks. Stereotypes trump the evidence. The kind of thing also gives the press an opportunity to beat up on President Bush, who has taken the reasoned position of not funding any new embryonic stem cell research lines.

So people like Wesley Smith, who are advocating a course that would benefit untold numbers of patients, have been accused of being inhumane toward suffering people. And bad news about embryonic stem cells gets censored—such as the fact that they are causing tumors in animal studies.

So when you read the papers and see scientists and stars testifying in Congress about cloning and embryonic stem cell research, beware. Don’t just listen to the rhetoric—look at the evidence. Then help educate your neighbors. In this case, as in so many others, the best scientific answer is also the right one morally. And if the press won’t say it, we must.

And, look at this from:

http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99994418

Blood could generate body repair kit

A small company in London, UK, claims to have developed a technique that overturns scientific dogma and could revolutionise medicine. It says it can turn ordinary blood into cells capable of regenerating damaged or diseased tissues. This could transform the treatment of everything from heart disease to Parkinson's.

If the company, TriStem, really can do what it says, there would be no need to bother with conventional stem cells, currently one of the hottest fields of research. But its astounding claims have been met with bemusement and disbelief by mainstream researchers.

TriStem has been claiming for years that it can take a half a litre of anyone's blood, extract the white blood cells and make them revert to a "stem-cell-like" state within hours. The cells can be turned into beating heart cells for mending hearts, nerve cells for restoring brains and so on.

The company has now finally provided proof that at least some of its claims might be true. In collaboration with independent researchers in the US, the company has used its technique to turn white blood cells into the blood-generating stem cells found in bone marrow.

When injected into mice, these cells migrated to the bone marrow and generated nearly all the different types of human blood cells, the team will report in the January edition of Current Medical Research and Opinion (vol 20, p 87), a peer-reviewed journal.

Proof required

"I would be extremely sceptical of these findings and would need more proof," says stem cell expert Evan Snyder of the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California, whose response is typical of many scientists New Scientist contacted.

"I was extremely sceptical," says team member Tim McCaffrey, a cardiovascular researcher at George Washington University in Washington DC, who was asked to evaluate TriStem's claims. "They did it in front of my eyes with my own blood," he says. "It's stunning."

Even if replacing bone marrow is all TriStem's method can achieve, it is still significant. Tens of thousands of people need bone marrow transplants each year. In some cases, doctors already extract stem cells from the blood instead of transplanting bone marrow itself. A donor is given growth factors that make their marrow stem cells proliferate and spill over into the blood, but the procedure takes several days.

TriStem's method might make it possible to obtain vast numbers of blood stem cells in a fraction of the time. "What's radical is the speed and ease with which it works," McCaffrey says.

Much, much more

But the company claims it can do much, much more. Ilham Abuljadayel, the founder of TriStem, says that by adapting standard culturing methods she has managed to turn white blood cells into heart, nerve, bone, cartilage, smooth muscle, liver and pancreatic cells.

TriStem has not yet published results proving all these claims. Since the company has worked only with human cells, it cannot perform what is regarded as the "gold standard" test of stem cells' versatility: inserting them into an embryo to show they can form all the different tissues. But if TriStem's method really can produce a wide range of cells, its potential is huge.

For starters, it would avoid the ethical issues associated with embryonic stem cells, the most versatile kind of stem cell. TriStem's method would also make it easy to treat individuals with their own cells, avoiding any problems with immune rejection. The only way to obtain ESCs that match a patient's own tissues would be therapeutic cloning, yet to be achieved with human cells.

The adult stem cells found in various tissues in the body could also solve both these problems. But there is still much debate about their versatility, and even if some are capable of forming just about any cell type, they are scarce. Extracting and multiplying them is difficult and time-consuming.

In addition, TriStem's claims challenge the scientific dogma that specialised cells cannot revert back to an unspecialised state or be converted from one type to another. Other groups also claim that they can "transdifferentiate" cells (New Scientist print edition, 12 October 2002). But none can do so as swiftly and easily as TriStem.

Killer antibody

Its "miracle" hinges on an antibody manufactured by DakoCytomation of Denmark that is normally used to detect abnormal brain cells. In the early 1990s, while working as a consultant immunologist, Abuljadayel tried to use the antibody to kill leukaemia cells. Instead of dying, the cells altered form and flourished.

Abuljadayel says the antibody binds to a receptor on the cell surface. But how the antibody triggers "retrodifferentiation", if indeed it does, remains to be established. To avoid arguments about whether the cells produced are genuine stem cells, she calls them "stem-cell-like cells".

Abuljadayel applied for a patent on retrodifferentiation in 1994, and in 1999 founded TriStem with the help of her husband, Ghazi Dhoot, then an investment banker. The company has long struggled to convince mainstream scientists that its system works.

Like TriStem, McCaffrey encourages sceptics to try the procedure themselves before condemning it. "I don't think there's voodoo involved, but until a number of people do it, other scientists have every right to be cautious," he says.

For many researchers, alarm bells ring loudest over the failure of TriStem to get such groundbreaking results published in a leading journal. They also ask why Abuljadayel has had no permanent academic position.

Gross mortality

Then there is the question of whether TriStem really has achieved retrodifferentiation. Alexander Medvinsky at the Institute of Stem Cell Research in Edinburgh thinks the antibody might simply kill ordinary white blood cells, leaving stem cells behind.

But McCaffrey rejects this, saying that tests show the white blood cells remain alive. "There is no gross mortality, and the numbers surviving are of the order of 90 to 95 per cent."

Not all researchers are as sceptical. "The results reported here are impressive," says Bob Lanza, chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology of Massachusetts. "If successfully repeated, this process could have broad clinical potential."

TriStem is sufficiently confident that its method works to start human trials. Earlier in November it received permission to carry out a clinical trial of its technology for creating stem cells from blood. Senior government research collaborators in the country hosting the trial have asked for the location to be kept secret for now.

The method will be used to treat a dozen patients with aplastic anaemia, a condition in which people have a severe lack of bone marrow. Abuljadayel plans to treat the patients with blood stem cells derived from tissue-matched donors. "Within a week, we should find if the cells have taken," she says, adding that any improvements in the patients' condition should be immediately noticeable.

The results should be in by the end of March. Watch this space.

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