“Latest Stem Cells News”

Korean scientists are moving closer to cloning embryonic stem cells, the unprecedented breakthrough that their compatriot and disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk claimed to have achieved in 2004, only to have this disproved later.

Currently, a team at the Cha Medical Center is working on a project after getting state approval last year, while another team headed by professor Park Se-pill at Jeju National University is also set to begin research.
Park and his associates are awaiting final approval from the National Bioethics Committee.

“If the endorsement is made before June, we should be able to clone human embryonic stem cells sometime next year,” said Park, who extracted stem cells from human embryos, not cloned ones, in 2000.
“Our embryologists’ technology is leading on the global scene. Hence, I believe that Korean teams should be able to create cloned embryonic stem cells in the not-so-distant future,” he said.

For the first time in the United States, stem cells have been directly injected into the spinal cord of a patient, researchers announced Thursday.

Doctors injected stem cells from 8-week-old fetal tissue into the spine of a man in his early 60s who has advanced ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It was part of a clinical trial designed to determine whether it is safe to inject stem cells into the spinal cord and whether the cells themselves are safe (…)

Dr. Karen Aboody estimates that she has cured several hundred mice of a cancer of the central nervous system called neuroblastoma.
First she injected them with specialized neural stem cells that naturally zero in on the tumors and surround them. Then she administered an anti-cancer agent that the cells converted into a highly toxic drug (…)

For 3 1/2 years, the agency focused on the basic groundwork needed to someday use human embryonic stem cells to replace body parts damaged by injury or disease. Such cures are still far in the future.
Now the institute has a more immediate goal: boosting therapies that are much further along in development and more often rely on less glamorous adult stem cells. It is concentrating its vast financial resources on projects that could cure conditions such as age-related macular degeneration, AIDS, sickle cell disease and various types of cancer (…)

Patents offer the economic guarantees scientists and companies need to develop new treatments, Oliver Bruestle told Deutsche Welle. He’s at the center of a German court battle surrounding embryonic stem cell research

Oliver Bruestle, director of the Institute of Reconstructive Neurobiology at the University of Bonn, is pushing for Germany to recognize the right to patent procedures conducted on embryonic stem cells, saying patents are the right way to ensure that scientists and companies profit from their work.

Greenpeace, however, is opposed to the patents. The organization filed suit against a patent granted to Bruestle in 1999, saying that the patenting of embryonic stem cell research could lead to an “embryo industry.” (…)

There is obviously a lot of hope and hype attached to embryonic stem cell research. Some people imagine a world full of bionic limbs and clones. Is that where the research is headed?

Stem cell research has huge potential for biomedicine mainly because there’s an opportunity to generate essentially every single type of body cell and every single type of tissue artificially in a cell culture lab. This is particularly relevant for organs which have lost their capacity for regeneration. That’s true for the nervous system and the heart as well as for insulin-producing cells. For these tissues, embryonic stem cell lines, which are really the entry point of the patent and procedure, provide a limitless source of cells. We can use these cells to generate insulin-producing cells, heart cells and brain cells in limitless numbers in a cell culture dish (…)

There’s also a lot of fear for people who envision a world full of bionic limbs and organs and clones. Is there potential for this to get out of hand?

There are quite a few misconceptions in the field. For example, we get confronted with accusations that we do research on embryos. This is, in fact, not true. The way the research is done is that there is a possibility to derive what we call embryonic stem cell lines from oocytes, which have been fertilized during artificial insemination or during fertility treatments which are left over and frozen and which are otherwise thrown away in large numbers.

There is an opportunity to use these cells with consent of the parents to derive embryonic stem cell lines and the very special things about these stem cell lines is once they are derived they can be multiplied indefinitely. We can grow them for years, we can freeze them, we can thaw them and they have the remarkable potential that they can be turned into any type of cell in our body.

This field needs a very clear and tight regulation. We certainly have such a situation in Germany. We have one of the toughest embryo protection acts in the world, which essentially prohibits any procedure which is not to the benefit of the embryo. That’s the reason why in Germany we cannot derive embryonic stem cells from fertilized oocytes, which can be done in many other countries (…)

What other possibilities does stem cell research offer that could improve people’s lives?

