Posted on 03/21/2005 7:51:51 AM PST by dead
A poorly funded Queensland team has bucked received wisdom by proving that adult stem cells have the same life-saving potential as those from embryos.
ALAN Mackay-Sim and his small team of researchers investigating the human sense of smell have tended to get up the noses, pardon the pun, of the serious scientists working in the field of stem-cell exploration.
Most of the real players were to be found studying embryonic stem cells at such long-established research centres as Monash University and the University of Queensland, although the work of those other Australian scientists targeting bone marrow and neural stem cells was also highly regarded.
But no one quite knew what to make of Mackay-Sim's Griffith University team that somehow had taken an odd turn into the murky tributary that is the olfactory mucosa - the organ of smell in the human nose - and begun rowing against the tide by studying adult stem cells taken from the nose.
The prevailing science was that where embryonic stem cells had multi-potentiality and could give rise to all cell types in the body, adult stem cells were old dogs that couldn't be taught new tricks. Even those stem cells in tissues that do regenerate, such as skin, blood and olfactory mucosa, can only give rise to, respectively, more skin, blood and olfactory mucosa, so the accepted wisdom went.
Moreover, there was also the suspicion that adult stem cells were the last refuge of the religious Right, that after 40 years of intensive fossicking in this stream the only scientists still stubbornly panning for gold were those whose ethical beliefs wouldn't allow them to experiment with embryos left over from fertility treatment.
Certainly, adult stem-cell research had long been left behind by governments, corporations and benefactors wanting to sponsor scientific advances. In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger last November was able to persuade voters to approve a $4.04 billion investment in embryonic stem-cell research over the next decade. Meanwhile, by contrast, Mackay-Sim's team laboured away on an annual budget of a couple of hundred thousand dollars, the pickings so slim that one key researcher, Wayne Murrell, was forced to take a scientific time-out to earn some real money by working as manager of a grocery store.
"It has been a disregarded area of research generally," Mackay-Sim, the 2003 Queenslander of the Year, concedes wryly. "Whenever I presented a paper, the feedback I would get was that our work was 'interesting but weird'."
Yesterday, in one of those sublime moments with which the history of science is replete, the tributary might suddenly have become the mainstream. With the publication of Mackay-Sim's research on the Developmental Dynamics website, the twin arguments that adult stem cells lack the multipotency of embryonic stem cells and might not be as useful for stem-cell therapies were abruptly turned on their heads.
"Our experiments have shown adult stem cells isolated from the olfactory mucosa have the ability to develop into many different cell types if they are given the right chemical or cellular environment," explains Mackay-Sim.
New nerve cells, glial cells, liver cells, heart cells, muscle cells -- all were grown in a dish from stem cells from the human nose. Establishing the versatility of these adult stem cells was in itself a significant scientific achievement, but the Griffith University team's experiments also uncovered a raft of additional advantages.
For starters, such cells are easily harvested. The research team's doctor, prominent Brisbane ear, nose and throat specialist Chris Perry, was able to extract them from consenting patients - and later from the scientists themselves - by simply spraying the inside of the nose with a local anaesthetic and then removing a sample no bigger than a grain of pepper.
The harvested stem cells were not only readily available but proved to be astonishingly easy to grow in the laboratory, with millions of them forming within weeks. Down the track, once all the required trials are carried out - which could take at least another five years - it might well be possible for a healthy person to have his olfactory stem cells harvested, a mildly uncomfortable process that takes barely 10 minutes, grown in a lab and then frozen for injection years later into - to give just one example - the withered muscles of a heart after a heart attack.
For the moment, however, the most significant advantage is that these cells can be harvested from anyone of any age and without the need for major surgery, which is the only way scientists have been able to obtain other neural stem cells in the brain. And unlike adult stem cells in the blood and bone marrow, they are abundant and easily multiplied.
From the standpoint of pure science, the advantages keep stacking up.
Brisbane neurologist Peter Silburn, a member of the National Health and Medical Research Council and the clinical and scientific adviser to the project team, is most excited by the fact that researchers have been able to take cells from patients with Parkinson's disease and turn them into neurones to enable him to directly study the cells involved in the disease.
"We can now learn about the condition in ways we never could before," says Silburn.
Moreover, unlike embryonic stem cells, which reportedly can trigger tumours in one in five cases at the point of injection, these adult stem cells grow in a controlled fashion. As well, they are phenotypically stable, meaning that once they turn into, say, heart muscle, they remain heart muscle and do not revert to their original guise, as embryonic stem cells have been known to do.
And because they are the patient's own cells, there is no risk of the body rejecting them as alien. Hence there is no need for immune system-suppressing drugs, nor for therapeutic cloning.
Yet perhaps the most significant advantage is that this apparent breakthrough might eliminate the ethical dilemma that has fused itself to embryonic stem-cell research.
Pro-lifers, with the Catholic Church the most prominent and outspoken, have refused to be swayed by the "end justifies the means" logic of researchers who have argued that the destruction of embryos is but a small price to pay for the possible elimination of such diseases as diabetes or Parkinson's.
As Archbishop of Sydney Cardinal George Pell put it recently: "We are not in favour of producing human beings to destroy them for scientific purposes."
If the adult stem cells grown by the Griffith team do turn out to be as dramatically useful as all the experiments suggest, there will be even less of an ethical dilemma attached to their use than there is to a blood transfusion. After all, where is the ethical dilemma in having a person's cells used to help cure their own afflictions?