The prime candidates for stem cell therapies in the nervous system are diseases which lead to a loss of nerve cells or other cells in defined areas. For example, Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease are diseases where we see the loss of very specific types of nerve cells in very specific areas. For replacement therapy, we know where to go and which cell type to put in (…)

from http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4898622,00.html

“Behind the embryonic stem cell war is just a war of patents,” led an article in the Osservatore Romano newspaper by Angelo Vescovi, a geneticist at the Niguarda Hospital in Milan and a professor at the Università Bicocca, who has always been against embryonic stem cell research and supporter of ‘law 40’ (recently declared unconstitutional by authorities). “The production of embryonic stem cells by reprogramming adult cells discovered recently is not only better than methods that use human embryos, but is also based on new techniques, which are not protected by patents that currently govern the use of stem cells derived from embryos. Many countries are leaders only in manufacturing embryonic stem cells.”

According to Vescovi, who despite his last name (which means bishop in Italian) is notoriously secular, “numerous labs, billions of dollars in investments, an entire chain of patents, scientific techniques, and entire careers are based on the use of embryos”. “In a situation like this,” observed Vescovi, “it would be naïve to think that all of this could be abandoned in order to embrace different techniques, just because they are more efficient and ethically acceptable.” Basically, “there are too many interests for the use of human embryos to be abandoned without any reaction”.

Vescovi also says that it is “questionable” to present choices made on this basis “as the response of the ‘moral authorities’, who try to create opposition based on alleged moral or religious beliefs which are irrational and unreasonable” .These actions are branded as anti-scientific and against the interests of the sick and require these outdated people to look at the facts”. “This position,” he concluded, “cannot be defended and is distorted, since the facts cannot be denied. Nothing will slow the development and research of possible treatments, the use of human embryos is in no way a solemn necessity.”

MONSIGNOR BETORI, WE MUST CALMLY REEXAMINE THE GALILEO MATTER. IT WAS A MISUNDERSTANDING

“It is completely possible to calmly and objectively reexamine the Galileo matter, a “tragic reciprocal incomprehension” and a “painful misunderstanding”. As John Paul II said in 1992, the situation not only condemned the founder of modern science, but one of the most incredible minds in the past millennium,” said Monsignor Giuseppe Betori, Archbishop of Florence, during the inaugural ceremony of an international conference on “The Galileo Case”, which opened today in Florence at the Santa Croce church, and was attended by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano.

“Unfortunately, this painful misunderstanding has often been erroneously interpreted as an opposition between science and religion. I hope that this event,” added Betori, “demonstrates that this opinion is unfounded.” Monsignor Betori also hoped that “the important dialogue between faith and reason can be restored and resumed creatively, aiming for a permanent and constructive collaboration between the church and the institutes of scientific research, economic development, and social promotion”.

“Faith does not benefit from a refusal of rationality, but is part of a wider reasoning. Reason, without faith, risks reducing itself to calculations,” said Bertori, “and without a conflict, it is often unaware or blind of sources of important questions, fundamental values, and dramatic human situations. Therefore, dialogue between faith and reason must continue.”

The latest developments in molecular biology in the prenatal diagnostic field, particularly regarding preserving stem cells extracted from amniotic liquid, were the focus of the latest S.I.Di.P conference (Italian Society of Prenatal Diagnosis and Maternal Fetal Medicine).

After a greeting from S.I.Di.P President Claudio Giorlandino and President of the Italian Gynecology and Obstetrics Society Giorgio Vittori, Professor Giuseppe Simone, the head of the Biocell Center in Busto Arsizio (VA), the first Italian center able to treat and store stem cells extracted from the amniotic liquid in liquid nitrogen, opened the conference.

“In the next five to ten years,” explained Professor Simoni, “scientific research will have developed therapy based on amniotic stem cells. They are very similar to embryonic stem cells, they are multipotent and young, and this means that they are preferable to embryonic stem cells.

Preserving them creates no risk and the embryo is not sacrificed. Investing into research in this field is an obligation to humanity. There are so many possibilities and the research into amniotic stem cells to treat diseases represents the new frontier for research in the third millennium.

Researchers hope that they can be used to combat many terrible diseases, as well as in reconstructive surgery, and to treat nerve system diseases.”

Stem cells derived from the amniotic liquid are able to differentiate into various tissues, including bone, fat, nerve, cartilage, muscle, hematopoietic tissue, and offer a wide range of clinical applications.

“The future,” continued Simoni, “is research into these types of stem cells, which many research groups, including research teams from Italy, are studying. Preserving them, from anyone who has already decided to undergo amniocentesis is a golden opportunity to donate a precious gift to the future: the gift of life itself. Cryoconservation will allow us to be ready when scientific progress achieves further developments, which will come soon.”