Staunch Catholic Tony Abbott, the federal Health Minister who officially launched the publication of the Mackay-Sim research yesterday at Griffith University and then had to grin and bear it as the principal author and Silburn publicly reminded him that the federal Government's contribution to the project had been precisely nothing, declined to describe the apparent breakthrough as a godsend.
"It's a science-send, not a godsend," Abbott said. "But if adult stem cell research is as prospective as this particular project seems to suggest, well, then all those moral dilemmas we were wrestling with a few years ago and will have to wrestle with again when the legislation [permitting the use for research of excess embryos created through IVF before April 2002] comes up for review, we may be delivered from."
Pell is hoping for nothing less than a decisive shift in the debate. "I hope it will [lead to that]," he says. "I think it deserves to be evaluated with the full rigour and I hope that after that rigorous assessment we'll see just how significant this is. I think there is a real possibility that [the Griffith University scientists] have made an enormous contribution."
The question now is how yesterday's stunning development will be received by the embryonic stem-cell research industry.
Stephen Livesey, chief scientific officer of the Australian Stem Cell Centre, which undertakes adult as well as embryonic stem-cell research, takes an understandably balanced view of the publication of Mackay-Sim's findings.
"Adult stem-cell and embryonic stem-cell advances don't happen in isolation," says Livesey. "One field of inquiry impacts significantly on the other in combining to form a growing body of knowledge about the ways in which stem cells behave and can be controlled. The success that the team at Griffith University has reported will be important in understanding the properties of both adult and embryonic stem cells."
Pell, who perhaps has studied the human condition somewhat more closely, has his fears.
"One of the complicating factors is that a lot of people have a lot of money tied up in embryonic stem cells," he says.
The man at the epicentre of this scientific tremor, Mackay-Sim, is hoping that science, pure science, will triumph in the end.
"I hope," he says, "it will excite people as it excites me."
If you ever get a pounding sensation in the nasal sinuses, maybe it is just the stem cells growing a new heart between the eyes.
Cutting your research budget, then hoping that somebody else will come up with your next product is like holding your breath underwater in the hopes of evolving gills.
Last year there was a report from Russia that using the same cells they were able to grow new spinal nerve cells.
"New nerve cells, glial cells, liver cells, heart cells, muscle cells -- all were grown in a dish from stem cells from the human nose"
So, Woody Allen's "Sleeper" was right after all!
"Nonsense. VCs fund a great deal of research, along with companies of various sizes, including stem cell research."
I'm with Holger on this. While some private money is spent, it is swarfed by govt spending (eg NIH spending at near $40 billion). VCs much rather spend our money than theirs ... that is what the Cali stem cell boondoggle was all about: Taxpayers footing the bill for research.
Which is to say that the VCs do put money into research, but would rather the taxpayers do so. Who can blame them!
Ambilical Cord Stem Cells have also proven to be great. They are easily obtained once a baby is born. The trick to the ambilical cord is that it is something that must interface with the DNA of the mother and the DNA of the baby, so it is "adaptable" to other bodies, apparently.
Finally, what they are talking about, adult stem cells, have great promise because your body will not reject your own cells and your own DNA [I certainly hope not].
Embryonic Stem Cells, besides being immoral [killing someone for research purposes] is a waste of money and time, but people can make billions off the waste by "controlling the research".
Great, just when I get a truckload of fetuses....
Cartman (on phone): Okay Gary. How about $90 a fetus?
Gary: How about $50 a fetus?
Cartman (on phone): Come on Gary. You are breaking my balls Gary! You are breaking my balls. How about $70? Okay, I'll call you back.
The bottom really fell out of the fetus market once Superman sailed off for bluer skies.
Horsehockey. Private industry spends everything but the CEOs bonus on clinical research. What was the last disease cured by a government?
You're confusing research with development. Research will tell you only that beta blockers will work (and that came from a series of NIH grants), but only development will produce the actual beta blocker drugs. The goal of clinical "research" is to develop the latter.
I am sure you have heard of R & D.
I am not confusing either. Pharmaceutical companies must do both. I know, I did both. They do not rely on the NIH for research.
bookmarked...thanks
The difference between "totipotent" and "pluripotent." A totipotent cell can become any kind of cell. A pluripotent cell is limited to becoming a certain range of cells. Even a totipotent cell is not necessarily identical to a one-celled embryo - it will not put into play the self-directions to develop into a complex organism - unless it is manipulated to so. That's why, in order to clone (so far) you have to take a cell nucleus and insert it into an denucleated egg, and then stimulate the egg.
Suppose any nose'll do?
That'll just crush the pro-aborts. They've been needed a noble excuse to abort more babies.
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Don't bet that pluripotent stem cells won't soon be converted into totipotent ones. Researchers have already figured out how to grow eggs from male embryonic stem cells. And how to fertilize an egg using half the genetic material from any cell in the body. And one of the proposed methods for using adult stem cells to create new organs or specialized cells to treat medical conditions, involves putting the genetic material from an adult stem cell into an egg (either natural, or artificially produced) which has been stripped of its original genetic material, and then coaxing the egg to start developing as an embryo. When this technique is refined to the point where it can produce any needed organ or cell type, you can be sure it will also be at the point where it can produce a baby who is a clone of the adult whose stem cell was used. At which point stopping the embryo from developing into a baby, by steering it to grow only into the desired organ or cell type, is no different from stopping any other embryo from developing into ababy, in order to use it for some other purpose. We'd all better get used to it, because this technology will arrive in our lifetimes.
That is hilarious. I love the disclaimer:
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